Wow. What a location, what a view, what an occasion. Very glad to have you all here. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Brevik event. I'm glad you made it all here. I'm Chris Beumelburg, I'm heading Investor Relations and Communications for Heidelberg Materials. Let me start by saying thank you for being here. I know it's been a long journey for many of you, and if the beautiful boat ride yesterday and the nice dinner at the location yesterday haven't convinced you yet that it was worthwhile to hop on a plane, I think the next few hours will. We have a lot to share and a lot to show, and to be honest, also a lot to be proud of. Let me also welcome our virtual guests. Good morning, everyone attending our investor conference online. We look forward to spending the morning with you.
Since we are at a cement plant and you get the beautiful view out there directly to our capture unit here, let me first remind you of some important safety rules. First, feel free to go outside, obviously on the barge, but in all cases, please stay within the fenced area. In case we need to evacuate, there are two emergency exits on my right and on my left, and the restrooms are located just outside the barge here to your left. We are here on the banks of Breviksfjorden , home to this unique facility that you will hear a lot more about today, and I hope that many of you will be able to join us for the tours. We have two tours this afternoon. I will say something at the end of the presentations. Today is not just about Brevik.
As you can see from the agenda behind me, you will be hearing from many of our board members today that you met yesterday during the dinner, how we drive value for our company, and they will show you why we are all energized, all optimistic where we are now and where we are going in the next five years. Let's not waste any more time. Get underway, enjoy the program.
Excited? I am certainly excited, I can tell you. Also, good morning from my side. Thank you all for coming. Chris has mentioned that, and I'm absolutely sure you will not go home without many new ideas of what this company is all about. I hope you agree that this location is very special. I would argue a special location for special times, and these are very, very special times on many levels. You all know that after the water outside, concrete is one of the most widely used materials on our planet. In fact, it is the most used man-made material ever. It is critical to our everyday life everywhere. Concrete is used, and you know that, to build schools, hospitals, warehouses, private homes, office buildings, bridges, tunnels. I could go on and on. What is important to understand is the characteristics of concrete. It is very versatile.
It is durable. It is fire-resistant. It is sound-absorbent. It is 100% recyclable. It has many, many great properties, and one of the properties is super important also for us. It is produced locally, and it is sold locally. In short, concrete is essential for building a sustainable future. It is here to stay. I would argue, in fact, more than that, because just like water, it will become significantly more important. You ask yourself why, right? I know you know that, but let me remind you, and let's remind us, the world is facing an unprecedented wave of investment into construction. As a world and as an industry, we are at an inflection point. We cannot build like we have built in the past. The climate challenge, as we discussed last night, as many of you know, demands change. Therefore, the future demands change.
Exactly that's the reason why we are here in Brevik: to show you that change is coming. In fact, it is already here. To show you that we at Heidelberg Materials are going to lead that change. We are going to lead that change. All around us, behind us, is an icon of that change, not just for Heidelberg Materials, but for the global construction industry. In fact, I would argue the world has waited for this moment for centuries. This is the first fully decarbonized cement and concrete, evoZero. Heidelberg Materials is revolutionizing the industry. Welcome to Brevik. Welcome to this new era, and welcome to the first moon landing of our industry. This facility and others in the future will allow the most innovative and progressive building and infrastructure owners to create completely decarbonized building structures from now on.
With new materials, but, and that is critically important to understand, with the known and trusted properties of cement and concrete, they're always new. But those properties, they used to come with a high carbon intensity. From today, this is history. Hello, future. Erasing the only disadvantage, concrete becomes the most sustainable building material on this planet. With this in hand, Heidelberg Materials, we as a team will embark on a path of growth and profitability acceleration until 2030. We will, we will and want to make the difference. Let me walk you through the key themes. Let's together lift the curtain. For many years, even decades, our industry has had what I like to call a rusty and dusty image. Okay, fair enough. Not today, but there is somewhere in the world still a little bit of rust and dust about.
The stereotype has lagged our reality for quite some time. As Heidelberg Materials, we are at the cutting edge, the cutting edge of some revolutionary changes in the world. In fact, we are inventing them. Not only that, and that is important, we are leveraging them for financial success. We are changing us, the way we operate, think, and act. We change our mindsets, super important, and that equally important of our customers. We are changing our product portfolio. We are changing the way we make our products. We change our processes, and we innovate around digital. To be very clear, and you know our company also for a long time, many of you, this is not just about technology and innovation for its own sake. We are building on what we do best, finding ways to do it more efficiently, at lower cost, and more competitively.
We are living in a material world," the author at Conway quoted. Mega trends are providing a bigger tailwind than ever before. We are witnessing the biggest wave of capital investment in history. I know you know this, but let me stress it. I had a discussion with my kids, and I tell you, they use the word mega somewhat inflationary in their generation. Also being very honest, I sometimes disagree with them. However, in this case, I would say this is really appropriate. Heidelberg Materials is at the very heart of this development. Who of you is surfing? Anybody in the room who is windsurfing? Nobody? Come on, it can't be true. No windsurfers. Okay. Can you see the surfer on the... Can you see here? Okay. Yesterday, all of us were already scared of waves of one meter or two meters.
In fact, the boat was not able to go out because there were waves of 3 or 4 meters. The picture shows the monster wave that the German surfer Sebastian Steudtner conquered on October 29 in the year of 2020. You imagine how high this wave was? 26.2 meters. We were scared yesterday of 2 meters. 26.2 meters. The highest wave ever conquered by a human being. The wave that we can expect from the capital investments over the next years will be as big as this wave, or maybe even bigger. The good news is we are in the right places, at the right time, with the right products, and very important, the right sales approach to capitalize on these large-scale global trends and growth opportunities. Most important, we have the best team in place to pull this off.
We're going to give you many data points over the course of the day, but if there is one thing I would like to get across, we as Heidelberg Materials will be the winners riding this wave. Let's talk about the five waves. Wave number one, energy transition. Simply replacing one power station with enough renewable electricity to power about 100,000 homes takes a large material footprint. In fact, 50,000 tons of concrete versus 2,000 for a normal power plant, each one of you can calculate 25 times, 25 times the amount of concrete. If you take a similar approach to the nuclear plant, one 10-gigawatt nuclear plant takes 4 million cubic meters of concrete. I just checked with John last night. That's the sales of our German or our British, he likes to prefer British, British concrete sales annually.
You probably also heard that the US administration, yes, there is one, has actually, last week, I think, said they want to build 10 times 10 gigawatts until 2030. Wave number one. Wave number two, infrastructure. You've heard all this discussion about 43,000 bridges in the U.S., 6,000 bridges in Germany close to collapse. That's a problem and needs to be fixed. What you may have also heard, if you have been traveling in Germany, we still do have a railway system, but it's famous for its unreliability. The company and the government, Deutsche Bahn and the government, have decided they need to fix it with spending EUR 150 billion until 2030. Morocco, emerging markets, plans to increase their airport capacity from 30 to 80 million passengers by 2030. Wave number three, housing.
The world needs a lot of housing, growing population, 100,000 homes every day need to be built. For example, in Africa, by 2040, we will have 31 cities with more than 5 million people. The good news is in nine of those cities, Heidelberg Materials is already operating. Let's look at the housing shortage. Somebody from Holland here, Netherlands, yesterday we had a couple of... So here you go. We discussed last night, 4% with your 18 million, 14 million people, you are 4% of the EU population. And the Dutch government has said we need 900,000 new homes until 2030, which is a 10% increase over the total base in Holland. So housing remains a big issue. Now, a fourth wave came recently, defense.
Just to play the numbers, if you take the GDP increase that is talked about, I just, you know, trying to be conservative, I said we go from 2% of European GDP to 3%. That adds EUR 200 billion. You probably heard yesterday Mark Rutte saying, "Hey guys, we want to go for 5%." That would be EUR 600 billion. They are fantastic numbers. If you turn this into what means, what does this mean for us? Let's be conservative. 10% of that goes into infrastructure for shelters, for seaports, for airfields. Typically, it's, you know, if you follow up the estimations, it's about 5% to 20%. That tells you we are talking about a spend of minimum EUR 30 billion plus, trying to be conservative on that one. Last wave, digitalization. You all heard about the exploding demand for data centers.
Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM, Microsoft, all are investing billions of dollars in data centers around the world. I have to be honest, preparing for this morning, you know, they spent a mind-boggling $3 billion per week to build data centers. That adds up to $150 billion, but they want to really increase this big time. The good news is to build one data center, it is about 50, 50 multifamily homes. Just to give you an idea, we are talking big numbers because most of the research institutes actually estimate that the demand for data centers will go up three or four times to about $600 billion per year. Wow, do not you think? Each of these five waves are already massive. Combining them, I leave it up to you, all of you, to imagine.
Yet some observers still perceive this industry as mature, standing still, being boring. Let me tell you, this could not be further from the reality. As you just saw, the opposite is true. We are absolutely convinced as a team that there is plenty of excitement in this industry with Heidelberg Materials at the very heart of it. Rest assured, we will make the difference. We are here to show you how we make this happen and what this means, what this transformation means for you, our investors, and for the future of this industry. This is very significant. Get ready. We are very clear about who we are and how we will continue to be successful. This enormous task that I just described to you with the mega waves demands all our energy. Very importantly, we must not get distracted.
We are committed to a disciplined strategy of being a true, a true heavy building materials company, with all pride, focusing on sustainable product applications of cement, aggregates, ready mix, concrete, asphalt. Since 2021, we have made 31 acquisitions and 12 disposals. We have focused on our core markets and made our position in them even stronger. Where we analyzed that there were better owners, we sold the business. We continue with our diversified presence across geographies, capturing different stages of the economic cycle, optimizing our portfolio by prioritizing with strong market positions, with strong growth profiles. All business is local. I'm sure you have heard this many times. I have been long enough around the industry to know that this mantra has changed as well. Of course, we still need local roots, local approaches. To be successful, this is not sufficient anymore. This is not sufficient anymore.
Driven by the massive progress in technology, transparency and communication, ideas and practices move much faster from one place to the other. If you get this right, you make the difference. That's us. We are not just a collection of local markets. We are driving success across our geographies and businesses by being a locally rooted, globally connected, efficient, and digitally empowered global leader in heavy building materials. Of course, we are continuously improving our global advantages along three platforms: sustainability, digitalization, and technical excellence. We have adjusted our organization accordingly. You will get a deep dive into each of the topics from my colleagues in just a few minutes. Let me give you a sneak preview. On sustainability, we set ourselves the most ambitious emission reduction targets with the most attractive business case. That combination is critically important.
EvoZero is a revolution invented in Europe and commercialized globally, with a focus on Europe for now. Our first mover advantage and scale allows us to drive significant value for our customers as the supply of carbon captured net zero cement is very scarce and demand for it continues to grow. To be clear, for now, we are not addressing the main market, but a hugely attractive smaller segment at the cutting edge. One point to note: CCUS is technically ready at industrial scale with a sound business case. I am not fooling myself that the next challenge is just around the corner. Scaling CCUS, scaling evoZero, rest assured, we are already on it and working hard to make the difference.
EvoBuild, the brand name for our ultra low carbon and low carbon products, is marketing all across Europe and all across the world, but will play an even bigger role in the future when EU ETS will further reduce the free allowances for carbon certificates from 2026 onwards, reinforcing our ability to lead not only in sustainability, but also on pricing. Supplementary cementitious materials, alternative raw materials, and alternative fuels will be accelerated across Europe and globally. You probably feel it. It's so exciting for me, and I would love to tell you more, but I do not want to steal Katharina's thunder. EdgeConnect, our customer-facing digital platform, which started in North America, is now connecting us with more than 25,000 customers in more than 20 countries, real-time 24/7.
We started centralizing and digitalizing our cement plants with EdgeProduce in Europe and are now bringing the concept to the next level in North America with Chris, with EdgeRock, our Heidelberg Remote Operations Center. We leverage across the company automation and AI to further advance our business case. With our investments into Command Alkon and Giatec, we are driving, and we are the driving force to move our industry into the cloud, making our own business better, increasing connectivity with our customers, and driving the value of our investments. Also here, I could go on and on and on, but honestly, Dennis is far better to do that in a few minutes. We do competitive global benchmarking and best practice exchanges across all regions and business lines. We learn from our most cost-efficient operations in countries like China, Turkey, Morocco, Egypt, and deploy these best practices around the world.
Importantly, we scale up piloted applications and AI applications and automation for global rollout. This is only a sneak preview from my side. Axel is the one who will share with you what he is driving. We are leveraging these functional topics across the entire organization and bringing them to life in our regions and countries. How does this work in two of our key regions, Europe and North America? Let me share with you how we leverage platforms in some of our geographies. Now, John, Chris, do not worry. I will save the best for you to present. You and your teams do the very heavy lifting. On Europe, we are on the verge of a demand rebound, and we are primed as a market leader to capitalize on this shift.
Underlying market demand will force a demand uplift, also driven by stimulus programs and various countries. EUR 65 billion to EUR 100 billion investments into the grid in Europe. Also, Germany's EUR 500 billion stimulus program that you have heard about will drive not only the local economy, hopefully, and will have a spillover effect also into other European countries. Importantly, in parallel, we are not sitting still. We are making a step change, a step change in Europe in efficiency by continuing to redesign our asset base. As demand rebounds, we expect a significant upward swing in profitability driven by our leading market position and the high operational leverage. On top, decarbonization will drive further growth and low and zero carbon product. The low and zero carbon product range will be a major differentiating and value driver. I'll get to you, Chris.
North America, we see strong demand growth driven by long-term structural trends requiring more building materials. You all heard about the $1.2 trillion infrastructure and investment jobs act that is there to fix the bridges, build roads, and also utilities. You have heard about the data center explosion in the U.S. in terms of investments. Almost $90 billion went into data center investments already in 2022, and that is going to grow to $165 billion, so almost doubling until 2030, growth rate of more than 8%. I would say still in the starting blocks, the reindustrialization in North America will also lead to sizable investments. You know, you all heard these announcements of all the, you know, proud US-based companies: Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Roche, TSMC, you name them. We are uniquely positioned to capture strong growth from these investments.
Now, importantly, through our digital and AI-based solutions, we will substantially accelerate the profitable growth and make it overproportional. One disclaimer. In the meantime, you never know what happens these days. We stay flexible on our toes to adjust our cost base during volume volatility. Who better than Chris could give you further details later? Yes, the past years have not been the decades or the decade of the emerging markets. True. It is also true that structural growth in emerging markets will drive demand over the next years. Urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world population will add another 2.5 billion people, 2.5 billion people into urban areas by 2050. Not in Europe. Not in North America. Not in Latin America. 90%, nine zero, 90% of that growth happens in Asia and Africa.
The Indonesian population will reach 300 million by 2030, growing 10% between 2020 and 2030. Cement demand will go up 3% per year. Africa grows from 35 to 42 million people. The investment story will go up from $35 billion to $42 billion, and that is an annual growth rate of 5%. We are well positioned as Heidelberg Materials to capitalize from this growth. We have market, we are a clear market leader in Tanzania and Ghana. We have a strong number one position, a number two position in Indonesia that we continue to build out and also optimize our network over there. Now, very important in the emerging markets, I'm always fascinated how we are making more out of less. We have many, many capital efficient operations such as Ghana and Tanzania, amongst others, with a return on invested capital.
I always see a smile on the face of our CFO, significantly above group average. We plan to build on this as we are leapfrogging a heavy asset base. We run deliberately a superior asset-light model. Instead of capital-intensive clinker plants, we deploy capital and cost-efficient cementitious assets across the continent. I hear you all writing already. Now this is all very exciting. Who the hell makes this happen? At Heidelberg Materials, we can build on the collective strength of our high-performance team around the world. Just over 50,000 people led by a great management team of PLL-owning entrepreneurs complementing their local ambitious agenda with global best practices and a relentless drive for rigorous change, creativity, innovation, and very good financial results. I see some of them standing in the background there with Paolo and Thor.
Those are the guys, together with GIF, our head of Northern Europe, who make it happen. We are just presenting this here to you today. Those are the guys who make it happen on the ground. If you get a chance to talk to them, these are the people to talk to. Teamwork is deeply rooted in our DNA and the key ingredient to our success. We are real doers. Check out with them. Everyone is committed to making a true impact, shaping a sustainable, innovative, and resilient future for our industry. I could not be prouder of this team. First and foremost, it is all about a different mindset, a cultural shift within Heidelberg Materials. We have changed and will continue to change the company for the better, taking more and more of our 50,000 team members on this journey along.
