Thank you today to come to this Capital Markets Day 2020. Welcome personally. We very much appreciate that you took the time to come to us today despite all the coronavirus discussions. Also, welcome to those that are with us today via webcast. Leading the Industry, that is the title of today's Capital Markets Day. KION is the leading player in this industry. Why do I say that? First of all, number one, we've delivered again another very strong year with our full year 2019. Secondly, we operate in a very attractive market. Third, the unique combination of supply chain solutions and industrial trucks allows us to shape the future for today and tomorrow. Fourthly, we do have the financial strength to make strategic investments in the future to secure the future.
Today we will discuss these with you and give you more information on these investments. As always, it always starts with people. I'd like to introduce right now my team and the team that's with me today, starting here, Anke Groth, our CFO; Andreas Gröninger, the head of Linde EMEA; CP Queck, KION Asia Pacific; Hasan Dandashly, head of Dematic; and Eike Böhm, our CTO. CFO is not yet, but he's really good with the numbers. Okay. Let's get started with the presentation. We have a full day agenda for you today, but I'm sure that it will be very interesting material that we can present, and we have enough time also for dialogue with each other. I'd like to start with the strategic update. In a simple word, we have delivered. We have created significant value.
If you look at KION during the past years since the IPO, we have grown revenues 6.6%, almost 7% annually. We have delivered profits 8% annually. At the end of the day, 180% shareholder return. That strong return beats our MSCI, European Capital Goods, and Material Handling peers without a doubt. In a nutshell, since the IPO, KION truly has created value. How have we done this? Since the IPO in 2013, we have strongly deleveraged the company. We made a transformational acquisition by bringing Dematic into the family in 2016. This led to our unique ability to deliver logistics solutions. After that, we set up the KION 2027 strategy and defined our strategic fields of action, namely energy, automation, digital, innovation, and performance.
Earlier this year, in January, we put out a tremendous full year 2019 numbers because we had such a great finish in the fourth quarter of last year. Of course, it does not stop there. The journey continues. The journey of creating value. We are making substantial strategic investments this year, investments to keep the momentum going for growth, to become more global, and in innovation, in innovating and investing in our core. These will allow us, these investments will allow us to continue to shape the material handling industry as we have done in the past. Of course, and that will be a focus of today's Capital Markets Day, we have our eyes on cost, our focus on performance, and we have rolled out a group-wide efficiency program.
We will use this Capital Markets Day today to dive deeper into all of the topics on our global setup, innovation, and efficiency. To set the scene, I'd like to talk a little bit about the attractiveness of our market. If you look at the global trends around us, and we notice that every day in our personal lives, these do strongly drive the material handling industry growth that we've seen in the past years and the growth that we anticipate in the years to come. Just take e-commerce. We all know it. Everyone receives packages, maybe not daily, but often. This is driving the business, drives the need for automated solutions. Otherwise, you can't have such a span of e-commerce available. This is expected to grow by 14% through the coming years. Urbanization. Cities are becoming more dense. Population in cities is growing.
This drives the need for things like micro-fulfillment, a very interesting technology that you'll get an update on today. 58% growth is expected in the coming years. Digitalization affects all of us, especially in times like these, how to communicate with each other. Big data, big data increases drives the need for connected vehicles, all pieces in a warehouse speaking with each other. This market is expected to grow by 54% in the coming years. Last but certainly not least, sustainability. Customers are asking for green supply chains. This drives the need for electric trucks. KION is the largest supplier of electric trucks in the world. Lithium-ion battery-powered trucks are expected to grow by 42% until 2027. These trends do drive the changes in our industry. The path that our industry is on right now is towards what we call lights-out warehouse.
Yesterday, we offered forklift trucks, driver assistance, fleet data management programs for all of our trucks. Today, we are concentrating more and more on new energy sources, sustainable products, micro-fulfillment. More and more, we are offering autonomous vehicles, software, and connected solutions. Our industries do need to tackle these technologies, data analytics, to enable lights-out warehouse. A large part of the warehouses, especially our big e-commerce pure-play players, in their warehouses of the future, they will be entirely dark and fully automated every day. As a leading player in this very innovative business, KION is uniquely positioned to capture the growth opportunities in our industry. How do the megatrends translate into demand for material handling solutions? Let's take a look at that here.
We expect that the growth in this market is a longer-term market growth, that the total addressable market will be for material handling solutions, if I break it down in trucks or industrial trucks, of around 4% CAGR through the next several years until 2027, and even double that growth, so 8% for automation solutions. This is really a great market to be in, a market that is truly growing year to year. If we take a look at the regional development, this growth is not specific to one country or one region. If you look at the 6% growth in Europe, Americas, and particularly in Asia and particularly China, growing ahead of this market, all around the world, material handling solutions are being asked for.
We as KION, with our global setup, are the one that will truly be able to capitalize because of this broad global setup. Now, let's take a look at the market development by technology and customer needs. Look at the left side of this chart, e-trucks, and on the right side, the e-commerce, which strongly contribute to global growth. In industrial trucks, we will be seeing a continued substantial shift away from internal combustion-driven trucks to sustainable electric forklift trucks. This is driven on the one hand, certainly, by the emissions requirements and the demand for sustainable products. On the other hand, the technical advancement that we've seen in the last couple of years for lithium-ion battery packs, you have an electric truck that has almost the same performance and, in many cases, a better performance than an engine-driven truck.
We will see this all over the world, not just in Europe, but particularly in China, making the biggest effort here to convert to electric-powered vehicles. In automation systems, we will see strong growth in e-commerce automation being driven by online demand, but also omnichannel fulfillment, regardless of industry. It is not just the pure-play e-commerce. Every industry is affected by this trend. KION will benefit from this trend. If you look at how has KION changed since the IPO and even since the last crisis, 2009, we have become much less cyclical and more global. We have substantially grown what we call our non-cyclical revenue. We consider non-cyclical revenue the revenue of SES because it is driven by longer-term strategic decisions. Also the service business in industrial trucks, which is triggered by an ever-growing install base, this leads to almost 70% of our future revenue being non-cyclical.