To be very open with you, we certainly do not have all the answers. We do not know today what we will learn tomorrow. We have trained our muscles to react quickly, turn around if necessary, and trust in ourselves that eventually we will make it happen. We have the dedication and certainly the will to make the difference. For you to experience this change firsthand, we are deliberately presenting our story going forward with seven of our members of our management team. Hearing it from me is one thing. Hearing it from all of us is the real thing. I know you are all waiting for the numbers. What does this all lead to? Let me bring it all together.
Until 2030, we strive to increase our RCO, result from current operations, 7% to 10% per year, and bring our ROIC, return on invested capital, up to around 12%. We have sharpened the pencil on our specific CO2 emissions and reduced below 400 kilograms per ton of cementitious material. With this platform in place, we are in a stronger position than ever to accelerate growth. We maximize value from sustainability, especially evoZero, scale our leadership, and grab the opportunities ahead. René is obviously the right person to lead you through more details, including the financial impact of evoZero and this new reality. Now, finally, you may ask yourself, so much growth potential, an ambitious sustainability agenda, and a digital agenda, significant scaling of technical innovation, a step change in Europe, growth place in North America and in the emerging markets, can they really deliver all of this?
Let's do a quick check how we did against our ambitious midterm targets we set for ourselves back in May 2022, almost three years ago. We have not only delivered, but overdelivered against all of them. René will give you the numbers. We have not only walked the talk, but we are convinced, and I am sure you are too at the end of the day, that we will just do it again. With that, enjoy the presentations from Katharina, Dennis, Axel, John, Chris, and René. I love the teamplay. I'm excited to have all of you here with us today to turn the page to our 2030 strategy, making a material difference. A new chapter of leadership, innovation, as well as sustainable and profitable growth, setting the clear global benchmark in the heavy building material industry. Thank you.
For Heidelberg Materials, decarbonization is not a threat. I t is actually a once in a lifetime business opportunity. My name is Katharina Beumelburg . I'm the Chief Sustainability and New Technologies Officer of the company, and I would like to spend the next roundabout 20 minutes with you to discuss exactly this point. I'm the new kid on the block. I only joined the company in October last year, coming from the oil and gas industry, where I was on the managing board of Schlumberger. After 17 years in Siemens, from my background, I'm a mechanical engineer. And through all this time, the one thing that was always really important to me is decarbonization of industries because I'm convinced we need it for the planet. So, having that said, let's get started. So, decarbonization is no longer a future ambition. It is really becoming reality just right now.
We have 142 countries in the world that now have climate targets, and they are backing them with regulatory frameworks. Obviously, we do see the geopolitical, let's call them uncertainties, especially in the U.S. right now. Still, industry and country commitments are holding. Carbon pricing schemes are actually expanding. While obviously Europe is at the forefront, we see it happening in Asia with China, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia. We see it happening in North America and California, Canada, Mexico. The clear epicenter for now is Europe. Europe with the EU ETS is very much becoming a market driver for the hard-to-abate industries because the free allowances will start going down 2026, and they will go down to zero by 2034, which is actually a very steep decline. I discussed it with some of you yesterday evening.
That means that the cost of carbon for carbon-heavy industries will rise sharply, and with that, the pressure to decarbonize. The truth is, for us, this whole decarbonization topic is more than a response to a regulatory framework. It is really a once in a lifetime growth opportunity for our company. I'm saying that with our company having created our unique product, evoZero, unlocking a new, different value-based market segment and reducing the reliances on the free allowances at the same time. That means we have a double advantage: a growth potential in a new market segment and reduction in cost on the other hand. René will go in more details and actually show you the business case behind it. With Brevik, the world's first and only operational industrial-scale carbon-capture cement plant, we are proud to be the frontrunners.
We are setting the benchmark in Europe and scaling this leadership and then selling EvoZero worldwide. Having that said, let me look where we are today. We are delivering material impact, and we learned a lot over the last years on decarbonization and what we are able to do. Now, let me present the new targets for 2030. We will reach less than 400 kg CO2 per ton of cementitious materials by 2030, as well as more than 50% of sustainable revenue, sustainable revenue being either 30% less carbon or at least 30% recycled materials. To hit these goals, we are also raising the targets for our two main levers, which is we will increase the alternative fuel rate to higher than 50%, where our previous target was 45%.
On the other hand, we will further decrease the goal for the clinker incorporation rate, which had been 68%, and now we are sure we can achieve 64%. The reason why we are able to increase this target is because we got smarter. We learned how decarbonization works. We understood our levers better. This is why we can make these commitments now. These are obviously long-term levers, and they will contribute to 2030, but obviously push us beyond 2030 and beyond the less than 400 kilograms. While CCS will only deliver around 3 million tons of CO2 stored underground by 2030, the CCS lever becomes far more important after 2030 when we have done all the conventional levers that we can. It is the time now to really work on it to make sure we have it available after 2030.
Now, having that said, we are well underway with our CO2 reduction. Let me show you some examples. First of all, alternative fuels, 30% of our clinker plants reach at least 45% alternative fuel usage. I have brought two specific examples. Germany, Lengfeld, has already around 100% alternative fuel rate. They secured a constant supply and an optimized usage of processed household and industrial waste, tires, and biomass to reduce the fuel-related emissions. Other example, Indonesia, Grobogan, where I had the pleasure to visit the plant earlier this year. When we bought the plant a while ago, it was 100% going on coal. We are currently building a system that allows us to use 45% alternative fuels in the course of the next year. I think this is a very nice example that shows that we are the best owner to decarbonize these assets.
Let me also highlight some topics on the clinker incorporation rate. Forty percent of our cement production reaches a clinker incorporation rate below 68%. This is part of why we adopted the target, obviously. Let me also highlight some examples like here. Let's look at the U.S. that is under 64% clinker rate already. Based on a very strong economic reason, and I make sure that I say it was an economic reason, we bought SEFA. Chris will give you more details on it and show you the case, really. SEFA is the biggest fly ash recycler in the United States. With this buying of SEFA, which produces 1 million ton fly ash, recycled fly ash per year, we reduced our global carbon footprint by 5 kilograms. That's actually a very big lever. It brought the U.S. in total under 64% already.
Another example, Ghana, and you potentially read it in the news in the last couple of days. We have just built the biggest flash calciner for calcined clay. We are using this flash calciner and produce clay for Ghana and for Togo. We managed to reduce our clinker incorporation rate via this calcined clay to less than 66%. One other example that I particularly like because it's really CapEx low is an example in Germany. Germany, which is one of our biggest markets, reduced its carbon footprint within the four years between 2020 and 2024 by 80 kilograms. An enormous improvement. The main lever that they used was a shift in their portfolio, as well as optimizing the recipes of the cement. Portfolio and recipes, limited CapEx, led to minus 80 kilograms.
That is something that we now very much looked in detail, what exactly happened and how we did it. We will roll out this very balanced approach in those countries where we see the biggest potential over the next years. In the end, every percentage point matters for CO2, for cost, and obviously for our competitiveness. Let's look at our portfolio. I must say I'm very proud to say that we have the most comprehensive low-carbon portfolio in our industry. We have two main brands in our sustainable products, evoBuild and evoZero. EvoBuild cement contains at least 30% less CO2, while evoZero is obviously our carbon-capture net-zero product. Recently, our sector came together to develop a global low-carbon product rating scheme, starting from band D that you see at the top, going down all the way to near zero.
With evoBuild products, we already start in band 3 with evoBuild 30. With evoBuild 70, we are able to get down into the band between 200 and 300 kilograms per ton. With evoZero, we are the only company in the world that can offer a product in the near-zero range. I think the real advantage of the scheme is that it gives customers maximum transparency and comparability between the products. It was developed to basically be adopted by governments and by the private sector in their lead markets and in their procurement practices so that you really have an overview of what you buy. Now, today, we are here in Brevik. [Foreign language].
[Foreign Language] I've been a carbon capture nerd for 15 years, and I've been intrigued by the Brevik project since I first heard about it. I need to work in a place that actually takes the environment seriously. When this opportunity came, working at Heidelberg Materials in Brevik, a plant that has been a frontrunner in green technology for decades, I was really eager to join the business. It is a technical challenge, and it's really stimulating. With evoZero, our new product from Brevik CCS, exactly the same cement as before, the same quality, but it has almost zero emissions. We can enable net-zero concrete on buildings without compromising the quality. This is the first application of its kind for the cement industry, and it's not just important to me, but to everyone around here. [Foreign language] .
Welcome to the world's first industrial-scale carbon capture plant in the world. I personally think this is really an amazing place to be. Brevik is the result of a successful innovation partnership with Northern Lights and with the Norwegian government, who funded the project with up to 85%, both in CapEx as well as in OpEx, over a period of 10 years. This is obviously not only a pilot. We are producing net-zero EvoZero cement, and we are with that gaining operational experience. We are learning, and it is the basis for leading the way in a space that nobody has entered before. Actually, it is our step on the moon. We are the only company to have achieved industrial-scale carbon capture in cement. As the first company globally to do this, we are collecting the data. We are building the know-how.
Exactly, maybe I just keep in. You hear me? Okay. I took it up online. I took it up online. I just stand here. Okay, let's hope they can solve it too, because just standing here just does not feel right. [Foreign language].
[Foreign language]
Are they back too? Okay. F```or those out there, we had a power outage. We did not do that on purpose. It is great to have you all back, and I will try to pick it up where I left it. By the way, with the advantage that nobody can say I was too long afterwards because I had this power thing in the meantime. That was what happened before, I was too long. We were talking about Brevik, right? I was saying that I think being the first one and being the pioneer does come with very significant advantages. Advantage one is we do collect the data and we learn about the plant, about the capabilities, and we will get smarter every day, basically. We develop the talent, meaning we are developing people that are able to run such a plant.
Obviously, with the partnerships we had, we learned a lot about how to work in such an environment, how the contractual framework works, all of this. Being the first one does include more risk in the beginning, and you have the advantage of being able to learn far more. Actually, we had 400 experts that have worked more than 1 million hours to build this up. Currently, we have 30 experts who are working on carbon capture here in the Brevik plant. Axel will give you some more insights into it later. This is how we drive global advantage. We learn it here, and then we are able to scale it globally. Let me give you a quick glimpse into how the process works. We have this nice little diagram here.
First, we capture the CO2 in the big absorber that you see over there. We compress and liquefy it and store it in the silver tanks that are there, but you do not see them right now because of the ship. From the tanks, it goes onto the ship. With the ship, it is brought up the Norwegian coast and hits the Northern Lights infrastructure. It is stored again and via a pipeline. It is the first CO2 ever that is going to be stored in the Northern Lights reservoir, which is actually 2.6 kilometers under the seabed. It is actually a closed-loop, fully traceable system. This remarkable process actually leads to our evoZero. It is the world's first carbon-free net-zero cement at industrial scale. Only we have it.
Brevik is a true game-changing facility where a commodity that has been a commodity for a very long time is turned into a specialty. What makes evoZero so truly unique is actually its performance. It is a totally new product, but it does have all the characteristics of the CEM1, the Portland cement that we are used to. At the same time, it is fully decarbonized because of a smarter process, because we produce the cement, and after the production, we take the emissions and capture the CO2 with the process that I have just shown you. Brevik is not only a project. Brevik is the future of our industry. I am more than proud to be able to announce that we will take FID of Padeswood in the U.K., our next carbon capture and storage plant, hopefully within the next six weeks. We are very close to this.
The volumes that are seen on this slide here are the combined volumes of Brevik and Padeswood. This is what we took into consideration when we calculated the 400 kilograms. Everything else that we do will come on top. Besides these two, obviously, the next TCS project is already in the starting blocks. Let me show you a little bit what evoZero actually means for our customers. First of all, customers can buy evoZero in two different forms. The first form is they buy the physical product here from Brevik. It is shipped from Brevik, and it goes directly to the customer. The second form is actually buying evoZero as a virtual product. As in this example, it is a product bought from a plant of us in Spain. We connect carbon credit from Brevik to the product in Spain.
To make sure that every carbon certificate that is produced here in Brevik is only allocated once, we follow a three-layered approach in terms of product assurance. Step one is that we track and account every ton of CO2 that we store here, not here, but in Northern Lights, in our carbon bank. Step two is that we secure this process with blockchain technology. And Dennis, who is there, will tell you more about that. Third, we have a third-party verification process that ensures full traceability and makes sure that we have a one-to-one matching with the cement sold. To be 100% sure, it is safe the way we sell it. Now, for evoZero, we are actually implementing a very targeted sales approach. This is new for us as a company as well. I've already discussed it with a couple of people yesterday evening.
Actually, because the value of evoZero is most valuable for stakeholders in the built value chain earlier in the process than our regular tier one to tier three construction companies, we set up a team which is dedicated for evoZero. This team has two layers. One is centrally in my teams, and it's a commercial team that globally works to represent evoZero. Then we have local teams in those countries where it's most promising to really drive the country customer engagement. In addition to our traditional customer base, we are also engaging with these early stakeholders that I was talking about in the value chain. That would be companies like asset owners because they see a very significant value in the lower carbon of the building. It could be real estate investors. It could be architectural companies.
I'll show you in a second what their advantage really is. Moreover than this, we actually work with key stakeholders besides the sales process that include governments, industry associations, NGOs, and architects and investors to shape an enabling framework to actually be able to sell evoZero because that's something that needs to be ensured as well. This drives the demand for net-zero construction products. This is how we really shape a new part of the market. Our initial focus for this is obviously Europe because based on the ETS system, this is where the business cases are easiest. The plans are clearly to expand the capacity to North America over the coming years. Now, let me walk you through what the real customer advantage actually is. With evoZero, we enable our customers to reduce the embodied carbon of a building.
That creates additional financial value. Let me explain how we do that. First of all, of the life cycle carbon emissions of a building, you can broadly put them in two parts. One is the operations part of the carbon emission, that's mainly heating and cooling. The second part is really the embodied carbon of a building. Of these embodied carbon of a building, roughly half comes from cement. If you compare it to the cost of cement in a project and how comparably small this is in a building project, this is a huge lever to reduce carbon emissions. If you reduce these, you have an immediate impact on the entire project. Our customers can actually benefit from improved loan conditions.
It looks as if they are ranging from 5-15 basis point reduction, but for the entire project, not just for the cement, of course. It can help fulfill the requirements that are given from cities so that developers are actually able to bid for projects. There are lots of cities around the world that are just right now coming up with regulation for embodied carbon in cities like Amsterdam, New York, Toronto, Seattle, London, Helsinki. I think it is a growing number that puts a focus on this. EvoZero gives the opportunity to the developer to really bid for the project.
Taking into consideration that currently the demand for green buildings is higher than the actual availability of green buildings, that leads to higher occupancy rates, as well as the willingness of tenants to pay higher rents or pay a higher price if they buy the building. They do that because this has a very immediate impact on their emissions and their goal that they have announced. Based on this rationale, we are convinced of the business case for us and for our customers because it creates value and it drives decarbonization of the built environment. As I said, Brevik is just the beginning. It is the first in a growing portfolio of carbon capture utilization and storage plants that we are working on across Heidelberg Materials. I can confidently say this is the most advanced portfolio in the industry.
As mentioned, Padeswood has taken an important step at Edmonton, is getting very close to FID as well. Other projects are in advanced development levers, and you see them on the right side of the slide. To be clear again, only CO2 captured and stored here in Brevik and Padeswood is currently accounted in our 2030 goals. Everything else is long and medium-term upside that you see on the slide. This is our global advantage. We make decarbonization the driver of our profitable growth for the future. Now, having all of that said, let me leave you with three major takeaways out of this part. First, for us, decarbonization has a convincing business case because we create value for our customers. Second, with the most advanced portfolio in the industry, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive global growth in new market segments and with a value-based price.
Brevik proves we can do this at scale. EvoZero proves that carbon-captured net-zero cement and concrete works. No other company has achieved what we have. This is how we actually lead and how we will scale e voZero globally in the next step. Thank you. I hope you enjoy the rest of the day and the tour over the plant. With this, I hand it over to Dennis. Okay.
Hi, everybody. My name is Dennis Lentz. I'm the Chief Digital Officer here at Heidelberg Materials. Four years in that role and joined Heidelberg Cement 15 years ago. In those days, still Heidelberg Cement. I originally started in the business, and that is still what my heart beats for and what makes me get up every morning. It's not so much about the fancy tools.
It's more about the business impact they can actually generate and the P&L impact we are after with it. The next 15 minutes will be about a topic. If we are honest, it's a topic our industry is not really famous for. It's the digitalization, the digital transformation. As Dominic already outlined in his presentation, here at Heidelberg Materials, we are actually proud to not only follow this trend, but really to pave the way for the whole industry into the cloud where digitalization and generating a P&L impact out of this is so much easier. Let's unpack that a little bit. What you see here on the right side is the typical IT setup of a ready-mix business. It's a very localized system. It's locked-up data. Nothing is connected. Very difficult also to bring innovation to such an environment.
Just imagine a country here, for instance, in John's patch with 150 plants. If you want to bring something in terms of innovation to that business, you have to repeat it 150 times. That is a lot of effort, and it takes a lot of time to get something done. A couple of years back, we realized that this cannot be the future. With all that new technology coming with much higher speed than before, this is not a foundation which we can rely on as a business. That is why we had that vision of one central cloud platform where we handle all of our most important business transactions, where we can connect the dots and our people, also our customers, where access to new technologies such as AI is so much easier, but also faster. Faster also means the benefits hit the bottom line earlier.
We had a choice to make. Are we building this just for ourselves, or are we building this in a way that others can also benefit from it? That is exactly the decision which we have taken. We are not building it ourselves and just for our own business. We are building it together with a partner network we have invested in and which we were gluing together to build the cloud platform of our industry. We are doing this for two specific reasons. Obviously, we want to make our own core business better, faster, but we also want to help our customers, our ready-mix and asphalt-producing customers to move together with us into this cloud and open up all those opportunities and also offer value-add services to them.
A nice side effect of that is the more adoption that platform gets, the more valuable also our participation in those digital partners get. Let's unpack that a bit. Let's also look into who are those partners actually. Obviously, the most prominent and important one because it's the centerpiece is Command Alkon for two specific reasons. One, it's the largest installed base in the customer. In the US, it's a little bit tricky with data sometimes, but it's a fair assumption to say that in 8 out of 10 cases, in 8 out of 10 ready-mix deliveries, one way or the other, a Command Alkon system is involved in this. That was what attracted us because we did not only want to do this for ourselves, we wanted to do it also for our customers.
Many and most of those customers are already on that platform. The second reason is that the Command Alkon cloud is covering those main processes I mentioned. It starts with sales. It continues with the materials you need to produce. It is continuing with production, quality assurance, dispatching our trucks and deliveries, and then ultimately bringing the material to our customers and also to make it a good experience for them and make us and our ready-mix producing customers the easiest partners to do business with in this industry. Remember, I said it is so much easier to bring innovation to a cloud-based environment. That is exactly what we do with the other partners. Giatec up in Canada is the leading digital tech provider to the ready-mix industry. It is all about AI for recipe optimization, quality control in transit, strength prediction.
When you run a ready-mix business, it's very often difficult to actually get data and insights and turn it into actions. Very often, you run it a bit blind because remember that picture in the beginning, if the data is locked there, how to get it out there and how to turn it into insights and how to turn it into action. That is what C60 is all about in the cloud. It turns data into insights and then into actions which our local people can follow up. Let me spare that a little bit for later on in the presentation. There is a lot of new work coming to our business with sustainability. We have to prove how much carbon is in those products. We have to show this to our customers. Obviously, we don't want to build up a lot of people doing this manually.
AI can help to make this a much smoother and better process. I know that digital sometimes for those not thinking about it every day can be a little bit fluffy. How does that translate into P&L impact? What is that actually doing to our business? I thought I bring you a couple of examples where this really becomes tangible. Thanks to my colleague Chris here, we have those examples because he's helping me a lot rolling them out in the US business, where we typically pilot things.
Again, on the left side, this is the typical workplace of someone working in one of our batch plants, a very local workplace, typically made for one batcher or maybe even one and a half to two batchers looking after one plant and very cumbersome to also stay or to make the system stay tuned, that it exactly mixes into the mix what is supposed to be in there. As we know that this is difficult, sometimes we have to plan for some mishappenings and put some buffer into it. Ultimately, buffer, which could be avoided, is nothing else than waste. Here on the right side, you see how that will look like in the future, already today in some of our plants when we move it into the cloud. It's not any longer a local system.
It's a local or it's a location-independent system where ultimately one batcher can look after up to 10 plants and just managing the exemptions of it. Big efficiency gain for us, also addressing our needs or risks in terms of labor shortage. That alone in the U.S., when we roll that out to all of our plants, is a $12 million opportunity for us. On the bottom, you see a tool from Command Alkon called Batch AI, which basically trains a plant-specific model, learning how the plant is reacting to different circumstances, temperature, moisture, different raw materials, mixes, and so on, makes sure always exactly what should be in the mix ends up in the truck. That helps us to cut out waste, and waste is safe cost, but looking at my colleague here, also saved CO2 because the best ton of cement is not yet evoZero.
It's still the one which we don't need to put into the mix. And that alone is $3 million or EUR 3 million, sorry, here in the North American business of Chris. Next example, this time from Giatec. And here we really teamed up with Giatec, bringing the technology to the table, and we bring the industry know-how to the table and also a lot of data. We gave them 180,000 mixes of Heidelberg Materials and how they performed in the past. And they used this to train the first real AI tool helping us to optimize mixes. And we can use this ourselves as much as our cement customers and aggregate customers producing ready-mix can use that to make their mixes more efficient. For us in the U.S., that's a $4 million opportunity. And always keep the local, sorry, the global advantage in place.
We are in the process of rolling all of these things out into our US business, but it can obviously not stop there. We have to go then also to the other countries of Heidelberg Materials to get the full benefits out of it. Together with Chris, we are committed that all the digital initiatives we are targeting in North America, and Axel will also show you a couple of other ones in the cement space, that we will get $50 million of additional result coming from that across the different business lines. Remember, I said we are doing this for two reasons. We want to make our own business better, faster. This is that. We are also doing it for the wider industry, especially our ready-mix and asphalt-producing customers. Let's switch perspectives. How does that make their business better?
You actually see me here in Atlanta talking to a couple of combined customers of Command Alkon and Heidelberg Materials who really appreciate that we are kind of open-sourcing our playbook, how to digitalize asphalt and also ready-mix assets. What can we do to make their business better? We can help them with a Giatec AI to optimize their recipes so that they can also take waste, CO2, and cost out of their business. We are offering them bundled services. An example for that is concrete together with a Giatec sensor to actually measure the maturity of the concrete. That is really nice. There are also examples which bring the two transformational pillars of Heidelberg Materials nicely together, sustainability and digital. Let me dive a bit deeper into those two ones here on the bottom.
I don't know how familiar you are with the concept of EPDs, Environmental Product Declarations, right? For those of you not knowing that, it's kind of comparable to the nutrition table you find on the food you buy in your grocery store. Where it's all about the caloric value and how much sugar is in the food, for us, the most important thing, which is on the EPD, is the embodied carbon. In the past, that was a very cumbersome and time-consuming process to collect all of that data to generate an EPD out of it. Sometimes it took actually years from us making an investment into our cement plant to reduce the embodied carbon level to really being in a position that our own ready-mix business, but also our ready-mix producing customers, can show this to their end customers.
That is important because if the customers do not see it, they will not buy that material, and that ultimately also hinders us from selling things like evoBuild or maybe later on then also evoZero. That is why we recognized that need and invested into that space. We are doing this together with Command Alkon and Pathway, so bringing two partners together. In the meantime, it takes us hours to generate a cement EPD. The good thing is we are not sharing a PDF or paper document with our customers, but we are sharing that data via the Command Alkon platform in a digital way so that the customers can update all of their hundreds of EPDs resulting out of one cement EPD in seconds and not any longer in years.
The benefit for our customers is that they can prove the reduced carbon levels earlier to their customers, and the benefit for us is that it's easier to sell our sustainable materials. I want to close it up with a bit of a visionary note. You heard Katharina talking a lot about evoZero and also her sales team really looking after those projects globally. Dominic also said ultimately this will become a global product which we market globally at one point in time. Again, bringing the two perspectives, sustainability and digital together, I'm actually convinced that at one point in time in the future, we can also use all of that platform to help our ready-mix producing customers to help us selling evoZero or evoZero inside their mixes through this digital sales channel.
Wrapping it up, we want to lead the whole industry into the cloud. We are not doing this alone. We are doing this with a couple of partners which we invested in and glued together. We are making our core business better, faster through this. We empower our customers with value-added solutions. We started all of this in the North American business, strong commitment to roll all of those solutions out and turn them into P&L impact. Obviously, that can only be the beginning. The cool thing about digital is you do it once and then you can easily scale it out to the world. Axel.
Good morning also from my side. My name is Axel Conrad. I'm the Chief Technical Officer for Heidelberg Materials since February of last year.
I'm actually 25 years already in the company, and I'm leading the competence centers for ready-mix aggregates and cement and 400 people worldwide. You know, are responsible to improve our efficiency in our operations as well as leading our non-capital as well as our capital projects worldwide. Brevik is a prime example of that proud achievement. Looking at this picture, it fills me actually with fond memories because that's our book, Lengenfeld Plant in Bavaria, Germany. This is where I started 25 years ago as a young kiln engineer. At that time, the task for me was to improve our alternative fuels from 10% to 50%. This plant is running now at 85%, which makes me very proud. My last assignment was actually to be the regional president for our Midwest division in North America.
At that time, I was very proud to be part of the team that constructed and commissioned our Mitchell, Indiana cement plant that we commissioned in April 2023, the biggest plant we have now in North America. Great achievement for the U.S. If we look at technology at Heidelberg Materials, we do not see that as an enabler. We see that as a core value driver for our industry. Across all our projects, all our plants, and all our processes, we leverage technology to increase our efficiency, our industrial efficiency, to improve our decarbonization roadmap, as well as to lead our innovations. Very happy that I have a couple of examples, six examples today, not too many, but six examples today that show you how we are uniquely positioned to really leverage that technology to improve our efficiency in our operations.
You know, the core success factor for us is really a consistent application of the global advantages that we have in technology. You know, if you look at us at Heidelberg Materials, we have global advantages, and we link that with technology, which we truly believe is a multiplier and an accelerator for our efficiency gain. Let me start with the global talent pool first. We talk a lot about automation. We talk a lot about autonomous, and that also sounds very much as efficiency gain per se. You know, we need to realize that our employees are the core asset of this company. Their skills, their competencies, their commitment, but also their mobility makes us successful to bring things like Brevik up and many other examples as well.
You know, if you look at standard operating models, we have very sound, very detailed operating models for all our business lines down to every plant and down to every process. We do not standardize to standardize. We are not the army. We are not a bureaucracy, but we use standards to really embed our best practices in our operation and use that as a platform for new development. Next one is R&D and knowledge multiplier. You know, we have a very sophisticated R&D center in Germany, and they do great things. It is amazing what they come up with and what they innovate. And they do not do that to go to congresses or write papers. We use that to really take that into our plans, pilot that very well in the plant, and from there on, scale it. This is the next point, economies of scale.
You know, we do that very, very thoroughly. We have a central engineering unit in our competence center cement that is able to scale those innovations from one plant out to the world over our 100 cement plants, our aggregate plants, our ready-mix plants very swiftly and very cost-competitively because we have the scale on that. All these four things are enablers. Between ability and doing is one big thing, and that is commitment. This is what I'm extremely proud of in our company, is the speed of implementation. We can excite our plants, our countries to go with us on the journey to implement things very quickly because they know we have tested them well and they see the economic value in doing that. Clearly, linking global advantages with our technology approaches, that really accelerates and multiplies our efficiency gain.
I brought six examples with you, and I want to show you with that slide only one thing. All these global advantages pay a huge dividend into making those examples really happening and scale them very, very quickly. We talk about CCS. We talk definitely about Brevik as you've heard before, right? We talk also about other carbon reduction levers that we have. We need to talk also about calcined clay. We talk about ATROC autonomous trucks as well as our transformation accelerator initiative that I have the honor to lead for the whole board. Let's start with Brevik. This is obviously our very proudest achievement of the recent time. You know, for us, this is the world's first industrial scale CCS plant with a capacity of 400,000 tons. You know, Dominic said that, this is for us like the first moon landing.
I can tell you very clearly, while we were already in orbit, right, when we were still commissioning the plant, we still had to figure things out to really make a sound landing and really get that thing going. It was really mind-boggling, new technology that was never tested before on that scale. We are really proud of what we have achieved here with the team. Let me tell you, it was not a switch of a button. Actually, eight years ago, we started to hire experts from a totally foreign field for ourselves from the carbon capture side and married them together with our expert of cement to really make that marriage of knowledge that later on became a marriage in technology that we see out there. This is, again, you know, a tribute to our global advantages.
We could bring these talents together, but we also could use Brevik as the breeding ground for new developments for our next operations for Petersburg, as we mentioned before. You know, people from Petersburg were part of this commissioning to experience that commissioning, so they will be quicker and better suited to do the next one that is coming up. You know, technology that is all seen here in Brevik was tested on a smaller scale in other plants worldwide. And we took that knowledge from those plants and applied that here back to Brevik to make that a success. So we really worked together to do that. We create now, based on that unique experience, already operating manuals. You know, we create digital tools so we can scale that knowledge then very quickly into our operation. This is unique out there.
You all know that, but we are able, and this makes us unique as well, that we can scale that now very quickly that nobody else can do. Brevik is a major leap, no question about that. As Katharina already mentioned, we are doing obviously much more to decarbonize our industry. You know, we talked about alternative fuels. We talked about the reduction of clinker incorporation as two major points as well. We go farther than that. We take all the levers that we have. We actually last year started to go plant by plant and capture best practices of our very great people in our plants worldwide from Africa, from Asia, from North America and Europe, and understand what levers, what is there for us to gain in all our, you know, world's greatest, greatest plants that we have.
We took all these best practices together and created a menu of levers and took these levers and mirrored that across all our plants and understood which of these levers can be economically applied in all of our plants. Economically applied, not just doing it, just what makes sense. We're very proud that we found another 1.5 million tons of CO2 reduction per year with very limited CapEx and an OpEx saving of more than EUR 50 million per year on that. That's really the strength of the company to bring these best practices together, do that in a very disciplined way, and roll that out as quickly as we can, you know, an attribute to our global advantages.
You know, while we stand here at Brevik and celebrate what we are doing here, we cannot forget, and Katharina alluded to that, we have at the same time started the largest calcined clay kiln in the world in Ghana, a flash calciner and an individual investment that we have done for that. We are very proud of that, that we have for our emerging markets a great product there to further decarbonize our industry. First time that we started with calcined clay is 15 years ago. We started that in Tanzania. And we used these last 15 years to fully understand how calcined clay works, but also how we can scale that in different directions. You know, calcined clay, let me talk maybe a little bit about clay for the non-mineralogist or geologist of you.
Clay is a deposit that is very common, similar to limestone, but clay is not clay. Clay has different minerals. Some of these minerals, you can heat treat to activate them to become a very potent secondary cementitious material with 80% less CO2 intensity than clinker, but at the same time, very comparable strength characteristics. We took that idea and thought, what else can we do with that? We found by now 15 plants in our group that can take the idea of calcined clay and either do things like that, a huge plant, or do very small scaled addition to our plants that do not require really CapEx. We can scale things up and we can scale things down and we can do that very, very quickly. You might have heard already about our Heidelberg Materials Optimization Center.
This is for me a very, very good example of technology-driven value generation. This is a hub in Dallas, Texas, that operates 12 of our cement plants in North America. We get the best people there to really sit together and exchange how we can operate these plants simultaneously better. You know, just imagine what kind of synergetic improvement you get if you know the best people in the world sit together and simultaneously improve 12 plants at the same time and run them efficiently. We will hear much more on that from Chris later on his presentation, but this is really a new generational step for us to operate our plants. Now, how can we scale that? We can scale that and just copy-paste that to other areas in the future.
We also can only take partial solutions out of that and apply that, for example, to our 47 grinding units and remotely operate them from our integrated plants and have efficiency gains with that as well. We scale again in different directions as well, full-blown or partial, all with a gain to improve our efficiency. We did that very quickly, you know, from idea, and Dennis was very involved in that as well. We can speed that up very quickly. Start with the idea roughly a little bit over a year ago until we are now in the implementation phase already and started the first plants already, having all plants online, you know, run out of Dallas in the next two years. Again, how quickly we can do that, that nobody else can do as we can.
Also, you might have heard about our autonomous truck project that we have. You know, for us, this is not only an upgrade. This is really the step development into manless operation of our quarries. You all know it's difficult to find people for haul driving, to, you know, find people for shifts, for night shifts and weekends. This gives you and us the opportunity to run a fleet completely manless. We are the first to really utilize that technology in our industry, and we scale that very quickly. You know, the real nice thing, the real cool thing about our solution to autonomous trucks is that it is a solution that is completely brand agnostic and retrofitable. We don't have to buy new trucks for that. We don't care who supplied the trucks.