KION is a very different company than it was several years ago, a much more non-cyclical company. We have also broadened our geographic setup. If we look at the acquisition of Dematic, we significantly strengthened our Americas footprint. With our strategic investment into China, we will also again grow our already strong presence in Asia Pacific. We have defined a very comprehensive growth strategy for China. China is the single largest forklift market in the world and still growing rapidly. We as KION are the number three in the market and by far the number one OEM that is non-domestic. We have been in China a long time, a quarter of a century. We know China. Our growth plan includes the development of new products, the expansion of our local sales and service network, and a new industrial truck plant.
We will take advantage of the growth opportunities that the value segment in this market has and the ever-increasing demand for electric-driven industrial trucks. To ensure the capacity that we need in this market, we've made a decision to erect a new state-of-the-art plant in Jinan in East China to manufacture these counterbalance trucks. For this purpose, we formed a joint venture with our anchor investor, Weichai Power. On this joint venture, KION has 95% of the shares. The investment volume will be around EUR 100 million in the new manufacturing plant for the industrial trucks, the Linde trucks and Baoli trucks that we will build there. We will have an R&D center and a training center. The construction of the plant will begin already this year, so 2020. We will make steps to ramp up the production to full speed by the year 2022.
A rather aggressive investment program. We are truly increasing our capacity in this for KION, very important market. CP will dive deeper into the details later today. The new factory in Jinan will truly broaden our global footprint. When we talk about global footprints, especially in the last couple of years, despite or as a result of trade wars and even now with the coronavirus, the global footprint that KION has today is a real differentiator in the market. We formed a strategy several years ago to be local, to be close to the customers, R&D, production, sales, and service, everything we need in those local regions, including supplier networks. We significantly streamlined our ITS production footprint in Europe following the financial crisis.
We even closed several facilities in the U.K., in Italy, France, and Germany, and then invested into new facilities in Eastern Europe, the Czech Republic, China, and our Polish factory is currently, right now, as we speak, under construction. We did not stop with just factories. In addition to the investments that we've made in our footprint, we've heavily invested in new technology to maintain and extend our leading position. If you look at this chart, clearly, KION is the leader in our industry. We're number two in the forklift market, number one in automation systems. The true value that we can offer our customers is the combination of the two, the unique offering that we can have for our interlogistics customers. We have achieved a lot of this through our strong focus on leading innovative products and services. Innovation is the core of our company.
We've always had a strong drive towards innovation focused on our customers. This allows us, in many regards, I believe, to also shape the industry and shape standards in the industry. At ITS, we have recently launched a new counterbalance truck generation for Linde and for STILL. This does not happen every day. This happens every 10 to 15 years. All are available with lithium-ion battery packs, and they are fully connected to the internet as a standard. Mobile automation, also a very key driver towards lights-out warehouse, offering bespoke and series trucks, automated guided vehicles. These are just the first step to enable us, to enable our customers to move to really lights-out warehouse. This is a shared technology between the two segments, SES and ITS. In SES, we've continued to strengthen our customer-specific expertise. We've developed vertical solutions for all the verticals.
One of the recent new technologies, micro-fulfillment and e-commerce returns handling. With our robotics center, we are also driving the robotic picking because that is also a prerequisite to be able to drive lights-out warehouses. Our innovations benefit also from the increased connectivity between all of the items through digitalization. Digitalization is a topic that is transforming our industry, our company, and we are driving very much forward to transform the KION Group. It is one of our strategic fields of actions for the KION 2027 strategy. I'm personally responsible to drive this transformation through the KION Group. As we improve our internal processes, our offerings to customers, the customer journey touchpoints, as well as new business and new business models that we can then monetize as we exercise this and execute it, it will change the way we do business.
A prominent example that's happening right now today is in the area of industrial trucks. With the launch of the new product, we have now a truck in the field that has a so-called digital twin. Digital twin, what can you do with a digital twin? You can make a software update. You can put a new function in the forklift. You can do predictive maintenance. You can change the performance of the truck through the cycle of its usage. You equip the truck to have new options that you may not even know about today that may come in two years from today. The only other product that I know that works that well is a Tesla car. Linde has the Tesla of the forklift industry. In addition to that, we can offer new services, preventive maintenance.
We can take advantage of remote diagnostics, which helps reduce the cost to our customer. In automation systems, we have a new emulation and simulation platform that makes it able to the customer to visualize, to actually see operational aspects of the entire warehouse in real time. The validation of the system becomes much, much easier than it was before. At lunchtime, please take the opportunity. We will have a demo of our Dematic IQ Virtual. Take the time to speak with some of our experts of how this works and the great opportunities that digitalization brings to our industry. In our continued drive to deliver digital, we are also proud that we are able to strengthen the software offering of SES. A couple of days ago, after a lot of work by a lot of people in this room, we acquired 100% of Digital Applications International.
DAI is Dematic's long-standing partner based in the U.K., and it offers logistics automation software that generates revenue of approximately EUR 40 million. We have 240 employees, most of whom are software engineers. With DAI, Dematic is significantly expanding its digital offering, which supports the movement, the storage, and distribution of goods across the entire supply chain. We have software as a solution, but we are also adding on or the possibility to add on existing or new entry points for new Dematic customers, while DAI customers can become also new Dematic customers. Hasan will provide a lot more detail to this point in his presentation later today.