We can retrofit that to all our trucks, and you see a little bit how that works. Keep in mind, these trucks are as big as a house, right? These are 100-ton trucks. They, you know, if you stand them next to your house, you know how big they really are. This is the equipment we are running with that. With that technology, retrofittable and brand agnostic, you know, we can scale that very quickly. It's a huge time advantage, but it's also very limited capital requirements. The payback time for that is less than two years on average. We can do that in three years over 30 quarries and covering more than 100 trucks with that. Coming back to the scaling effect to that, right?
Yes, we can scale that very quickly because we have trained our next generation of project managers to roll that out already while we did the pilot in Lake Bridgeport, Texas, USA for the last year. We can also go further and utilize that technology for other equipment, front-end loaders, drills, and so on. We can do that with different partners as well. We learned so much out of that that we can scale that now in a short amount of time. You know, I cannot stand here without talking about the transformation accelerator. Even yesterday in our evening dinner, you know, when I talked about technology, everybody was a little bit interested when we started talking about transformation accelerator. You know, the interest was really high, so that was very good. For us, the transformation accelerator is obviously an important project, but it is more than that.
For us, it's a mindset. We want to really become the best efficient operator in the world, and that is a step towards that. What we did here as a global efficiency program is to take a little bit different approach than we did in the past. We really used our data. As you know, we have P&Ls down to every ready mix, aggregate, and cement plant. And we understand the cost situation, the productivity situation, our plants very good. Based on that, we benchmark our operations and understand what good looks like and where we have improvement potential. We did that in a short amount of time. You know, it took us two months to get the program set up, all internal, without consultants. We did it all ourselves and are running that project now for two years. Our target is $500 million.
I'm very convinced that we achieved that. And why am I convinced? Because here we sit, end of April, data already in the books, and we saw we have taken a pretty good bite out of that already. We are very confident that we reached that. You know, for me, the transformation accelerator is a little bit a different example than the others I showed. I think on the other ones, you have seen that we are quite creative with that. Here you see that we are pretty decisive as well. If we set ourselves a target, we deliver on it. We see already that we are on a very good track there. Coming to an end, you know, I'm very convinced that our global advantages increase and accelerate our efficiency.
You've seen us, and Katharina mentioned that, and Dominic has mentioned that already, that we are pulling all levers in our decarbonization. We are not looking at CCS only. We are not looking at alternative fuels only. We are not only looking at SCMs. We look at the full spectrum. We look at everything. We do that in a very disciplined manner and, you know, look for the economics on top of that. You know, we go, and then you cannot stop us anymore. You know, I think we are very good at implementing scalable innovation. Yes, Brevik is a prime example. Yes, the autonomous trucks is a very good example. ATROC is, in my opinion, a great example as well. These are just some of the examples we are doing. We talked about already remote batching.
We talk about remote grinding and many more things that enables us to become the most efficient operator. That is our target. We want to become the most efficient operator in our industry, and I think we are on a very good track to that. This is what we do right now. This is, you know, what we are currently working on and get into implementation and on a good track in implementation. We are working on the future as well. We are working on the plant of the future, not only in cement. We do that in ready mix, aggregates, and cement. At the end of the day, this will not be a lighthouse. This will be a scalable solution that we will bring and scale across all our plants. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Axel. And indeed, also thank you, Dominic. Thank you, Katharina. Thank you, Dennis, for your inspiring speeches. We have heard all how we are decarbonizing our industry, how we are setting new standards in digital AI and technical excellence. Now it's time for a break. Let's do a quick break this time, 10 minutes. You should be back by half past 10 at your seats. Enjoy the break. Welcome back. Welcome back to everyone watching us online. And welcome back to everyone that's still outside who should come in now. I hate to be the guy to be, you know, pushing you, but we run a tight program this morning. And it's my pleasure to introduce Chris Ward, board member for North America, who will explain to you how we are tapping the full market potential in North America.
Before we do that, it's my pleasure to introduce you to Jon Morrish , who will explain to you how we drive value from a reshaped asset base in Europe. Please come on stage, Jon.
Thanks, Chris. Yes, I'm not Chris Ward. I'm John Morris. Yes, thank you. My name is John Morris. I've been the Board Member for Europe for the last few years. Before that, I was the Board Member for North America. I'm really pleased to be here, to be able to outline to you some more information about Europe and how we are uniquely positioned here in Europe as the market leader and with an asset base that we are optimizing, reshaping, and modernizing, where we're already delivering profitable growth today. More importantly, we see a real opportunity to make a further step change in profitability over the next short few years.
We're the clear market leader in Europe. In cement, we have 25% market share across Europe. We're either the market leader or we have a top two position in all of the key European countries. That gives us considerable size and scale and really strong, attractive network coverage across 22 European countries in Europe. We have deep, long-term customer relationships that have stood the test of time and have a really balanced coverage across residential, non-residential, and infrastructure segments all across Europe. We're seizing the opportunity that decarbonization will give to create real profitable growth in Europe. Now, the market recovery has started, and we're seeing the green shoots of that come through in different parts and at different rates across Europe. I'll give you more information about that. It's definitely started and coming through now.
Therefore, we see that we have a great position in Europe to benefit the most from Europe's market recovery. We've worked really hard in recent years to establish a focused yet really balanced business across our three core materials segments. Around half of our business is in cement across our 45 integrated cement plant coverage across Europe. Around a quarter of our business is in our aggregates business through our 250 quarries across Europe. Then around 20% comes from our ready-mix business from our over 1,000 batching plants spread across Europe. We've vertically integrated through ready-mix in all of our key markets. This is complemented by targeted businesses in precast concrete, recycling, and asphalt in certain countries. This focused yet really strong coverage and scale gives us a real benefit across Europe.
We needed this in recent times when times in Europe were not so—we were a little troubled. You can see on the graph on the left here, we have experienced volume declines over the last few years of over 20%. During that time, we have seen housing at 40-year lows. At certain times in certain countries, our energy prices have more than doubled or tripled in certain countries. Despite this, you will see that we have pushed and improved our profits by over 70% during these tough times. We have done this by focusing hard on cost reductions, by proactively reshaping our asset base as we saw these volume declines and as also we drove clinker incorporation down. We have necessarily driven prices up hard and fast and then been able to hold those prices high over these last short few years.
I'm proud to therefore say that despite the volume hit of EUR 500 million over this period, we pushed price over cost by over EUR 1 billion , driving our EBITDA improvement by over EUR 500 million during this period, an improvement of 200 basis points. This has created a super strong position just as the markets are coming back. How will we make that further step change? We'll pull three core levers to make a further step change in profitability. The first is our unique positioning. With our market size and our market leadership position, we will capitalize on the market recovery in Europe the most. We'll leverage our global advantage in decarbonization as a core engine of profitable growth in Europe.
We will also continue our radical focus on cost efficiency, maximizing the benefit of automation and continuing to reshape our asset base to match our needs. Turning to the first of these, the market recovery in Europe and how is it going? As I may have mentioned, we have everything in place to capitalize on this market recovery. The construction recovery is gathering pace with a few key drivers that we see. Clearly, interest rates dropping and therefore mortgage rates dropping spurs much-needed residential and non-residential improvement across different countries at different paces. This is augmented by new build stimulus packages in housing in certain countries, Poland, for example, in the U.K., and even in France. Also, infrastructure programs, notably in Italy, in Poland, in Germany with the much publicized $500 billion spending program, and also in the U.K.
We also see defense infrastructure spending, as Dominic alluded to, in particular in Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, in Poland, in Romania, and that is taking shape. We as a company are very well placed to supply what I would call the secondary effects of a Ukraine rebuild if and when that comes from our very strong positions in Poland, Romania, and up through the Black Sea from Bulgaria and Turkey. We see the recovery taking shape from early last year, as you can see by the market figures from 2024 into 2025. Let me just take you on a few more examples around Europe. In Eastern Europe, in the Baltics, in Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, we've seen a broad and strong recovery since early last year. This is continuing, helped by defense spending in those countries.
In Central Europe, first of all, in Poland, we saw a positive recovery from the start of 2024, also that time led by infrastructure. Our customers in Poland now tell us to prepare for a housing bounce back in the second half of this year after recent interest rate cuts of 0.5%. Staying in Central Europe, in the Czech Republic, again, we saw a bounce back from the start of last year. In that country, inflation dropped the furthest and the fastest. The recovery was led by residential and non-residential rates. That continues into 2025. Jumping down to Italy, what we see there is the much-anticipated infrastructure building program is now taking shape. This kicked in from quarter three last year with a really strong pipeline of infrastructure spending over the next few years.
We have not yet seen a housing pickup, but we watch very carefully for that in the second half of this year. Jumping back up to Germany, unsurprisingly, the EUR 500 billion is yet to flow. It's early days for the government. We have definitely seen a market sentiment pickup in Germany over recent months. Volumes in April and May have been strong. If we then hop over to the U.K., honestly, it's a mixed picture in the U.K. I would see 2025 as a transition year. After three strong years of infrastructure spending in the U.K., underpinned by rail infrastructure, some of these programs are slowing and pausing as they finish. The pipeline for future infrastructure in the U.K. is strong. There is a huge pent-up need for housing that we expect to kick in from later this year into 2026.
Therefore, that leaves us with the remaining core countries for us: France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and up here into the Nordics, where we see a similar pattern with volume declines now flattened out. We see that the worst is behind us. We're at a flat level and looking carefully for a market pickup from the end of 2025 into 2026. As you can see from this market coverage across Europe, these are our 22 countries. No one is better placed than Heidelberg Materials to benefit from this volume and market recovery in Europe. It is also because of our deep expertise and strong track record in delivering major project material packages all over Europe. This will be a key part of Europe's recovery as the infrastructure program in particular kicks in. We are trusted to deliver these key projects.
On the screen here, we have eight live examples of large projects taking place all over Europe. Just to take a couple of examples, the first in the U.K., in the west of England at Hinckley Point, where for the last eight years we've been building this huge nuclear power plant. Our specialist team of nuclear experts has been providing technical, quality, and complicated logistics support to build all of the concrete and all of the materials required for that huge plant. Our client, EDF, are so happy with the progress that we've made over that long time period that they've just awarded us with all of the critical material package for the sister plant Sizewell B that will start later this year in the east of England.
Hopping down to another example in Italy, we've established a really strong track record in recent years with WeBuild, Italy's largest construction company. Firstly, with the Brenner High-Speed Rail Tunnel that is under the Alps, where we've had a ready-mix concrete plant embedded under the mountain for the last three years. Also with the rapid rebuild of the Genoa Bridg in recent years. Our supply capabilities and reliability have placed us in a really great position when the next huge project came up from WeBuild, and that is the Genoa Port Redevelopment. You see this picture of this strange structure here. This was just a few weeks ago when I was there, and we're building these huge concrete caisson structures that we then float into place to sink and build a new port there. These difficult projects are taking shape all over Europe.
We are best placed with the specialist knowledge, the resources, and the capabilities to provide our customers with the confidence they need. When it matters, our customers trust us to deliver. That takes me to the second lever that we are pulling. D ecarbonization. The framework of the Clean Industrial Deal in Europe represents a real business opportunity for Heidelberg Materials for three reasons: carbon pricing through the ETS structure, but very importantly now with CBAM confirmed politically last week. This drives a really strong business case for low-carbon products and decarbonizing our processes. The Clean Industrial Deal also has a real focus on lead markets, as Katharina mentioned, with the adoption of low-carbon ratings and embodied carbon targets in government procurement. This was moving slowly two years ago, but is really picking up speed.
First of all, led by proactive cities across Europe, but also by national governments in the U.K., in the Netherlands, in France with the reshaping RE2020, and across different countries. It's really changing now. Thirdly, with grant funding, where there's a real focus now of EUR 100 billion of new money through the Industrial Decarbonization Bank that will be there to scale up and roll out breakthrough technology such as this place across Europe. This framework benefits those who decarbonize furthest, fastest, with the best decarbonized products. That is us. In products, we're already doing this by pushing and selling our evoBuild product range, where this is already over 40% of our sales of cement and will rise to about two-thirds of our sales by 2030. Two live examples are on the slide here.
The first is in Belgium and the Netherlands, where we are building a road network from Antwerp to Rotterdam that has already used a quarter of a million tons of evoBuild 70. That is a really low-carbon product, 70% less than the reference CEM1 there. In Germany, we are building the U5 subway project in Hamburg, which will be Germany's largest subway. Over the five-year build program, they want and need to drive down their carbon footprint by 70% over that build program. They are using our evoBuild products, EvoBuild 40 and 60, 200,000 tons just in the early phase of that project. We are not stopping there. In 2026, we will launch three more highly innovative low-carbon evoBuild products, all less than 400 kg per ton cementitious. The first is TurnerCEM from our plant in Paderborn, Germany.
This plant was earmarked to close with our clinker reduction program, but we decided to switch it into a low-carbon, low-clinker-based carbon based on industrial byproducts. We'll launch that in early 2026. Our QCements, Axel talked about calcined clays, and our QCements will launch in France and Belgium. These are calcined clay-based cements. We'll roll that further afield across Europe after France and Belgium. Our ultra-low-carbon binders products coming from our Spanish plant, again based on industrial byproducts. We are really doing all we can in the evoBuild product space to drive our sales of evoBuild and drive down our carbon footprint. In our process, we are really pushing the levers that we talked about before. In our alternative fuels, we'll move this from the current low 60s up to 80% by 2030.
We'll drive down our clinker incorporation from the upper 60s now to 60% by 2030 and increase the use of supplementary cementitious materials far more. And we're even recarbonating. This image here is last week from our largest plant in Poland, where we've commissioned our patented recarbonation reactor that takes recycled concrete paste from our recycling business and then reactivates it to reduce the CO2 through our process, really closing the loop on recycling. This is a first in the sector. We are using our global advantage, I think, as I'm showed on this slide, to really drive Europe's decarbonization, which in turn drives our profitable growth. I think we're the only company in our sector making this much genuine progress in Europe. This takes us nicely to evoZero, where you've heard already from Katharina.
I just want to take you through what we're doing in Europe and how we're working together in our new sales approach. We're really turning it into a reality with our dedicated evoZero country teams working hand in glove with their global colleagues from Katharina's team. We're focusing down the value chain, as Katharina outlined, and having fascinating new conversations with clients, developers, architects, structural engineers. Then we're linking those together with our well-known customer base in the precast industry, in ready mix, and in our construction companies, and really making it happen in the countries. Customer interest is based on hitting embodied carbon levels, the improved and increased real estate values that our clients think they can get, and also the reputational benefits of being first to market with a zero-carbon building. That's really happening in the countries.
Our order book comprises orders for our cement into both precast concrete, ready-mix concrete, and mainly currently for the buildings segment. We are very pleased that we are already sold out for our 2025 volumes of around 100,000 tons to customers spread across 11 countries in Europe. Naturally, some of those countries are quite close and near to hand in the Scandinavia countries, in the U.K. and in Germany, where we will ship the physical product to. The virtual product will go as far afield as Romania and Bulgaria. EvoZero is genuinely special and a game changer for the industry that no other company can deliver. It has strong margin potential, and we have high demand. René will outline the business case a little bit more in the next section.
Yet we're not only relying on a market recovery from a strong position or on growing evoBuild and evoZero sales. We're also continuing our real push and our focus on our cost efficiencies and driving that across Europe, working closely with Axel. We focus here a lot on making sure that we are adding value where we can add value the best. That is focusing on our assets and our precious capital, such as our fixed plants in our core business, our reserves, automating those assets, and also decarbonizing, as I've outlined. That means we focus less on where we don't add so much value. In particular, in Europe, that means on our transport assets. The image here is the sale last year of our large transport business in France called Tratel, where we sold 600 trucks.
We can focus better on our core productive assets than our transport fleet. The second area is really embedding and driving the performance culture all the way across and deep inside the business that we continue to do. We're a core part of the TAI cost-saving program. Within that program, we focus really hard on benchmarking all of our operational sites all the way across Europe in each of our key businesses. We also do that benchmarking for the organizational structures in all of our countries too. We are standardizing our back office functions as much as we can. When that's done, we put those functions in our two large business service centers, one in the U.K. and one in Bulgaria. We leave the countries to focus on what they do best: sales, manufacturing, and logistics.
We have an obsessive focus on areas of the business that we can improve and that have got upside potential through our back-in-black approach that we call in Europe. All of this is enabled by automation and AI, where we're working closely with the colleagues from, with Axel, but also with Dennis, with tools that we can now provide that we did not used to have. Three specific examples here in Europe. The first is in our ready-mix business, where we've proven over recent years our remote batching concept in Italy, where we have 50 of our sites that are already with remote batching. We're now going to step change and roll that across Europe, and we'll have 400 of our 1,000 sites with remote batching by 2028. We really are stepping this up. In cement, we have 22 clinker grinding plants across Europe.