A topic that affects all of us and everything we do and something that KION, as a group, many years ago, before Fridays for Future, in the early days, has been committed to and at a sustainability in our products towards our customers and within the group. We are making substantial, significant progress in this important field. We serve as an enabler, a true enabler for our customers to have green supply chains. We enable green material handling for our customers with something like electric trucks. Today, already 86% of all of our order intake products are electric already today. We expect this trend to significantly increase in the future. We act sustainably. Our activities and reporting have been increasingly have been recognized. We have scored very well in several independent markings, rankings, and publications with our sustainable strategy.
We will continue to be ahead of the curve on this because innovation, sustainability is reflected in our R&D spend every day. As I talked about innovation being at the core of KION and the need to continue to innovate, we are strongly committed to our R&D, and we will increase this R&D spend in this year in our focus areas. We have continually increased our spend in this area with innovative solutions, being the technology leader in our field. This year, we intend to up our R&D spend to around 3% of revenue. We do consider this a heavy investment into our core. This is the highest investment level that we've ever had and probably, I would assume, among the highest in the industry. It has a huge payback. We will demonstrate some of that to you today.
We'll be increasing our spend to further support the derivatives of our next generation trucks, the next generation platform that we are bringing to the market. We have increased our budgets to fit to our strategic topics, especially new energy. One topic, the new joint venture for lithium-ion with BMZ, mobile automation, a heavy focus, and generally connectivity, so digitalization. While we increase the spend, at the same time, we in the R&Ds are becoming much more efficient in the use of our resources. If you look at this picture, next level efficiency is a high priority for the entire KION Board. Our Chief Central Technology Organization led by Eike, who will present later today, we continue to improve the efficiency of how we do product development.
A couple of examples: using modules, using agile methods, implementing common parts, implementing across regions, across brands, platforms to enable us to continuously improve our efficiency and to improve our cost position. With this, with the R&D efficiency efforts, it's a huge part of our performance excellence program that we established to act as a kind of counterbalance, to counterbalance some of the cost that we are investing in our strategic investments. We have a group-wide performance program that we call performance excellence to drive our efficiencies home throughout the entire group. We kicked off the program last year, which I think is great timing. Very good thing that we did it ahead of the curve.
It is aimed at supporting the compensation of cost inflation on the one side, but also capturing additional savings potential and improving, very important, improving the cost flexibility that we have in the group. A couple of example initiatives are the productivity improvements in our factories globally, the further savings in indirect purchasing. KION is now on EUR 9 billion. Imagine how much indirect purchasing effort we can save through very structured efforts. Now with the new shared service center for finance, which Anke will talk about, a very important strategic step to flexibize our costs. Implementing the program targets is a strategic priority for us at the board at the KION GEC level. Anke, as I said, will provide more details on the financial impacts of the program as we go through the presentation today.
Our focus on being more efficient and more effective is a key highlight, I believe, in our investment highlights for the entire group of KION. Let me summarize the highlights in the short and midterm. I mean, we operate in great markets. I mean, if you can have a market to work in, you want to be in a market that's growing. This market is really growing. The second thing is KION is today already 2020 here in February, a technology leader in all of our fields. We have an increasingly resilient business model. If you look at how we've changed the company over the last five years, it's a much more resilient company. We have a clear plan to invest into the future. At the same time, we have an absolute laser focus on efficiency and profitability.
The investment highlights that we'll talk about today support our path towards achieving our midterm targets for profitable growth. Nothing's changed. Some of you know this chart from some of the presentations. Today, we remain as committed as ever to our mid and long-term targets with respect to revenue, our EUR 10 million target in the year 2022 to outgrow the material handling industry stays today. We're also targeting the adjusted EBIT margin in the double-digit range in the medium term, and we intend to grow into the range of 10%-12%. Having said this, I would like to thank you for coming again today personally and so many of you. We're really looking forward to discussing and presenting our information to you and also later in the Q&A. Right now, I'd like to hand it over to our CFO, Anke Groth. Thank you very much.
Good morning aga in, also from my side. Thank you for coming, and thank you for listening over the webcast. How does the CEO agenda of being more global, focused on innovation, software, and digital, the next level of efficiency translate into my agenda? It can be summarized like this: First, we will invest disciplined and focused into our core. Second, we will invest strategically into growth areas. Third, we will relentlessly improve our profitability. These three financial actions will secure our leadership position, support how we will continue to shape the industry. Before I provide more details to you, let me tell you why we are confident that we are able to deliver. We have always delivered in each and every year since the IPO, also in times where others have struggled. 2019 is a great example.
Most of you have seen our 2019 financials just two days ago. We have a strong revenue growth in ITS and SCS, and at the same time, we were able to grow our EBIT. We had a slight decrease in ITS profitability due to the segment mix and higher R&D expenses. Let's leave the past for now and move on to the future. As outlined before, my CFO agenda has three priorities. Firstly, investing into our core. Secondly, investing into growth areas. Thirdly, at the same time, we will clearly focus on our profitability. Let me start with our focused investments into our core. The first pillar is our investment into R&D and the new product launches. R&D is at the core of our capabilities. We are technology leader. Every year, we launch highly innovative products that translate into commercial successes. What is different this year?
We have introduced a complete new truck generation, and we do this only every 10 to 15 years. I can tell you, it's a pretty cool truck. It comes with a digital twin. This truck is a real game changer. Let's have a look at the financial impact. The short-term impacts need to be seen in the light of a stable market environment. We will miss volume effects in 2020. Short-term, we will see an increased R&D spend expected to be 3% of revenues in 2020. The product launches and the investments into the machinery lead to higher depreciation. This new truck generation will enable us to win market share and to sell add-on digital services to our customers. Midterm, we will continue to grow above the market, and the core business will be in the profitability range of 10%-12%.