If you recall the presentation given by Axel, we are auto-grinding; we are automating those plants. By 2028, we will have 15 of those plants auto-controlled. In our sales and customer service, we are also implementing AI tools quite extensively. For example, in our cement, in our ready-mix sales in Belgium, the Netherlands, the U.K., and Germany, we already use price quotation tools, AI-generated price quotation tools. We already make extensive use of chatbots, and now we are just rolling out voice bots. We even have email automation so that customers, when they send us emails, they go straight into our order processing system. By doing all of this and pulling all of these levers, the business is super ready to benefit from the market recovery. In addition, we continue to actively restructure and reshape our clinker asset footprint.
We started this around three years ago when we could see the volume declines really taking shape, but also more proactively when we were driving forward and driving down our clinker incorporation rates. We're already halfway through this. Across Germany, France, and Spain, we made the difficult decision to close five plants, reducing 13% of our clinker capacity in Europe. Now we're on to wave two, and we'll execute that over the next short few years, where we'll take out between 12% and 17% of our clinker capacity. That will total between 25% and 30% of our clinker capacity base being taken out. Importantly, this will not impact our cement capacity. In fact, we're adding to that in certain countries. We have extremely strong sourcing and access to supplementary cementitious materials, SCMs, all across Europe.
When markets come back, we are very able to service it. These actions and decisive actions are clearly reducing our cost base and our asset base and improving margins and our ROIC. To pull this together, in Europe, we are pulling all the levers to be able to deliver a next step change in profitability. I hope we've shown you that we've already got a strong track record of delivering over the recent years in tough markets. That leads us to be in really great shape to have high operational leverage. This coupled with a great market position will enable us to deliver and benefit most from a market recovery in Europe. We're driving forward decarbonization, and in particular through evoBuild and evoZero. These will drive value further.
We are driving a step change in efficiency with less clinker capacity, yet more flexible production capacity and increased SCMs usage. This will enable us to deliver more profits. We are confident to be able to deliver EBIT margins up by at least 250 basis points, enabling us to deliver half of the group's ROIC improvement target that we are outlining today. We are pulling all the levers to take Europe to the next profitable level. I think no other company is as prepared or as ambitious in Europe as Heidelberg Materials. Thank you. I will hand over now to my colleague, Chris Ward.
Okay, thank you, John. Good morning, everyone. I am Chris Ward, and I lead our North American business. I have worked in the U.S. and Canada, deep down in both our aggregates and cement business for 30 years.
I'm really grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today about our North American business. Let me start with sharing with you just a little bit. For those less familiar with the U.S. business, let me just share with you a little bit to set the stage, okay? I'd say it's very easy. We have a very attractive footprint across the U.S. and Canada, with leading market positions in both cement and aggregates. We have complementary downstream businesses in many of our markets and a track record of proven growth and margin expansion. What I believe is still many nice opportunities to continue to grow this important business in North America. I'll share with you over the next 15 minutes or so why I believe in North America, we're uniquely positioned to accelerate growth, drive efficiencies, and add value.
Now, unique positioning means a lot of different things, as you listen to some of my colleagues. In North America, it starts with our locations. As you see on the map, as I tell people, we're not everywhere. Where we are, we have great, very strong long-term positions with very nice overlap of aggregates and cement complemented by the downstream businesses. I also tell people 60% of the US population lives east of the Mississippi River. I think you see from the map that puts us in a very nice position. Also, from a geographic standpoint, you see a nice blend between our Sunbelt states, typically driven by fast residential housing, with a nice blend of through the Midwest, the heartland of the U.S., along with the Northeast. Then a very wide-reaching Canadian footprint from the West Coast through Toronto and the major metropolitan areas.
Now, you see a lot of dots on this map. Let us be very clear. In North America, our business is anchored by cement and aggregates. If I start with aggregates, I think this is often underappreciated for our business in North America. We have 254 plants with over 12 billion tons of reserves and resources. As they say in the real estate industry, location, location, location. I will tell you, for us in North America, we have very powerful long-term locations. I spent a lot of my early career in the aggregates business. I am very conscious of the importance of us continuing to invest in these businesses. We are constantly looking for opportunities to add reserves to these positions, and we are constantly investing to make sure that we have the capacity to grow with these local markets.
Now, equally powerful for us in the U.S. and Canada is our cement and cementitious business line. Here we have 11 cement plants. We are 16 million tons of cement production capacity, complemented very nicely by a wide-reaching SCM position. We are six grinding facilities slag , and four fly ash manufacturing plants, reclaiming fly ash. And these SCMs, these cement positions are really reinforced by a wide-reaching rail distribution network and very importantly supported by the most comprehensive overseas import terminals from Maine to Miami across the East Coast. Now, all of this cement movements is optimized to ensure that we are always balancing domestic capacity with the overseas import capabilities. We shift that depending on where the through the market cycles across the US.
Very importantly, as my colleague, as Dennis spoke about earlier, as of recently in North America, we now have all of these businesses, both our aggregates and our cement business, fully underpinned by one scalable, harmonized digital platform that we really believe will allow us to unlock future efficiencies throughout this business. I'd say if you look at this platform, as I just described it, I'm confident when I look back because this platform has delivered. We set very aggressive margin targets for us back in 2019. If you recall, we said we were going to grow our EBITDA margins by 400 to 500 basis points. We knew we had a gap to some of our competitors in North America, and we aimed to close that gap. We did that by really harnessing the power of our global competence centers to focus laser-like on efficiency gains.
We invested in some of our core assets to improve capacity and production cost. We also knew to get to that level, those margin gains, we knew we needed intense focus on the commercial side of the business, and we did that. You see that show up in the results. You see our compounded annual growth rate on the cement pricing side of 7% since 2019. You see that commercial focus has realized 6.5% compounded annual growth rate in our aggregates business over the same period. When you couple that strong commercial performance along with the focused operational excellence programs, you see the nice margin development in our business over this time period with 600 basis points in our cement business and 312 basis points in our aggregates business.
Now, it's this past performance that really gives me confidence as we start talking about the future of North America. It's this past performance that underpins my optimism about the future. This optimism is also underpinned by, I think, the general market structure and the general economic outlook that we see here in North America. We talk about it in three distinct segments. If we start with infrastructure, I think it's widely understood that the IIJA money still has there's still a lot of potential in the IIJA infrastructure package bill. Nearly 60% of those dollars still have to be spent in the next two years. We have strong backlogs. As I told some of you over dinner last night, I feel pleased that the US Congress is already picking up the discussion on reauthorization of this transportation bill.
It's not officially expiring until this time, until another 18 months, but they're already having these discussions in Congress to extend this surface transportation bill, which will be very, very important to us. The second segment I'll highlight is really the residential sector. And this is a sector that, quite frankly, has stayed softer for longer than we expected. It tends to punch a little heavier than its weight. But we know in the midterm, despite maybe some rockiness in the short term, we know in the midterm in the U.S., there's still a shortage. It's widely known. There's still a shortage of nearly 4.5 to 5 million single-family homes. And the current rate that we're building homes in the U.S. still is lower than our historical average by 20%. So I think there's good reason to be optimistic in the midterm on the residential segment.
Lastly, the commercial segment. As Dominic talked about, the bow wave of infrastructure investment, we have tried to highlight on the slide, we have tried to highlight projects greater than $1.5 billion, specifically earmarked towards data centers, reshoring of manufacturing capacity. You see those are up and down the East Coast. Clearly we highlighted them in our areas. You see the nice portfolio of this reshoring activity, that bow wave that Dominic spoke about, that is what we are seeing in North America. A few examples might be the Ford Battery plant in Kentucky or the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical plant in northern Indiana. These projects today, we are already shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of aggregates, cement, fly ash, and slag. These are the projects that give us optimism about the future.
Now, we know everybody's trying to get better in the U.S. and Canada. Okay? We're pleased with our past performance, but I'll tell you, we are far from satisfied. If we think about where we're going to go from here, we're going to really think about three specific levers that we're going to focus on, very similar to how John framed it in a little bit different order. We in the North American business will stay radically focused on driving growth in the cement and aggregates business. We're going to leverage the global advantage. I'll tell you, I'm proud to stand up here and listen to my colleagues, Axel and Dennis, talk about North America leading the way on so many of these digital global initiatives that we're doing. Really excited to be part of that.
I'll share with you some of the deep dives on what we're doing specifically. Lastly, I'll highlight our unique positioning, not just in our locations, but in the products that we have available to supply our markets and the emerging trends of the industry. Let's deep dive into the radical focus. We continue to invest in our operations. If I just take a few specific examples, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the nearest limestone quarry into the city of Philadelphia, we've invested significant dollars and improved production capacity by 500,000 tons a year. In an important market for us like Atlanta, Georgia, similar investment, improving capacity at that plant by nearly 500,000 tons per year. Both of these aggregate locations have excellent long-term reserves and will be there well past any of us sitting in this room.
Of course, the Mitchell, Indiana plant in the Midwest. This has been an excellent example of how we've really leveraged everything we do at the group level to now really make a core investment in the heartland of the U.S. This plant still has a lot of installed capacity to grow with the market across the Midwest of the U.S. Now, those are a few organic examples. Let me just share with you a few and just highlight a few of the M&A examples we've done to continue to grow our business in North America. First off, if we think about the Northeast, the acquisition of Highway Materials, a great example, aggregates led, Philadelphia, already a very important market for us, some HMA, and really been a nice complementary business to our already existing portfolio in Eastern Pennsylvania.
The CIFA group in the Southeast, and this was our first, this was our first really significant investment into the fly ash business. Again, very powerful business across the Southeast. I'll pick up on this a little bit later. How I think about it as well, this was not just the purchase of these specific plants, but a platform that we intend to grow into other utility companies across the U.S. Lastly, our most recent acquisition of Giant Cement, really rounding out our footprint in the New England markets, filling a white spot for us in the Southeast cement markets, and adding a very nice alternative fuels recycling platform for us that we intend to leverage across our other plants in North America. Now, it's very, I'll tell you, my teams get excited about investing in our plants.
They get excited about M&A, but I'll tell you, they're also equally excited about really leaning into the TA program and really driving, and it is a core value for this company, continuous improvement. It is something that we really, really stress. I'll tell you, our teams are as energized about that as they are building new plants or making acquisitions. If we think about the levers that we're working on right now in North America, there's a few that I'll pick up that are really helping drive our transformation accelerator program and allow us to reach our targets across our business. First, you heard Dennis talk about Command Cloud. I think he did an excellent job really illustrating what Command Cloud can do for a business.
I'll just share with you, it's not often, and it's not easy to have one of our general managers get excited about change. I'll tell you, I was with our teams in the Southeast, and that general manager said to me, "Chris, this is game-changing for me to have insights and me to have the potential to change things to improve our batching, our dispatching, quality control, customer service." I'll tell you, they're very excited. This is really unlocking data, unlocking opportunity that our teams just don't have with on-premise software. Again, lots of excitement. Equally exciting, I'll tell you, is for our aggregate operators. Okay? These are operations we have a difficult time filling many of these jobs. Our aggregate quarry managers, along with many of our large cement quarry managers, are very excited to be leading the way when it comes to autonomous trucks.
Lastly, HROC. I'll say before, I'm going to have a deep dive on HROC right now, but I'll tell you, this is really a great example of our digital group team led by Dennis with Axel leading on the competence center side and the can-do-it-ness of, I think, our business in North America coming together to really make an excellent project. Here, as Dennis said, we're consolidating, and we're bringing all of our plant operations controls to our headquarters in Dallas. Now, this floor sits just beneath mine in Dallas.
It is interesting when I go down and I spend time with the team just a few weeks ago. I'll tell you what, as I talk through it with the guys and girls from all over the world, top talents, and I listen to them, production planning, maintenance planning, maintenance troubleshooting, process optimization, working hand in glove with our local plants. The teamwork I see, the power I see, really reinforces to me that we're on the right track here. What does that bring to us? It clearly brings more cement capacity. When I think, when we deliver, I'll tell you, the team said to me, I had one of them ask just to go off script. They said, "Chris, what is really your expectation of HROC?" I said, "Really, it's very simple. We want world-class performance at all of our cement plants in North America.
We want it every day, and we want it at every single plant. It is really that simple because right now we have pockets of great performance. I think HROC is really designed to bring world-class performance at every plant every day. That is our mission. If we do that, it unlocks almost 500,000 tons of additional production capacity in our plants with no additional real investment. That is the size of a small cement plant. It unlocks margins of an additional 60 basis points, which is why we get excited. I will tell you, HROC is not just a pilot. HROC for us is a blueprint. We expect to scale the learnings, scale the changes in our operating model to our other business lines of aggregates and ready mix in the years to come.
Lastly, and very importantly, with those efficiency gains in our cement business, we improve our CO2 footprint in our cement portfolio in North America by 10 kilograms per ton. North America knows we've got an important role to play in reaching our global roadmap targets. One lever that we pull is really around SCMs. As Katharina highlighted in her session, SCMs are a very important part of how we're going to reach our CO2 targets. How you should think about SCMs, SCMs just make concrete better. SCMs increase the durability, increase the resilience, and they lower the total embodied carbon of every yard or meter of concrete poured. We've really leaned into this with investments in slag grinding capacity, both Houston, Cape Canaveral, Speed, Indiana, and with our CIFA investment in the Southeast for fly ash.
We've leaned into this and see very much power in this. Now, you might say, "Sustainable products in the U.S., okay, is there really a premium to be paid? Is there a pull? Is there demand from the market?" I'll say, "Yeah, it's still early days in the U.S., but we definitely feel it. We sense specifiers pushing for it. We sense construction project owners wanting these products, and we're in a position now to deliver." Now, just a few projects I wanted to highlight. We've leveraged in a market like Houston, Texas, where we have our own concrete business. That contractor approached us with very high specifications and said, "Can you get to this level?" I'll tell you, we tapped our evoBuild family of products, 70% slag blend to help that customer meet their targets.
In Miami, Florida, the tallest single-family housing building built south of New York City, we've done with 70% slag to meet both the embodied carbon targets, but also the other structural targets that that contractor was looking to do. I think could not have done without the slag contribution that we made. Again, 70% slag contribution in Miami, Florida. Lastly, the US's most modern nuclear power plant on the border of Georgia and South Carolina has significant quantities of fly ash produced from our CIFA business, allowed that project to be built as it was. We're very, very proud of the fact that that project, that plant, those fly ash volumes really contributed to the successful project of that modernization, along with many others. We believe that while sustainable products are early stages, we definitely are feeling that pull.
We really like what we see in terms of margin development in these other SCM products and our evoBuild family of ready mix products. I just wanted to share with you how this all comes together. I've talked to you a lot about our intense focus on aggregates and ready mix, excuse me, ready mix aggregates cement. We've talked about our global digitalization programs. We've talked now about our SCMs and our unique footprint. Just a short to help pull it together. If we zoom in on the market of the Southeast of the U.S., this has always been a very important market for us in terms of a nice, strong aggregates position highlighted in the gray dots. We've had this position for many years. I started my career in this position.
Now, that was complemented by a cement plant that has been mostly sold out for many years in Birmingham, Alabama, along with a slag grinding facility in northern Florida. Now, with the recent investments, you see on the pink dots is our CIFA position. Those are the four reclaimed fly ash plants that I talked about. You see the Giant Cement plant, the orange, the big orange dot. This is now, again, fortifying our cement position in the Southeast. All the green dots represent the distribution network that I spoke about earlier. That distribution network is both for SCMs and for cement. In addition to the Harleyville plant, a nice Savannah, brand new Savannah import terminal to help us flex during the economic cycle. The purple dots reflect the GER, the alternative fuels recycling business.
Again, it is this collective strength that when you look at how this comes together in a market like the Southeast, this business over the last three years will have doubled in size and margins will have improved by 500 basis points. To summarize, I think we are on a great, we certainly have a proven track record of growth and margin expansion with leading positions across many of the important growth markets in North America. Okay? Certainly, maybe some clouds on the horizon in the short term, but I am very confident in the midterm potential that this platform has to deliver. I believe strongly we have the right assets, the right teams in place to deliver margin growth, RCO growth of 8% to 10% per year between now and 2030.
My teams in North America know that's an ambitious target, but I'll tell you, we're energized, we're committed, and we look forward to delivering it. Thank you very much.