Let's move on to our lithium-ion joint venture with BMZ, which we announced last year. It will allow us to secure the access to lithium-ion in a cost-optimized way. Two out of three trucks in 2027 will be lithium-ion trucks. Financially, we will invest EUR 15 million this year. The third pillar, our Poland plant. It's all about growth delivered through capacity increase and an improved production footprint in terms of costs and efficiency. We will free up capacity in Aschaffenburg plant, which will be dedicated to the new truck generation and shift the product from Aschaffenburg to Poland. What does this mean financially? An investment of EUR 80 million and EUR 50 million of that in 2020. Additional setup expenses affecting the margin. The new plant is a fundamental requirement to support our growth and our margin development.
Andreas will give you more color on these three points as they all belong to the IT and S segment. The last pillar is our investments into IT projects. We drive the harmonization of our IT landscape and we prepare for S/4HANA as well as investing into RPA, robotics process automation, and digitalization of our internal processes. Short-term, affecting our margin with higher expenses. Midterm, it will pay off with efficiencies. Let me move on to our strategic investments into growth areas. We will further strengthen our segments by investing in China as well as with the acquisition of DAI, a software company. In China, we will invest a total of EUR 100 million for a highly automated plant and EUR 45 million of that in 2020.
With this new capacity, new product developments, and an improved network through our partnership with Weichai, our net sales will ramp up by an extra EUR 500 million per annum by 2025, with an attractive margin at IT and S segment level once fully operational. CP will later on give you more insight into our China strategy. Just two days ago, we announced the highly attractive acquisition of Digital Applications International. Software capabilities are of paramount importance for SCS, and DAI is a long-standing partner of ours. This deal does not only bring 240 very experienced software engineers, but also sound financials with attractive software revenues and a double-digit margin. As a CFO, I do like the transaction structure very much because the total investment volume is EUR 120 million, but the cash out at signing was only EUR 97 million, and the remaining amount will be out during a three-and-a-half-year period.
Why do we invest? We do not take our eyes off our profitability. In fact, our focus on profitability will only increase, and we have a structured performance program to support it. In 2019, we launched a group-wide performance program to achieve scale effects across the group and other efficiency measures. Gordon has taken you through some of the examples, and let me talk about the financial targets we aim to achieve. Firstly, we will mitigate cost inflation. You can see this target was already achieved in 2019. Secondly, we are targeting additional cost savings, contributing positively to EBIT. Thirdly, we will improve our cost flexibility and our cost structure. Gordon has mentioned shared services. This is indeed a great example from my area of responsibility. We will bundle all European accounting processes in a shared service center located in Poland.
All in all, we intend to deliver EUR 150 million gross EBIT uplift in 2021. It will not only compensate headwinds, but contribute a EUR 50 million recurring EBIT effect. Let's summarize. We will invest into our core. As explained, we invest into R&D and new products and lithium-ion, Poland, and IT enablement with an additional CapEx of EUR 65 million and a margin impact. The main effects in here are the higher R&D expenses accelerated by lower capitalization, as well as higher depreciation from the product launches. In the bucket of our strategic investments, China and DAI are included. This sums up to a cash impact in 2020 of EUR 140 million and a minor margin impact. A positive contribution will come from our performance excellence program. In total, we do see a margin dilution in 2020 of around 0.5 to 0.8 percentage points.
Midterm, which is defined as 2022, these mentioned investments will turn into net sales growth and contribute positively to our margin in comparison to 2020. R&D, depreciation, and lower capitalization is reaching its peak in 2020 in relative terms. Poland will be finalized this year. In IT projects, we do see the largest increase in spending this year. China will be operational in 2022. The positive impact of performance excellence is growing over time. Therefore, we are very confident to hit our midterm target. Before I now move on to 2020 and our guidance, let me just share a few words on our corona situation before. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, we are facing several risks, such as infections in our workforce that could lead to closure of production sites as well as sales and service locations. Additionally, global supply chains might be challenging.
Chinese GDP is expected to be impacted in 2020, and consequently, we expect a high single-digit decline for the IT and S market in China in the full year, whereas the market for supply chain solutions is marked by long-term strategic decisions and therefore less cyclical. As of today, we expect that the situation will start to normalize during Q2. What does that mean for KION? Until today, we are not aware of any employee who is infected by the coronavirus. Therefore, all of our plants are running. However, our Chinese plants run slightly below our originally planned capacity, also due to longer S4C enclosures within our supply chain in China. For the first quarter, we assume that top and bottom line will be slightly impacted negative in China, but a catch-up until year-end seems feasible depending on the further development of the epidemic.
We also analyzed the supplier situation in Europe in detail. As of today, we only see limited risk for our European factories, as we already have started with the implementation of supply chain mitigation efforts. Additionally, we installed a KION crisis task force to be able to assess the overall global risk situation permanently and on a daily basis. As the overall impact as of today is not assessable, we do not consider any effect of coronavirus in our 2020 guidance. Let's move on to the guidance 2020 now, again, which does not take corona into consideration. Our guidance should not surprise you after explaining our focus on investing in our leadership position for the future. IT and S is affected by the investments. We do face a more or less stable to slightly declining revenue based on 2019 order intake and expected market development.
We don't have a volume effect. The negative effects from investments and the other spend areas won't be balanced by a positive volume effect. All in all, this is supposed to result in an implicit margin of + - 10%. On the SCS side, we do expect to continue the very positive trend. Revenue increase as well as adjusted EBIT. This would result in an implicit margin of + - 9.8%. The KION Group development on the next chart is, of course, the result of the two segments. How does this all play together? The investments into our core and growth areas and our performance program will ensure that we achieve our midterm targets. Our midterm targets remain unchanged. We are on the way to achieve group revenues of EUR 10 billion and a profitability of 10% to 12%.
As you know, our group generates a significant amount of cash. Let's talk about cash. All the investments will be financed from operating cash flow. EBITDA in 2020 is positively influenced by the higher depreciation. We do expect a cash conversion at the level of 2019. The point really driving the reduction in free cash flow is CapEx and the DAI acquisition. The business is financially on very sound footing. It's nearly generating cash as we go. As said, we do finance the investments from the cash we generate. We have increased dividend year over year, now proposing EUR 1.30 to pay out as a dividend to our shareholders. At the same time, we have deleveraged very nicely, having reached our target of two times INOT end of fiscal year 2019.