Great. Thank you so much, Chris, John, for your energizing presentations. We now embark on a first Q and A. We do a business-related Q and A. I am sure you have a lot of questions on what you heard so far, but we deliberately said, "Let's keep it business-related." After that, René comes on stage with wrapping it up with all the financials. Then we do another Q and A with regard to the financials. Please join me on stage, everybody who has presented. For you online, you can also ask questions via the chat function in the Q and A button. I will ask the question on your behalf. With that, let's get started.
Where was I? Was I...
I love the birds.
Yeah, the birds are fantastic.
So you guys are all mic'd up still?
Yep.
Wonderful. First question, Luis. Yeah.
Take the mic.
Yeah.
Yeah. Just one operational question for me. We've seen the start of the year to be weakish on the pricing front. Price over cost was a small number. There was a lot of transformation accelerated in there. So the like-for-like pricing trends, I don't know what to say, I don't want to say a bit of a concern, but we're weaker than I would have expected. What should we expect in terms of pricing over the next quarters and for the full year? Is there a catch-up in the pipeline? I'm referring North America, Europe, but yeah, whatever you can tell me is useful.
I think maybe we should go through the regions. Chris, you want to start?
Can I say something on pricing, Chris?
Oh, yeah. Hey, the North American business certainly started softer than the markets certainly came out of the gates a bit soft this year. I think that especially in the cement business line, we saw that soften a bit. Aggregates business is holding quite nicely, and I think we'll see that continue to trend. Time will tell on how the markets improve and where the cement prices go.
I think in Europe, it depends where you are. We've got pricing at different stages of the year. It also depends on what cycle we're in in the recovery. We've got market pricing. We've pushed pricing in different countries at different times in the last two or three months. We've got different stages of pricing at different countries over the next few months too. In places where we've got softer volumes, we've really held on to price as well. I don't have many concerns at all.
Elodie? Is that working?
Yeah.
Here we go.
I had a question mostly for Katharina, but I suppose for everyone. In terms of how you make your CCS investment decision, I imagine a lot of that is driven by the subsidies and the grants, as well as your views on carbon price going forward. I mean, that seems quite potentially essential in terms of your assumptions. What is the minimum carbon price that you have embedded in your assumptions? How essential is it to make it economically viable in terms of taking those decisions?
Maybe you want to start, Dominic, and then you kick in, Katharina.
Yeah. Maybe, Elodie. You know, the carbon pricing is only one of maybe 15 to 20 different data dots that you need for a final investment decision for carbon capture. You know, it's the technology, it's the OpEx, it's the CapEx, it's the funding level, it's the location, it's the supply chain. There are, as I said, 15 to 20 different data dots. In this respect, I think we need to be careful to zoom in just on one piece because as a global company, you know, the carbon pricing sits in Europe, but we have also projects in North America. We need to look at every different project.
Yes, while carbon pricing plays a role in Europe, and Katharina will take you through the assumption there, you know, we do not restrict ourselves just to look at the carbon pricing because it is only one data dot and one variable in the total business case of CCUS. Maybe also René can later on allude a little bit to that.
You were specifically asking about this business case, and René will show you later. If we take the decision, we look at different scenarios for the carbon pricing. We did take from the, I think there are 10 big scenarios out there how the carbon price may develop. We lean very much on the conservative side. I think it's just how our company takes decisions. When we looked at the business case, we actually took a carbon price under $100 in 2030. Honestly, I think the success of the business case is only limited dependent on the carbon price. We see that, as I showed, the customer value is not only in the carbon price, but the customer value is really driven by a multi-layered approach, be it loans, be it higher rents, higher sales prices. This is what drives the demand for evoZero.
It is actually the demand for evoZero, which is a very strong part of the business case. I think this gives us room in terms of how the carbon pricing develops.
I'd like to have the mic just one more on CBAM. John, you said it was politically confirmed last week, the implementation of the cross-border mechanism adjustment. How do you see the implementation of that coming through from next year? Do you think next year will be efficient already, or do you see a couple of years in terms of need to settle that and how this will deal with import risk into Europe?
I think the implementation of CBAM is a key point in key countries, probably five or six key countries: Romania, Bulgaria, France, Italy, Spain, and now that the U.K. is linked into the same system. We are working as a company and also as our national trade associations with all of the customs authorities around Europe to make sure that the European Commission does what they say they will do. They have a good plan, including third country verification. We are working hand in glove with the European Commission to make sure that's put in place. I think, yes, it will happen. I think you know full well that the first, then next stage, when free allowances drop off a little bit, the first short term will be small changes, but I think the midterm will be a significant impact from CBAM on Europe.
It is something that we have been pushing hard for with policymakers over the last three or four years. It is great that it was signed off last week by the European Parliament.
Next one from Glynis.
Glynis Johnso n Jeffries. I'm going to sneak in too, actually. Sorry, Chris.
Oh, right.
Chris, your presentation. You talked about back to black underperforming plants. Does that mean you have plants in the red? Can you talk a little bit about what is underperforming? Oh, sorry. Sorry. I was going to say a surprise. Jon, question to you. Then secondly, in terms of the CCUS, and this one is definitely Katharina, the less than 400 million kilos per ton, I noticed Bulgaria was not in there. Can you just talk about some of the other CCUS plants that have been on previous slides? If I go back through the years and their timing and what the sort of new timing we can maybe anticipate.
Let's start with Jon and then Katharina.
Okay. Back to black is a euphemism. It's an ACDC song, actually, that we use as the targeted focus. Look, it's no secret that ready mix is a tough business in certain countries and that we're at the low ebb in the market cycle in some of our countries. We really are pinpointing any improvement focus we need and making really good progress in those targeted areas. I was just highlighting the fact that we obsessively focus on that and bring them up even higher to optimize their performance.
On the CCUS pipeline, I think, first of all, we are very proud to be in a first-of-its-kind CCUS plant here. Other than that, I've shown you the pipeline on projects that we are working on. If you compare it to what we communicated before, this pipeline is shifted to the right. Why is it shifted to the right? Because we learned that some things do take longer. Permits take longer. Infrastructure takes longer. Nevertheless, we believe in exactly that pipeline. We take decisions step by step, very much based on the business case of the single project. The pipeline in itself, I think, is the strongest in the industry. We are very committed to make the single business cases here work.
The other thing that we say is for the less than 400 kilograms per ton that you were referencing, we only took into consideration Brevik and Padeswood from a timeline end because they will bring at least 3 million tons under the ground. And these 3 million tons are kind of calculated in the 400 target. All the rest that comes on top is basically on top.
Glynnis, let me maybe add. I think two points are critical. We talked about the first mover advantage. We are super committed as a team to keep, in fact, build out this first mover advantage and not lose it just because we set out a huge amount of CCUS plants. Because technology will change, I think you sense that. Everything will change in that. We take the time. The second point, do not take this personal, but this industry has been focused far too much on volume, and we are falling in the same trap. Everybody is asking us, how many volumes? How many volumes? For us and our customers, it is value. It is not volume. That is also true for CCUS.
Arnaud, next one.
Thank you very much, Arnaud Lehmann from Bank of America. Two questions as well, if I may. Firstly, Dominic, many times you come back with the word global, and I think you're the last properly global company, or you will be in a month. Why do you think that makes sense? Can you help us understand the synergies a little bit on a global basis for what is essentially, as you also said, a multilocal business? That's my first question. Secondly, on Europe, you mentioned the second wave of clinker capacity closure going forward. Are you comfortable with that at the time when Europe is about to see some sort of volume recovery? Germany is investing in infrastructure. There will be a need. How do you reconcile shutting down capacity, market recovery, and the value of volume strategies that you just mentioned? Thank you.
You want to start?
Yeah, yeah. We're comfortable because we've been looking at this in detail across the footprint of Europe with our network and then various scenarios of different volume expectations. We're also comfortable because we're driving down our clinker incorporation through our product portfolio really well. Therefore, when you balance the two things and you spin out different scenarios, it gives us the confidence to be able to say, yeah, we can take our clinker capacity out, but we've got really flexible cement and SCM capacity in order to shape that. I can picture in my head the map of the various plants we're considering, and we are taking those on a case-by-case basis, but within the fit of the network.
Arnaud, maybe on the global advantage, we strongly as a team believe, and I think that was the purpose of today's presentations, to really show how this goes hand in hand. I think the best example to pick is the one that Chris was mentioning in the Southeast, where you see how this came together. You know, the idea that we buy into a fly ash business, with all due respect to the American team, was not just created in North America. That was the long tradition of the group to bring something like that to the U.S. If you look at the Giant Cement acquisition, it is no secret we bought it for 10 times multiple. You could argue that is above our trading multiple. I can all guarantee you, after synergies, it will come in far below our current trading multiple. That is where the synergy is.
If you move out to Texas with this HROC, nobody in the industry has figured out to remotely manage plants in an efficient way. That is basically the three of them working together. I can tell you, maybe long after all of our time, this will be a game changer. We talk about this one, but personally, I am convinced this HROC idea is the next game changer you will see in our industry because it will take things upside down.
Next question comes from Yassine. Then we have one question from behind and the next one here. Please, Yassine.
Thank you very much for taking my question. Yassine Touahri from On Field Investment Research. The question would be on the commercialization of evoZero. You sold out in 2025. I understand that you've got 350,000 ton planned to be sold next year. Could you give us a bit of a color of how do you market it? How much have you managed to sell for next year? I have a question which is more about the midterm. When you're thinking about governments, a lot of the cement consumption in Europe comes from governments. Are you starting to lobby to get the green procurements to be able to sell this evoZero to public works? How is it going?
That's your question for John and Katharina. So who wants to start?
I can start general, and then John talks about it for the Europe piece, I would say. I think in general, we are exactly as you said. We are working on lots of different puzzle pieces to establish this new market. I've shown you the CO2 grid that we have been developing in the industry to make transparent where products are in terms of CO2. This is what we are discussing with governments, with NGOs, to make public what is possible. I think the point that we have to recognize is that it is building a new market segment. It's a market segment that hasn't been there before, and we have to reach those that get a benefit out of it. Now, we talked about real estate investors, developers, architectures.
Yeah, we just announced our MOU with Arab last week to do exactly that, to lobby and work on creating this demand. A very significant part of our customer base is actually governments. The more governments understand what's possible and lean into this with the transparency that we are working on to provide, obviously, the easier it's going to be to sell evoZero. There are global customers, like, for example, the whole hyperscaler industry that we saw as an example both in Dominic's as well as in Chris's presentation, where there's a huge pressure on decarbonization and at the same time a huge demand. I think these are other customer types that we are used to work with, so to say. We are in the discussions, and really, it's an educational process as well, to be honest, to create this global demand. This is why we are not worried about the demand creation.
I'll add to that just to give you some information in Europe. When we say it's sold, it means there's a customer commitment and a formal commitment from us to the customer, customer to us. We have a funnel of hundreds of conversations going on all across Europe and globally with the hyperscalers that we previously talked about. When we've said we've sold our 100,000 ton, which is the first piece, that means it's in the order book right now. There are then hundreds of further conversations going on all over Europe and more globally. That's why I really mean they're knitted together. Those are adding week on week. I literally sat there. I got three emails saying more sales. In terms of creating that demand in the European countries, there are real government commitments for decarbonizing.
Therefore, that's why I mentioned the clean industrial deal. There's a real push and a drive for lead market, and in particular, putting in place low carbon ratings. That's a first step. That means everybody talks about the same thing as low carbon cement, low carbon concrete. We're all talking about the same reference point. Cities and governments are genuinely putting in government procurement targets for low embodied carbon. They've paid lip service to this for the last two or three years, but we are genuinely having really strong conversations in government and in the European Commission on this. It's taking shape now.
We have time for two more questions. One in the back. Maybe you state your name first.
Yeah, it's Harry Gowe from Berenberg. Thank you. I've got two questions, please. Firstly, just coming back to the topic of cement plant closures in Europe, can you indicate what that implies for your utilization rate, probably where it's at now, and then what that is when this is completed? Also, do you expect competitors to be undertaking a similar process with regard to closures around Europe in the next 5 to 10 years? Secondly, a question for Chris on the IIJA program. I think you said firstly that less than half of the money has been spent, but you also said negotiations have begun about subsequent programs just with regard to the money that hasn't been spent. How many years of visibility does that give you on the infrastructure side? Thank you.
Thanks, Harry. We start with Jon.
I think I heard the question. Capacity utilization, how this plays out.
The information about competitors, you have to ask them. You know, it's not for us to comment, but Jon can comment especially on what we are planning.
Yeah, I think capacity utilization, I haven't got the specific figures to hand, to be honest with you. Wave two, that's why I say it will be 12% to 17%. We'll have totaled 25% to 30% of our capacity being taken out. The capacity utilization actually depends on how fast the market picks up over the next two or three years. I think we'll still have the headroom that we need to be able to perform. That's why we've run two, three different scenarios for each of these decisions. I think that's my answer to that. It really depends on your scenario for the pickup as to where the capacity utilization would be.
Harry, careful, clinker and cement, to make the point, is much different. You know, we are ramping up on cement. We're ramping down on clinker, also meeting what Katharina has presented, the 64% clinker incorporation. You can make the math. You have a lot of wiggle room on the clinker capacity.
Regarding the I IJA monies, you know, we see a very clear pathway for the next two years. That money is appropriated. We see at least 60% of the funds that were originally earmarked in the I IJA appropriation bill. We see those funds that are still to be spent on DOT works across the U.S. over the next two years. Again, the discussions have started now on reauthorization of that highway bill, with the baseline starting at this new level that the IJA is starting at, with obviously the industry pushing to account for inflation to continue to try and push that next authorization bill to even a higher level.
All right, we've got time for one more question because, you know, René is waiting eagerly for his presentation. So one last.
Excellent. Thank you very much. It is Ben Rider Martin from Goldman Sachs. I just had another one on evoZero. Very interesting to hear about the demand from hyperscalers and governments so far. I wonder what portion of the order book do they represent at the moment? Is it relatively balanced when you think about that 2025 sold-out profile between the two, or is there a little bit of a skew between those two subsegments? Awesome.
Yeah, maybe on that one, quite honestly, we won't comment because that's a little bit, you understand that's a competitive discussion. In that respect, us, we are understanding, you know, I think there are, as Katharina said, there are a lot of discussions going on with hyperscalers, but we don't want to give too much away before. We'll inform you if there is something spectacular coming along, okay?
Okay, I know there are other questions, but we do have a second Q and A, so please hold onto your questions for the second one. We now embark on another 10-minute break. Please come back at latest 5 to 12. Running a little bit behind, but we're making it up. Thank you. I'll just wait a few seconds, guys.
Hello and good afternoon, everyone as well from my side. My name is René Aldach. I'm the Group CFO since September 2021 and responsible for Australian business since January last year, and I'm 21 years in the company. I think you have heard a lot of good stories of my colleagues in the last few hours, and now I will wrap it all up, what it means for our financials. Yes, I will give you some insights on how the Brevik business case looks like.
Over the next 20 minutes, I'll give you a few details about our past performance, the drivers of this, and what you could expect or will expect from us going forward until 2030. Over the past five years, I guess we had a very successful development in all our financial metrics. Our RCO grew by around 8%, and combined with a very disciplined CapEx, we reached a return on invested capital of around 10%. In addition, we achieved a cash conversion of 50% and a free cash flow of around EUR 2 billion. As we have promised, we have increased our shareholder return to above EUR 1 billion, and we have started our first share buyback program in 2021 and will do the second tranche of the second program beginning of June.
I think the company's financials have never been as strong as they are right now, and this is a very solid foundation for accelerated growth in the future. We have outperformed our targets despite significant headwinds. As you know, in that period, we are looking at, we had Corona, we had the Russian-Ukraine conflict starting, leading to an energy crisis, and as you have heard from John, material volume declines in all of our European markets. I have to say, in addition, the volume development in North America and emerging markets was as well well below our expectations, which led to a volume impact of roughly EUR 750 million in the wrong direction. Even with these headwinds, we have increased our RCO by 50% of around EUR 1 billion. How did we do this?
You heard it from my colleagues, value over volume, you see price over cost plus with EUR 1.6 billion. Especially from Jon and Chris, you heard we were pushing pricing into the market to recover our cost, and we were even successful to overachieve just the cost equalization. We have as well increased our margin in that time, which I think is a remarkable success. We have launched the transformation accelerator you heard from Axel in 2024, where we made very good inroads already in Q1, and I am super confident that we achieve the EUR 500 million savings until next year. You heard me talking about RCO. Also, our net CapEx the last three years was even below our guidance of EUR 1.1 billion, and leading to a nice free cash flow of EUR 2 billion, 50% cash conversion.