In conclusion, we deliver on our promises, and we have created a highly resilient business model. We will deliver again in 2020. We are leading the industry with investments into growth areas, new products, and new technologies. We undertake these investments today to ensure we stay at the forefront of the industry and drive our performance. All of this in combination with a strong cash flow, a rising dividend, and a strong balance sheet. We have created shareholder value in the past, and we will continue to deliver.
Good afternoon. Good to see that you are still all with us after lunch. I hope you enjoyed the lunch and also took advantage of the simulation of IQ.
After Gordon and Anke presented the overview of KION's directions, KION's strategies, and the outlook, we will now in the afternoon go into details of the different business segments and will show you how the strategies and financials are anchored in our operational businesses. I have the pleasure to lead you through the KION ITS segment. My name is Andreas Krinninger. I'm the president of Linde Material Handling. I'm supporting KION now for 12 years. For seven years now, I'm a board member at Linde Material Handling, and for five years since inception, I'm also a member of the KION Global Executive Committee. Basically, the ladies and gentlemen that sit here in the first row. In my prior roles, I've been an executive in operations. I've been running plants across the globe as well as distribution centers.
In my past, I have used many different material handling equipments. I have that personal experience, and I bring that customer focus to KION's ITS business. Why is KION ITS important? If you just reflect for a few seconds on all the objects that you've touched today, each of them has been touched by the forks of a forklift at a certain point in time. That continues to be the case also in the future. KION ITS is in the middle of that. We are very well positioned, and therefore, we are very confident that KION ITS continues to be a highly attractive segment. Now, let me at the start lead you through the four highlights of the KION ITS segment. Therefore, those first attractive markets. The markets we're in continue to grow, and the growth drivers remain intact.
The product and solutions that we offer perfectly fulfill the needs of our customers. Second, technology leadership. We have already the technology leadership today, and we continue to invest in new innovations to enhance the value add that we bring to our customers. We continuously invest into new product platforms and new solutions such as safety, energy, as well as automation. Third, it's resilient services. Services continue to grow, and we have a full lifecycle offering, and we do this all out of one hand. We capture the full value chain of services. We utilize digitalization opportunities to, on one hand, enhance our service to customers, ensuring uptime of our products, as well as increased efficiency of our own service operations. Fourth, it's efficiency improvement.
If you be aware that the brands of KION, STILL, Linde have a history of more than 100 years, you only become that old if you continuously drive technology leadership for one, but also if you have efficiency improvements as part of your DNA. We relentlessly drive efficiency across our business model, utilizing things like product modularity, optimizing our production footprint, and automating our process where we can, just to name a few examples. Overall, four clear highlights. In summary, KION ITS continues to be a highly attractive segment to be in. Now, let me narrow in on each of these four highlights, and let me start with attractive markets. Attractive markets, they continue to grow. If you look at the left side of this chart, you see how the market is expected to grow until 2027.
We expect an average growth by 4% year on year, growing from EUR 40 million to EUR 56 million in terms of value. This is the total value of the market, including all new business as well as all services. If you look at the regions, all regions are expected to grow over the next years. First, if you look at EMEA, that's where KION ITS is a clear market leader in the ITS segment. This remains the largest segment globally, and we expect a solid growth of 4%. Second, the Americas region, where KION ITS is in a catch-up position, but with an all-new product portfolio as well as an improved sales and service network. There we also see a solid growth of 4%. Lastly, China, where KION ITS's position is the largest non-Chinese player.
We expect even a growth of 5%, and that's why we also have specific measures such as growing in China, where the details will be later on presented by CP. Now, this growth in the market is driven by clear market trends and certain customer needs. Let's go in the details of those. Overall, these market trends and customer needs, they remain intact, and the KION answers to that do shape the market overall, but they also address these customer needs. First, our customers are looking for higher efficiency. You need to imagine our customers, they're challenged to handle more and more different products, more and more volume in shorter periods of time with less space and less labor available. You can only manage this if you continuously drive efficiency in your operations. Therefore, KION ITS, we offer highly efficient products, solutions, and services to them.
Second, it's a need for greater sustainability. All of our customers are eager to reduce the carbon footprint as well as lower the energy cost. We, as KION ITS, on one hand, we offer the cleanest and most fuel-efficient IC trucks. At the same time, we also have the broadest offering of lithium-ion and fuel cell-equipped trucks in the market. On top, we also offer energy consulting to identify the right energy solution for each of our customers based on their needs. There is increased safety. You can imagine if you handle heavy goods in little space with high speed, there is always a risk of accidents. Therefore, safety and prevention of accidents is a key concern for our customers. We address this by having the most comprehensive and most sophisticated set of products and safety solutions for our trucks and the environment of the trucks.
The answers that we have, they are the result of a very effective innovation process. We continuously invest into understanding our customer pain points, our customer needs. We access latest technologies. We develop minimum value products. We bring those to the markets quickly. We test them. If they're effective, we standardize them and scale them. Everything we develop is a result of a very effective innovation approach that we use within KION ITS. This is how we address our customer needs continuously going forward. Now, let me show how these solutions we offer not only address the customer needs, but also drive profitable growth within KION ITS. Basically, there are three pillars that we focus on. The first pillar is technology leadership. We grow above the market in a growing market.
We do so because we offer a differentiated portfolio that drives real bottom-line value for our customers. Thus, we satisfy our customers, and we are able to retain our customers. We are also able to achieve a positive price assertion year over year. The second pillar is resilient services. Here, we offer a very comprehensive portfolio of services from financing, repairing, maintaining, renting, and even selling of used trucks. For us, this means whenever we put a truck in the market, whenever we sold a truck, then this installed truck, we basically have the opportunity to manage that profit pool throughout the entire lifecycle of that truck from cradle to grave for up to 15 years. We also use digitalization to actually enhance the customer experience as well as drive efficiency internally.
Thus, we benefit on one hand from the resilience of service, on the other hand, also from the high margin of this business segment. The third pillar, efficiency improvement. Again, that's something where we continuously and relentlessly drive efficiency gains across our business model, also utilizing digitalization and automation of processes. These are the three pillars helping us to drive profitable growth within KION ITS. Let's now look in more detail in these examples, and I would start with the first pillar, technology leadership. Let me go to the core of our offering, the trucks. Here, I would like to introduce the two new platforms that we just introduced to the market. What you can see here are the two all-new counterbalance truck platforms of STILL and Linde, the two new crown jewels that STILL and Linde has.
As Anke pointed out, these are really cool trucks. Both are a completely new generation of trucks, and these are new platforms that pave our way for the next 10 to 15 years. Therefore, we remain at the forefront of innovation, and we enable best performance for our customers. Let me go into more detail. If you look at the silver-orange truck, that's the RX 60 from STILL. It's a new electric-powered truck, and it truly sets new standards in that segment. So far, electric trucks have never had the productivity of IC trucks. Let me quote a magazine, a very well-established magazine in our industry, F&H, that does actually continuous testing of trucks. Let me quote them here. For the first time in our test history, we have an electric counterbalance truck with performance values and productivity that exceed the comparable combustion engine trucks we tested.
Truly an innovation here, setting new standards for electric trucks. On the left side, you see the red truck, the Linde H20-H35. We launched this November last year, and it is for sale now, starting January. It is an IC truck, and it is the first model of a whole new product family. There will be many other trucks following as IC and E on the same platform. As Anke pointed out, this is the first digital truck. It comes with a digital twin. It is 100% connected, which allows many, many functionalities for the customers as well as us. First, it allows easy fleet management. It allows remote services. It allows remote health monitoring, condition monitoring. We can even update software over the air. We can also switch on and switch off functionalities that a customer may need at a certain point in time.
A lot of new functionalities, and as Gordon pointed out, very similar to what some of you may know in terms of the Tesla of the industrial truck industry. According to our own tests that we've done, the H20-H35 in this IC version allows the highest productivity. In our test, we showed actually that we were about 10% higher than our competitors. At the same time, we could also show that we have the lowest fuel consumption. On one end, you have the highest productivity, lowest fuel consumption. We also consider that to be the most sustainable truck in the industry. What better time could there be to now introduce that truck? Both new generations of trucks, they will help us to expand our market share in the industrial market segment.
As Anke said, it's necessary to make these investments today to also expand our leading position in the future. Let me now give you an example and show you a video that kind of introduces some of the features of the new Linde truck.
Linde H20-H35, the best counterbalance trucks in their class. Precise, fast, efficient. Linde's hydrostatic drive, double-pedal control, and Linde load control form the basis for optimum interaction between man and machine. Low maintenance components and easy access for servicing ensure high uptime and low costs. The easy operation of all essential functions is the key to nearly fatigue-free working. Best visibility conditions due to slim A-pillars and the panoramic armored glass roof additionally ensure fast and safe handling of goods.
Innovative lighting options such as the LED stripes and the Linde TruckSpot protect pedestrians, while the top-mounted tilt cylinder and the low center of gravity form the base of secure and precise load handling. The Linde H20-H35 is a digital truck. It is securely connected to the fleet management system as standard. Thus, fleet managers can act with foresight wherever, whenever. Linde H20-H35, maximum performance in all areas.
All-new truck generation paving the way for the future. If you're interested in a test drive, we're happy to invite you to the OM Voltas Material Handling taking place in June and May, where you can see the whole portfolio of our ITS offering for Linde as well as some of the Dematic equipment and others. Overall, completely new set of capabilities, always focusing on driving performance of our customers.
Now let me switch from driving high efficiency to the increased demand for safety. If you look at German industry, in 2018, they were counting over 36,000 accidents a year involving industrial trucks. That's more than 160 accidents per workday. All of these accidents interrupt the operations of our customers, they damage goods, they damage equipment, they damage infrastructure, and some of them even lead to fatal accidents. Safety is a true concern in material handling. At KION TS, we have great answers to that, how we make sure that we support our customers in reducing the number of accidents. We do this with a structured offering, providing three categories. First of all, structural safety equipment, actually improving the safety on the truck itself. Now, imagine for a few seconds you're in a high bay warehouse.
You're in the cabin of your truck, 16 m up high. You need to pick material out of this warehouse. Now you can imagine any unevenness of the ground floor translates into significant oscillation of your cabin 15 m to 16 m up. What could happen? You could bounce with that oscillating cabin into the rack, causing an accident. What we do with our system active stability control, this recognizes any unevenness of the floor and counterbalances oscillation so that the cabin is truly stable. Now you can actually safely pick, and you can also drive faster through the aisle. This solution, on one hand, drives safety, avoiding accidents. At the same time, it also allows higher productivity because it can go at faster speed. It actually reduces the need to actually even out the floor at the warehouse, which is a very expensive undertaking.
Yeah. Second category is surroundings equipment, which are aiming at improving the safety of the workspace, topics like surround view or curve speed control. The third category, safety assistance systems that look at the overall operation systematically with systems like Safety Guard, safety vest, and even including safety consultancy services. Overall, the customer benefit from that is very clear. You avoid accidents, you avoid cost, you drive higher productivity, and you save all the cost for the damages. For KION , a huge benefit because on one hand, we win new customers just with that safety offering. Second, we actually sell higher specified trucks. There was a question earlier of lower specified trucks. All that safety equipment actually drives to sell higher specified trucks because it's so urgent for the customers to avoid accidents. Third, this also offers new doors to our customers.