Now let's focus on our key metrics, how we steer the company, how we look at investments. Our return on invested capital went up from 6.5% to 10%. If you look at this, it's over 50% increase. In the past, you know, the industry was tracking along 5% to 6%, and now we have moved it up to a new level, I would say, with a ROIC of 10%. I've heard from Dominic already that we want to move this even higher. We have overdelivered of our targets we have set in the capital markets in 2022, already one year earlier for all the metrics you can see here. I'm very pleased to give you the new targets in a few seconds. Let's talk about capital allocation here. Also, we have exactly done what we have told you and have delivered on this.
We always said we want to increase the shareholder return, and we want to increase our bolt-on M&A growth story. This is what you see here. On shareholder return, we've increased it from 25% to 46% of usage of free cash flow. On M&A, we moved it from 10% to 36%. Even this accelerated shareholder return on M&A, our leverage is even with 1.2 below our communicated target of 1.5% to 2%. As M&A is and will be a very important part of our strategy going forward, I want to explain a little bit how we look at this and how we evaluate the M&A projects we have on our tables. First of all, we have developed, or we are developing, very prudent business plans with scenarios on the upside, on the downside, how many synergies can we achieve, and that we are in a cyclical industry.
It's not only a street upwards because the industry is seasonal, so we take this into consideration. In combination with a comprehensive due diligence, we do for cement acquisitions a detailed CO2 roadmap planning because you've heard it from Katharina, Grobogan, good example. In Indonesia, we have purchased that cement asset, I think in November 2023, alternative fuel rate zero, and now we want to ramp it up to 45%. For cement assets, all these assets need to come on the path to achieve our roadmap goals. That is also what Katharina said. If you look at this, if we would not buy this plant, the locals would run it and would never be sustainable. I think from a group perspective, we are the right owners to decarbonize as well these assets. Every investment will follow strict financial criteria, which I will go through in a second.
On the next slide, you see some examples of what we have done, and we have spent around EUR 2 billion for M&A over the last three years. Each of these investments runs through the financial criteria screening by our, let's say, corporate finance, and at the end, it runs through my desk and then through the whole board. The ROIC needs to be at least on group target level after integration, obviously, not in year one. If it's in countries where the WACC is pretty high as well, the ROIC in these countries for this project needs to be of the local WACC. That is especially valid for emerging markets where the weighted average cost of capital is higher than in mature ones. Immediate contribution to our net profit in year one already, and those investments need to reach our 50% cash conversion target after integration.
We were stressing that we do bolt-on deals in markets where we have already a good market position or where we want to improve our market position. You have seen a lot of projects as well in Chris's presentation. In the U.S., we were growing in all business lines. Similarly in Australia. We said we very selectively grow cement in emerging markets, which you see here also. We did Grobogan, Asment, and Tanga in very good markets for us where we further improve our market position. In terms of sustainability, you have heard from Chris, CIFA, not only from a CO2 perspective, is supportive of our targets as well financially because CIFA and the ACE group, as Boss Fly Ash, are both trading significantly above the business plan we have assumed.
Plus, the return on invested capital of these acquisitions is much better than the rest because they come with low asset base. That is another plus with these acquisitions. You know, the big topic was always, you cannot buy something which is over your multiple, guys. Relax. We do this properly. After synergy realization, every one of these acquisitions is below our own multiple. Yeah, because then you come into the discussion, "What do you want to do? Share buyback or more shareholder return?" We do a good mix of everything, and you see we have delivered and we will deliver in the future. Now a few seconds break because we are coming to a nice topic. You are all interested, I guess. Ha, that is probably the most anticipated information you are waiting for. I want to explain it a little bit in more detail.
If you look at the graph, the dotted lines represent cost curves. The solid lines represent revenue curves. Now let's start with the red ones. The red dotted line is here for Brevik. The cost, if we would not have the CCUS facility in place, and it's constantly going up. Why? You have the cement production cost, plus you know that the EU takes away free allocations, and at some point in time, we are short. So our production costs will go up because we need to buy CO2 certificates. That is the dotted red one. The solid red one is okay. We say we need to pass on the additional CO2 cost into the market, so our revenue needs to grow also. These are the two red ones without the CCUS unit. Now we come to the green ones.
Obviously, the dotted one is a cost curve, but you see it is far lower than the red one because we have that nice unit here over there, which avoids that we need to buy CO2 certificates. You see it at the end going up a little bit because the EU takes more and more certificates away as well with that unit because it only captures half. At some point in time, we are short, we need to buy, so the production costs go up. On the top line, the solid green one, that has three components. Obviously, the normal cement revenue, how we sell cement, the CO2 pass on, and the effect of the evoZero commercialization. You see that before I come to the numbers in the margin, three years ago, I have shown you the same chart, but it was theoretical.
Now that chart is built with real numbers. There are not many assumptions in there. This is real numbers for that facility, including the cement plant. Now let's come to the very interesting part. The 22-30 percentage points EBITDA margin increase is for the whole cement plant plus the CCUS unit. Bear in mind, we are only capturing half of the CO2 of that plant. That tells you that the margin for evoZero, if you just look at the few hundred thousand tons of evoZero, has to be significantly higher than it is presented here because the 20-30 percentage points margin is for the whole cement plant with the whole volume. I think that should be clear now, and I'm excited to hear your questions afterwards.
You see, and yes, we have heard it as well from Katharina, OpEx and CapEx to a certain extent is funded by the government. Again, this is a super profitable business case. I think a game changer, what we have heard already, because we are the only ones in the world having such a product. If we go to the next slide, we start now with a bottom chart. You see our certificate allowance balances developing with CCUS and without. You see the red line would be, okay, if we would not have the CCUS plant, we would be short. With the CCUS plant, it is a green line. We are long. That means cumulatively, it is 1.5 million tons we are, let's say, do not need to buy.
If you put a number to this, pick a number for the CO2 price, I think it is a nice benefit. You see at the bottom, I think Elodie asked the question, what CO2 price are we assuming? Here you see it in the footnote. We are assuming EUR 80 for 2025 and 2026, EUR 100 until 2030. This also confirms that this is conservative, in my view. Yeah, if you have a good business case with conservative assumptions, you can probably do a better one. If the CO2 price moves up to EUR 150, then the numbers would even look better. In the top chart, you see now the return on invested capital for the CCUS unit combined with the evoZero profits. What does this tell you?
Already in 2025, with what did we say, 100,000 tons of volume, which is 25%, which is a low, it is 20% of the total volume it can do in the future. The ROIC, the green bar, is already above our new target of 12%. How cool is this? It moves up to a very nice number. Why? Because we moved the volumes from 100,000 to 550,000 tons. Obviously, the asset on our balance sheet, we depreciate, so the returns are getting higher. Overall, very profitable business case. You can assume a similar good business case for Padeswood if we get the FID in the next six weeks. Yeah, we have two projects which nobody else has contributing to our accelerated growth. That was a little bit past and current.
I am very pleased to show you what we want to achieve in the future. You see my colleagues are smiling. I am smiling. I think we have a good story to tell. This will show up as well in our new financial targets. What do we want to do? How do we want to grow our RCO to the, listen carefully, fastest and highest growth in the global building materials heavy industry with 7% to 10%. I repeat it again, global heavy building materials industry. That is the fastest growth we have. How do we want to do this? You have heard from Jon, operational growth. There is material volume leverage in Europe and in North America and in the emerging markets. You see our Q1 numbers for Africa, volumes coming back a little bit are 60% up.
If you look at margin per ton in Jon's space, it's much higher than we had a few years ago. If we get volume rebound, the leverage will be very comfortable. What else are we doing? You have heard from Axel, Dennis, Chris, and Jon. We are relentlessly working on our efficiency and cost reductions. I just looked it up during the presentation of my colleagues. Our fixed cost for 2024, in an environment where global inflation was 3% to 4%, like for like was in absolute terms down, down. This now is a, and there, you know, in 2024, the transformation accelerator was just born and not really moving. Now we put the transformation accelerator on top. We put the initiatives from Dennis on top. We should see our cost base further improving.
Jon said to you, we take out another, what was it, 13 to 17% of capacity out of Europe, which will obviously help our cost base and our return on invested capital. The next integral part of the strategy is M&A. We need to ramp this up. You have seen what we have spent in 2024. We have given you a glimpse of what we will spend in 2025. This needs to at least continue, or we need to further slightly accelerate with our targets. As we said to you, the pipeline is full. We are very disciplined, and we clearly will deliver what we have said to you. Now, CapEx, that was my most famous topic with my colleagues. As this is a very important part of our cash flow, we give you a little bit of details how this should develop.
The past, we have said, very disciplined with below EUR 1.1 billion. We will upgrade, and now do not get nervous, we will upgrade the CapEx to EUR 1.3 billion. Why do we need to, why do we do this? Number one, we want to accelerate M&A. If we get then more assets in our group, obviously, if you buy three cement plants, then these plants need some PPE CapEx. That is reason number one. Number two, we want to move, you have heard from Katharina, we want to move alternative fuel rate from 45% to 50% and clinker incorporation from 68% to 64% down, but do a little bit less CCUS than we had announced three years ago. We move CapEx into these areas and want to accelerate to hit our 400 kilo target.
Number three, that number, the $1.3 billion on average, includes the red bars, which is the CapEx required for Padeswood. Now, if you look economically to this, since 2022 to 2030 is eight years. How much inflation would we have in these eight years? I do not know, 20%, 30%, 40%. You in the group growing, and we only moved the CapEx from $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion. I think that is, I call it super disciplined, and we will deliver also on this. Just as an additional information, these numbers include Brevik CapEx. We needed to spend some millions in 2025 to get this finished and Padeswood. These two CCUS units are included in those numbers. I guess it is as well a good message here.
As we intend to generate a lot of cash flow, between $15 billion and $17 billion until 2030, I want to now explain what do we want to use the money for. First, I told you we want to do bolt-on M&As, $5 billion-$6 billion. Number two, it's shareholder return. And these $5 billion to $6 billion include progressive dividend, so we continue our path, plus the amounts remaining of the second share buyback program. That is included in the $5 billion to $6 billion shareholder return. Then you come to available cash of around EUR 6 billion.
Assuming our leverage target of one and a half, or that we have potential to lever up, because already now our leverage is below the 1.5, we would have until 2030 another $4 billion spare cash if we would hit the leverage target of one and a half, which means until 2030 we would generate $10 billion excess cash, which can be used for organic investments, further improve the business, for further M&A, and for new share buybacks. I think that is a very good starting point and gives us a lot of flexibility and maneuver going forward. For 2030, now, new financial targets. We clearly want to step up the ambitions. You've heard it already from Dominic. Fastest growth in the global heavy building materials industry with RCO ramping up 7% to 10% per annum.
ROIC in the heavy building materials industry to move it up from 10 to 12 is an extraordinary success, and we will deliver this. Cash conversion, we will increase from the old target of 45% to 50%, and that includes Brevik and Padeswood CCUS CapEx. Net CapEx, we've discussed $1.3 billion, and we take the leverage target down from 1.5-2 to 1.5. Now, we are ready for accelerated growth, and I hope you have seen that we have the last five years delivered, exactly delivered what we promised even earlier. You can trust us, what we here put on the slides, we will deliver the next few years. I hope you see the opportunities from my colleagues, what they have mentioned. There's leverage opportunity on volume in all areas. There's commercialization leverage for evoBuild and evoZero.
There's efficiency and cost improvements in the whole business, in all business lines. We want to push growth via M&A. I think we are perfectly positioned to deliver this. We are not making only a material difference with that first of its kind facility. We have the EvoZero, which makes a material difference also. I think the financials speak for themselves. I think as well, we have ambitious targets out there, and I promise you we will deliver those. Thanks a lot for your attention.
Thank you so much, René, for this bold but realistic wrap-up of the presentations and the outlook on our financial numbers. This concludes the prepared remarks that we have and the presentations. We now embark on a second round of Q and A. Again, you know, everybody watching us online, you can ask your questions online. Please do so. I will, you know, post the questions on your behalf. Let's start with questions in the room first. Cedar, maybe you start.
Thanks very much. Cedar Ekblom from Morgan Stanley. Just two questions. You've laid out a very compelling story in terms of returns for your two carbon capture projects. You're getting a lot of money from governments. You're talking about strong commercial rationale for the product. Just at face value, it seems maybe too good to be true with return on invested capital for these projects well above your 12%. Can you maybe talk a little bit about how we should think about the risks around these projects and how that 12% ROIC or above, you know, might be at risk and maybe talk a little bit around your stakeholder relationships with governments because a lot of this is based on, you know, getting money.
On the second question, that EUR 10 billion of headroom in the medium term, that's a lot of money to deploy through bolt-on M&A. Should that be the route? Maybe you can talk a little bit about how we should think about bigger deals featuring in that EUR 10 billion number, how you evaluate that, and what would make you want to do a big deal. Thank you.
Yes, Cedar, thanks a lot. Let us tick tack a little bit on both of your questions. First of all, you know, for us with CCS, it's crucially important that we drive customer value. That for us is the radical focus because we see it happening and we want to capture that value. That's also a learning that Katharina, I think, has explained. It has, you know, worked its way through our discussions around CCS.
I think it's also clear that we are not married to Brevik as a technology in terms of Arminia technology. We are not married to the setup that we have in terms of business case. We are operating this plant on our own. We will make sure, as I said earlier, that we are capturing the global advantage and the first mover advantage that we have created to really make sure that we keep it down the road. One other point is important, although it was not really, I'm not sure whether it was implied in your question, is we have now a flag on the CEM1 and a flag at zero.
Now what happens, and René has alluded to it, we are accelerating in the middle everything that's ultra low carbon, low carbon, which is also more capital efficient in order to up our financial performance because we feel we have this global advantage and the first mover advantage, and there is no rush to do something out of haste when it comes to carbon capture. Last point on that one, government relationships. If you are the government of Norway and you see us presenting a case that René has presented, you could in the first moment say, "Ooh, what's this?" I tell you, we had this discussion over the last couple of months quite a lot. In Germany, we have a couple of direct subsidies from the German government that have never materialized.
In fact, there is this famous discussion about the EUR 600 million that they have spent into a plant that is now dead. Money is down the drain. If you calculate the additional attention that the Norwegian government has gotten through this project, all the travel going back and forth, the public discussion, I would argue the Norwegian taxpayer has gotten super returns on this facility. That is also a learning from us. We do not need to shy away because I think it is important also to explain to the governments, you should be proud of having initiated a financially successful innovative business case. That is also, by the way, how the Norwegian government looks at it.
Okay, then Cedar , question number two regarding excess cash of EUR 10 billion. Obviously, that is not in year one that needs to ramp up.
What we always said, bolt-on M&As, yes, you can do a lot with $10 billion. Do we exclude larger acquisitions somewhere? I mean larger, I mean $1 billion, $2 billion EUR? No, but again, I only stress, this needs to fit to the metrics I've presented to you, coming to a ROIC of 12%, cash conversion 50%. As we all know, monster acquisitions have difficulties to reach that number, I would have said. You know what that means. You know, we have now done two share buybacks, or let's say we are in the process to do the second tranche of a share buyback, second program. There's opportunity, obviously, for share buybacks going forward because it's in our toolset we have now developed the last few years.
What that includes also, Cedar is let's say we have another CCUS project coming up, it's a good business case. I would have said, okay, we have spare cash, we can deploy some money in that CCUS new project because it's a good business case. That's how we think about it. What you will not get from us is crazy deals. That's what we always will not do, and we stick to this. The good thing is, you know, if the company is as cash generative, we hope it will be. We have a lot of flexibility to do all the things, let's say in combination what I've just said.
Oh, so many questions. Maybe you in the front. Thanks.
Thanks for technical questions. Tom Zhang from Barclays. T he first one, just on the 20-30 percentage point margin increase, I guess that's, you know, Brevik specific. Is that a net number for the OpEx and how much of a parallel can we draw from that 20-30 percentage points to Padeswood and your future CCUS projects?
Okay, the 20-30% is after funding, obviously. Yeah. As you have said, the Norwegian government is helping us in OpEx and CapEx. Yeah. The OpEx is relevant for your margin question. That's after the funding. For Padeswood, you know, we need to see, I can't give you here any details. For other projects, we do it case by case. As I said, if we have reasonable business cases, we do them.
Got it. Thanks. With the $10 billion cash again, you were saying additional organic investments is one of the priorities. If I look at these, you know, returns already above 12%, above group average from day one, it feels like CCUS projects elsewhere should still be, you know, a big priority. Is that the right way to think about it? I mean, those, you know, those additional CCUS projects in Edmonton, Bulgaria, Germany, they should be the priority ahead of large scale M&A and probably shareholder returns.