We actually now engage with the safety engineers of the customers to help them improve the situation. At the same time, they also have a lower price sensitivity when it comes to the choice of equipment. Overall, many, many benefits that we derive for customers as well as for ourselves in driving profitable growth. Now, let me show you one example, a video showing our safety guard, safety vest solution. What you will see here is a solution where we actually equip the truck with sensors as well as a pedestrian with a vest where you can actually identify a pedestrian behind objects, even through walls. Effectively, the system leads to collision avoidance. Let's take a look at that video here, please.
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This is an example of how we help our customers to make sure they have a safe work environment and how we can contribute that their employees go home safely at night. To just explain this again, you could see there was a visual and acoustic signal for the driver as well as for the pedestrian. The system actually can recognize a pedestrian even behind objects, even behind walls, which could never have been done before. The system not only senses visual and acoustic signals, but it also slows down the trucks. It even stops the truck. Thereby, you avoid these collisions. The technology that's used here, ultra-wideband technology, you can also use for other purposes, for instance, like speed zoning, reducing the speed in certain crossings, again, to avoid collisions. This is how we leverage technologies for other purposes.
It also helps us in identifying truck locations when they are out in the operations, again, driving efficiency. Overall, we have the broadest set and most sophisticated solutions to help customers improve safety in their operations. With that, let's now switch to greater sustainability. We've discussed this before. Greater sustainability, there's a strong shift taking place from IC to E, and that continues, as you can see on the left side. While the overall market, we said, is growing in value by 4% year over year, the share of E-powered driven trucks will actually increase from 64% to even 76% globally by 2027. We should not forget, so far, while the share is actually declining, the volume has been still growing in IC, so it still remains relevant.
As we said before, from a financial perspective, there is no big difference in the margin between IC and E-trucks, neither in the new business nor in the after-sales. On the right side, you can see within the E-powered trucks, there is a significant shift from lead acid to lithium-ion. While in 2019, the share of lithium-ion was about 7%, we expect an increase by 10 times to 70% by 2027. Again, here, from a financial point of view, the absolute gross profit for lithium-ion is attractive and is actually higher due to the higher prices of lithium-ion batteries versus lead acid. At KION ITS, we are very well positioned to serve that trend. We do have a very broad portfolio of lithium-ion batteries, and according to our own tests, we do have several competitive advantages here. For one, we can faster charge batteries, lithium-ion batteries.
We have lower operating costs in total, and also, we have a higher temperature tolerance, so you can also use lithium-ion batteries in cold-store applications. To further strengthen our position in lithium-ion, we founded KION Battery Systems last year as a joint venture together with BMZ, a very well-established supplier for lithium-ion batteries. This is a 50/50 joint venture for development and production. There are several benefits that we expect out of that. On one hand, that we broaden our offering even further and that we increase our production capacity, but we also, by this joint venture, secure cell access in a market that's quite tight. We also are able to react faster in the development as well as in the scaling of production capacities. We will also be able to bundle cells, which will give us some sourcing advantages.
Lastly, we capture the value of that full chain, which is different, as we discussed before. IC engines we buy. Lead acid batteries are usually produced by somebody else. Now, we also take a step in the value chain for lithium-ion. Overall, an attractive element. This concludes examples now on technology leadership. Let me move on to the second pillar, resilient services. Services is very important for us. It plays a very decisive role in establishing value add to our customers as well as establishing a trustful relationship. Also, obviously, it generates the highest margins overall in that business, and it serves as a resilient as well as strong growth driver in our segment. Over the past years, we have seen a growth in that segment of almost 6% year on year.
Our position today in KION ITS is that we offer the full lifecycle from financing, from servicing the trucks, maintaining, repair from renting trucks, as well as from even selling used trucks. We have the full value chain, different to many other industries that usually do not have that in-house. If we look at the share, the revenue share, over 50% is driven by the after-sales business. Key for after-sales is to make sure that we have a high uptime of our trucks, and if there's any breakdown, that we fix this as soon as possible, at best, first time when we approach the truck. We do this by having a very extensive and highly qualified service network. We have more than 18,000 service technicians in EMEA, and thus, we have the best qualified and the most dense service network in the industry.
We support our service technicians by in-van delivery of spare parts so that they can really focus on the service task. Those in-van deliveries are supplied by multi-brand spare parts centers that we have that allow for scale in the distribution centers as well as, obviously, for high parts availability. 30% of the services is made up of short-term rental. That is always interesting for customers that have seasonal and cyclical businesses. For instance, if you look at farming, harvesting, you have certain harvesting seasons, or if you look at many retailers with their seasonal businesses, they then need to adjust the capacity of the operations, need to adjust the number of trucks, and they can always come to us. We have the largest fleet in EMEA with more than 90,000 trucks, so we can always find the best solution for them. Lastly, used trucks.
Used trucks are relevant for customers that do expect a high-performing, high-quality, robust truck, but that have maybe a lower utilization in their business. We can provide them with a robust, high-quality truck that we actually refurbish in our own refurbishment centers. They have very high-quality standards, and we provide them, obviously, with the same type of after-sales support that we do for new trucks. For us, this is then many times also stepping the door for customers to also sell a new truck then afterwards. Overall, service is very interesting. We have the full capture of the value chain. We support our customers, on one hand, with high truck uptime, but at the same time, with allowing them to quickly adjust their capacity when needed.
For KION ITS, you need to imagine we have many, many touchpoints in that segment, and at every one of these touchpoints, we can prove that we are a reliable partner for them, that we are worth being the partner for the future. Each truck once sold, if it's in the market, it's a profit pool for us that we can manage from cradle to grave. Again, that's up to 15 years. Let me give you some examples of how we use digitalization to continuously improve the service to our customer here as well as drive efficiency internally. Here, three examples, first being remote health monitoring on the left. Now, with our trucks being connected, we have full visibility of their health condition.