Yeah, let me maybe just jump in there. I understand your excitement and your impatience on this because the natural behavior would be, hey guys, you have eight, ten projects, why do you not just, with the financials that he is showing, why do you not just full speed go ahead? It is not just Katharina mentioned, it is like switching on the light bulb.
This is a super, yes, it's nice for us to present this today, but this is 15 years of work, as you saw in the video, to get to a successful business case, and that's why we are also very relaxed, this is going to be a massive advantage for us, at least until 2030. Because to figure this out, you cannot catch up, to make it a financial business case like this, did we start with that assumption? No. We learned over the years how to do this. We do one step after the other. The commitment that all of us are sharing is we only greenlight an FID CCS project if they meet a business case that is getting close to the Brevik one. That's our clear target.
Plus, you know, even if you say now, oh, we want to move faster, we want to do five projects in a year, you know, we cannot control. We need permits. Yeah, as well, we need permits. We need transport and storage partners. You need everything to be set in stone. You need government funding. You know, that's not an easy exercise. As he said, what is it, 15 years in the making? And Padeswood is how many years in the making? It is not so easy because we do not control the destiny for transport and storage. Imagine you have an inland plant, you need to have infrastructure to move millions of tons of CO2. That is not in my hands. The government needs to do this. There is a limit as well, factors which, as Katharina said, moves it out on the timeline to the right.
Anybody from here? Sorry, guys, you had Elodie, you're next then. Please.
Yeah, thank you. I'm Harry Dow from Redburn Atlantic. I think just two questions. I wonder whether you could or are willing to put a sort of a EUR price tag on evoZero cement to help us and what the incremental cost of producing it from an OpEx perspective before grants. And then we can maybe do some of our own work behind the scenes. And then maybe behind that as well on the incremental OpEx, maybe more detail, I suppose, on the color of where that is sort of being spent, i.e., maybe how much is it costing to get it transported and stored, how much is maybe the incremental energy costs, things like that. Thanks.
Yeah, maybe I'll do the pricing side and then René will add on the cost side of things. Look, I think Katharina has explained very well together with Jon how we think about evoZero in general. For us, our, you know, our price point is only one part of the equation. It is all in the end the question, what does the margin for the whole business case come up with? We are customer by customer discussing what is the value we can drive with evoZero for their customers. That for us is the core focus. That is why we think it is a super special product. It is unique in the world. Obviously, it demands, as René was saying, a much different price point because it is a completely new product from the traditional cement products. I ask for your understanding, and we have never done this, by the way. We have never discussed specific price points. Also for competitive reasons, we cannot.
I think it's also unfair to our customers. In that respect, the value is the focus. We are super comfortable that we are creating not only good value for our customers, but as you saw from René's number, also a good value for us as a company.
Regarding the operational costs, also here you as well, obviously that plant is here a super location because directly at the water. You can imagine transport storage is much more cheaper than you would have an inland plant in Germany, for example. The thing is, you know, for that plant here, I can say, I think I can say this, that the cost to operate this, you know, is far below this current CO2 cost, which is, I think that's a message which is very positive because then that contributes additionally to the business case.
Thanks for allowing me for more questions. Just, I know you do not want to give us more details, but realistically, where do you see capacity ramping up from CCS in the next 10 years? I mean, right now there are two projects. We understand it is on a case by case basis, but where is, realistically, where could that go in the next 10 years as percentage of your capacity in Europe, for example? Second, in terms of your top, in terms of your targets, could you give us more color on what it means, what you have assumed for top line growth split by regions if possible? What would that translate as well in terms of EBITDA margin, because in the past you have given some EBITDA margin targets. Thank you.
Sneaked in three questions.
Yeah. Nice. Elodie is a professional. How to squeeze three into one? Thanks, Elodie. I think on the CCUS, I think Katharina has alluded to the fact, and René has mentioned what we have, and this is now today a strategy 2030. It's not a strategy 2035 and not a strategy 2050 or something. I ask for your understanding that we have focused on 2030, and in that case, be very specific. You know, that's why we linked all dots together and say there is the Brevik case in there, there's the Padeswood case to be reliable on the figures. Whatever comes on top, you know, we could use excess cash, even, you know, talking about Edmonton and others that are close to FID, we can do until 2030 if the business case is a convincing one and fits into the framework that René has. We reserve that freedom.
All of those projects that Katharina has shown on the pipeline, they are closely followed. As I said, there are movements you would not believe between the different products in terms of timeline because of all the restrictions that René was sharing. Also, the question, how successful is the business case? That we watch, and then we take the freedom to go. I think you should assume that there will be additional volume coming after 2030 in a substantial amount. I think let's not jump too far ahead and give you some dream number. We want to be reliable in that respect and really drive the value first before we talk about too many volumes.
Elodie, revenue and margin. As a revenue, you know, we are not steering the business via revenue. I was surprised. I have seen Chris's numbers here. Revenue in the U.S. last five years, KEGA 2 point something percent, and margin went up 500 basis points. Revenue, we do not give a target, but from a margin perspective, you do not see a formal target there, and we do not have one. What I can tell you, you have seen Jon's 250 basis points improvement for Europe. I would have said this you can assume as well for the group that we should hit those numbers. If you add, what is it? We have now 21.3. If you would add 250 basis points, you are coming, let's say, I would say close to 24, 23-24%, I think is a reasonable target.
Hi. Ken Rumph from Goodbody. Some more questions on CCS, more from a kind of monitoring and verification and risk and liability point of view. Who bears the risk if the ship sinks?
The carbon dioxide turns out not to be stored. Is there some kind of insurance contract? Is that borne by the state? How does that work within Northern Lights? Also, just verification, you know, of the downstream part of it versus what you're doing. You know, how are those things assured from the point of view of the customer? Because obviously if the, you know, if the carbon dioxide ends up not stored.
Thanks a lot. I think I'm a trained lawyer, but I don't know the last footnote. I'm looking a little bit to GIF and his team. I don't know the last footnote of the contract, but just to give you the general concept from my perspective in the case of Brevik, until the shore here, it's our responsibility. Then it's the Northern Lights supply chain that takes over and takes over also the responsibility.
From our perspective, that is a little bit the general split. Is that fair, GIF? I think yes. I see a nodding. On the insurance side, I think we feel quite confident that we can make this happen. We do not pay large insurance premiums to try and cover our risk.
Maybe. Correct. You just said it. When the CO2 leaves the premises, liability is not ours anymore. Insurance. We are not insurance guys, you know,
I think. No, no, not insurance. That is not our core focus.
Okay, let us take Tobias first and then Yassine, Luis, and Glynis. I think we have to wrap it. Harry as well. Then we have to wrap it up, really. Tobias, please.
Yeah, Tobias, just one question, if I may. Dominic, you said it yourself. You're going to ramp up the cement and reduce the clinker capacity at the same time. By definition, that should imply that the capital intensity of your business goes down and the CapEx requirements go down as a percentage of sales. When I look at your ROIC going from 10% to 12%, while at the same time in the market, prices are going to go up because of the carbon price, shouldn't one say then that your target of 12% is quite conservative? That actually the industry is changing because it's not as capital intensive as it used to be?
Tobias, I think thanks for your question. Thanks for the fact that you're also ambitious. I think that's great. Look, from 10% to 12% is not a bad jump. You know, I've started in the business where we were hovering around 3% or 4%.
I think let's take again one step after the other. We are not the marketing company. We are the doers and delivery company, as René was also saying. We are very comfortable with the 12% ROIC. I think we've given you hints why that is the case. Can we dream of more? Of course we can. You are allowed to do so as well, but let's take one step after the other.
Yeah. Luis.
Yeah, I've been given the mic. Thank you. Luis Prieto again from Kepler. When I model CCUS on Excel sheet, and you can do whatever you want on an Excel sheet, and you let your imagination run on a price premium scenario or whatever, you can reach very high ROICs, which are consistent with the chart you showed us. Imagine that we reach a 40% ROIC for the sake of argument. What happens then?
Do we need to think about potential competition of decarbonized products coming from outside of Europe as a feasible scenario? Because economic theory tells you that you cannot run a business on a sustained basis on a 40% ROIC forever. Something happens in between. What do you have in mind? What are your concerns about those high returns being at stake in the future?
Yeah, first of all, I think your point that you cannot run a business sustainably on 40%. We are also following a little bit the data points in our industry. I think there are others who are claiming that that can be done for perpetuity. We are seeing this in our business that it is absolutely possible. I think John was showing quite nicely that, you know, even our core business in Europe as being a market leader has some significant upside potential.
Now, the other important point that hopefully we brought across, this is also why this is such a step change here for the industry and for us. That is why we say it is just the beginning, because this industry has been for decades, if not centuries, been a commodity industry. What our radical focus is to get out of that commodity trap. We want to make the difference. That is exactly how we, that is the answer to your question.
Thanks for that.
Gly nis, maybe just pass it on to Glynis.
Thank you. Too, going to get the right person this time, René. Your target, the 7% to 10% RCO includes M&A. If I take your bolt-ons, divide it by your multiple, because that is where you want to get to, it suggests it could be as much as half of your growth. Can you just give us, you know, context?
Is it half? It looked on the chart like it might be a third, something, you know, that helpful there. The second one is always the what's missing from the presentation. Lots of learnings from Brevik, but Brevik costs have been set for a very long time. That's all, you know, because of the funding. Last time, back in 2022, you said EUR 60, I think, was the average OpEx. From your learnings, from where you are now, what is the average OpEx for your CCUS?
Okay, first question, share of M&A, probably out of the 7% to 10%, if it's probably one third, not half, obviously not half, that's too much, one third. Regarding OpEx, you know, the chart what we had last three years ago, that has included, I think, seven projects where we put a mix on average on OpEx.
Here for Brevik, you know, the learning, what I said to you, there are two components. One, you have OpEx of running that plant, and you have transport and storage. For the OpEx for running that plant, I told you is far below the CO2 cost. I said also that you have an inland plant. If you have an inland plant, I think I'm not the techie, but running Amine or Oxyfuel or whatever, there can be probably OpEx differences. Yeah, but Amine is the most expensive. Then it comes to transport and storage, which is, that is your, let's say, where it can hit you on the cost curve or not. Because if you need to, if you have an inland plant, it's obviously much more expensive than here just at the sea. Again, case by case decision.
Yassine?
Yeah, thank you very much. The question would be a bit more color on the chart that you showed with the 20-30% improvement in margin. If I understand, the green lines show a cement plant, which is 50% evoZero and 50% gray cement. If I think about your normal gray cement margin in Europe, it's approximately 30%.
How much?
30%. This is,
Rough, rough. Okay.
Approximately.
Fine.
Yeah, fine. It means that in order to get 20-30% additional margin, you would need to get a 70% margin on the evoZero cement. It's like the math. Does it seem reasonable to you?
I leave you the math. I have presented you 20-30 percentage points for half of the CO2, and the rest I hand over to your Excel sheet. Obviously, I said it, obviously the margin for the pure product then is higher than what I have presented.
The idea would be that in order to get that, you would need to sell the evoZero at least like three times the price of normal cement.
Again, your mathematics, I trust you that you do them right. I think we leave it there.
Thank you.
Maybe question over there.
Hi, this is Pujarini from Bernstein. One question on your capital allocation. The five to six billion that you've shown on M&A, can you confirm that this is net M&A, so includes any potential divestments? Could you talk a little bit more about what are the main areas of acquisitions that you're looking on? I know these are small, but just generally, and also if there are any areas of potential divestments.
Also, our free cash flow, and we have said capital deployed $15 billion to $17 billion, that includes some small divestment amounts. Yeah, we said we do have every year what if you divest a small, it's small, that is that included. So the M&A number you see here is just growing the company. Yeah, and to be honest, right now we have no big divestment on the table. We have Congo to come, hopefully the closest, hopefully soon. That's another $100 million, but that's it for divestment. So there's no big divestment, whatever included in these numbers. Regarding growth, I guess we continue what we have done. Solid growth in the U.S. in all business lines. Selective growth in emerging markets in cement, selective growth in Europe in certain markets. I think that's a story we want to continue. No change to strategy. Yep.
Maybe Harry, last one, but I'm afraid we're running out of time. Last question from Harry Goad.
Thank you. Harry Goad from Berenberg. Just two on M&A, please. Firstly, are you able to tell us what the average EBITDA multiple paid for acquisitions has been in recent years? I guess probably more importantly, what that looks like on a post-synergy basis. The second one was you talked about this concept of, you know, paying or not wanting to pay a multiple to your own trading multiple. Obviously, your own trading multiple has moved upwards quite significantly in the last year and a half. Does that therefore mean the opportunities you can look at has expanded?
Okay. First question, the ones that I've shown you on the chart and Dominic and Chris alluded to, for example, Giant, we said it, that it's no secret, it's 10 times multiple headline price. And after synergies, we bring it down to below our current multiple. The other ones, if you go to the other ones, I would have said after synergy, maximum or around mid single digit. If you look at the emerging ones, that's mid single digit ones. You know, now it comes, firstly, you said we moved up dramatically our valuation. I don't agree with this. There's still room. Number two, that will not drive us in the trap and say, oh now our valuation is high, we now go crazy. No, because if I pay higher multiples, I have difficulties to achieve my ROIC targets.
Yes, maybe it opens up a little bit more, but still it goes through the same framework that this acquisition needs to achieve what we have presented here. Obviously, for the public, it's nice and you say, okay, you can afford more, but then it becomes difficult with our hitting our numbers.
Thank you so much for your questions. You see the friendly tour guides over there who are eager to take you on the plant tour. This concludes the Q and A. Dominic, you conclude the day.
That was a long one. This was more than four hours filled of content. You know what I enjoyed most are two little moments of this four hours. The one moment was where the power went. You realized what Katharina did. She told you the little story that even her board colleagues didn't know about her experience in Houston.
She kept a smile on the face, and I'm sure none of you really noticed what happened. Second moment was when Dennis was presenting, and he was presenting the fact that the best ton of saved CO2 is the ton that you don't sell cement. I tell you, our grandfathers and fathers, they would have gotten it to the ground and said, what is happening to your volumes, guys? This cultural shift in both of these little moments tells you what the company is on the move for. Because it sounds easy, but to get that cultural shift going, that mindset change that you can move the world even if the power goes, that's exactly what makes me proud of the colleagues sitting here and the 50,000 around the world.
Now, because it was a lot of facts, I'm trying to sum it up for you in five key points. I'm taking, I'm grabbing an idea from good old Jürgen Klopp back in Anfield Road when he was getting into his job talking about the normal one. We clearly want to leave you with, in the end, one sheet of paper that you can take home to your loved ones, to your kids, to your parents, to whatever, and try to tell the story on just one page. Here we go. Arno was already jumping ahead. We are the only global one. I think it came through with an unmatched global advantage that we are turning into a very flexible business, propelling the growth that René has shared with you, and we are maximizing our financial success. Second, we are clearly the deepest decarbonizing one.
We are the first to get to net zero. We have a clear path on the ultra low carbon products all the way down to zero. We have understood that it's all about the customer value because only then we can also maximize our value. In return, we have developed a very convincing business case that René has shared with you during his presentation. Number three, we are the techies. We are the tech one. I think both Dennis and Axel have done a fantastic job showing you what platform both of them have developed on the digital and also on the technical side in order to use this as a flexible springboard to really propel the growth of the company in a very efficient, cost-efficient, and speedy way. I think that is super important.
I was happy to see what both, especially Chris in North America, but also Jon is picking up from these ideas and run with them to optimize their business going forward. Number four, we are the fastest growing one. Yes, we have shifted gears in the last five years. That has been a small shift, fair enough. René has given you all the details, quite a successful one. Here we are at the next starting point. We want to be, and we will be, the fastest growing company in the heavy building materials sector. We want to profit from the volume rebound you saw with the big wave that is coming in terms of investments. We are making the difference on the decarbonized products, and we also grow through bolt-on acquisitions.
If you take the super scope on the one and only global one, if you combine it with the two platforms of decarbonization and being the tech one, you combine it with fastest growth, there is one left, and that's the trusted one. Super important for us. We want you, and we need you to leave to understand what we are doing, but we also want you to leave to understand we are as a management team, and all of us, 50,000 around the world, are super committed to deliver what we have shown to you today. With that, this was an exciting four hours. The more exciting piece is yet to come. We have our colleagues. Before we do that, we show you a little bit how it looks like.
Okay, what a cool video. You are going to see some of it. We are not covering as much ground as the drone did, but we will try to give you a good overview of the plant, first and foremost, the carbon capture plant, of course. With that, I would like to say goodbye to our online viewers. Thank you for watching. We hope to see you soon at a roadshow or a conference.