We can monitor their operational usage, and thus, we can detect through predictive maintenance, basically, when is there a risk that the truck could come to a stop. We could obviously prevent this by doing the right maintenance steps before or schedule a repair when it's not affecting the operations of the customers. Thus, reducing overall downtime to our customers. Second example is remote technician support. Once our service technician is out there, knowing that the trucks become technically more and more sophisticated, more and more complex, if there's a challenge for the service technician on-site, he can access via multimedia dialogue an expert in the back office to help him solve his challenges. Again, that's helping us to improve our first-time fix rate and ensuring that any stoppage remains very short for the customer.
Lastly, third example, a digital service app that we offer to our customers where they can order service through a simple app. They can provide us some information about the truck condition, maybe even take a picture of the truck so that this allows then our service technician to be best prepared, understanding what he will face here, and he can basically think through what is the right approach to solve that, what is the right type of spare parts that he needs to very effectively resolve that in the first time. Digitalization, on one hand, allows us to provide an even better service than today. On the other hand, it improves customer retention and allows for profitable growth for us. Let me now go to the third pillar, efficiency improvement. Several examples here, and again, we drive this relentlessly through our business model.
I want to start first with a topic that our CTO function of KION Group drives forward, the utilization of modules across our product fleet. We've early introduced these two new product platforms, and they actually use the same drive axles as well as masts. Once the Linde E-Truck version is out in the market, that truck will also use the same battery and connected chargers together with the STILL truck. This is an example of how the modularization actually helps us to scale innovation across the brands, at least within the region. It also allows us to reduce the R&D effort per truck. It allows us to bundle procurement volume, and it also reduces the complexity. Over the recent years, we have brought down the number of parts by 15%. You can imagine how that translates into reduced complexity costs in the administrative area.
It also helps reduce inventory, and it also helps to improve availability of parts as well as spare parts. Let me now give you another example of how we drive efficiency in our production footprint. This chart illustrates how our assembly plant footprint has developed over the past years. In 2014, we had six assembly plants in EMEA, and they were all in Western Europe. We only had one of those six plants being a multi-brand site. Now, in 2022, we will have seven sites with close to 20% in best-cost countries in Eastern Europe, and the number of multi-sites will have been increased to actually five. At the same time, we significantly increased into automation, so we see a higher automation capability in all of these plants. Let me illustrate this even further, showing you two examples of our assembly plants.
Here on the slide, you can actually see our seven assembly plants in Europe. Let's go to the first example, Aschaffenburg. Here, the plant can actually benefit also from the new truck generation. We had the question earlier, how do you manage the transition from IC to E? The nice thing is now with our new truck platform, where we not only have a high modularity between STILL and Linde, but we also have a high modularity and many same components between the IC truck and the E-Truck. For our customers, that means you will get, on one end, trucks with the same performance, E = IC, but you also will always have the same interfaces. Also for the driver, it's very easy to switch from an IC truck to an E-Truck.
For operations, this means we now actually can assemble IC and E-Trucks on the same assembly line. However the market demand changes, we can still produce them at the same assembly line. This means producing more on one assembly line, you actually have a higher tech time. Higher tech time translates into higher productivity. It is a huge benefit for us, not only for the customer modularity, but also helping our assembly lines to improve overall in productivity. Additionally, in this plant, we invested heavily into automation, for instance, in welding robots for the chassis as well as in powder coating for the mast. That is not the end of our automation journey. We will continue that for our logistics as well as assembly processes. On the right side, Kołbaskowo , the new plant we are building in Poland.
The building is almost complete by now, and overall, the plant will be set up by the end of this year and will go live early next year. This will then expand our footprint in best-cost countries and also is a great location, bringing us close to the Eastern European market as well as to some very important suppliers to us. Let me finish this section with some examples of how we drive efficiency also in the sales and service processes. Three examples here. On one end, we've decided to introduce a group-wide CRM system that actually helps us to improve the effectiveness as well as the efficiency of our sales organization. A second example is the consolidation of our back offices in Germany, and we continue to do so in the United Kingdom going forward.
The last example, going back to in-van delivery for our service technicians, which we continuously increase by scaling our multi-brand distribution warehouses. Again, that optimizes utilization of our service technicians. These are just three examples of many, many others that I could show how we drive efficiency improvement throughout our business model. Overall, the profitability drivers for KION ITS are technology leadership, resilient services, and efficiency improvement. Let's now take a look at how this translates into our financial perspective. Overall, we consider ITS a highly attractive segment with a profitable growth outlook in the midterm beyond 2020. As Anke indicated, 2020 is an in-between year. The net sales range we expect to be between EUR 6.2 billion to EUR 6.5 billion, and that's impacted by slightly lower order intake in 2019, which we partially compensate by growth and resilient services.
On the EBIT side, we do see a slight dip, and that is impacted by the investments into products, into production infrastructure, as well as in digitalization. The examples that I've shown you already, but you will see more examples when CP talks about growing in China as well as mobile automation topics that IKBM will speak about. Short term, those investments will have an impact through depreciation, increased R&D, as well as setup expenses, but we consider them to be key to continue our technology leadership and thus our profitable future of the KION ITS business. Midterm, then we expect growing markets, and with our new product range and offering, we will continue to outgrow that market. Once those short-term effects from the investments will have phased out and our efficiency improvements will contribute, this will translate into EBIT growth.
KION ITS remains a highly attractive business segment. We want to remain very relevant for our customers, help them to address their customer needs. We also want to obviously stay ahead of our competition, and we also want to make sure internally that we stay ahead of the SES segment. Now I hand over to CP, who will give us some more insights onto growing in China. Thank you.
Thank you, Andreas. Good afternoon and a warm hello, Ni Hao, from my side. I think some of you, I actually have known you guys for quite some time, since day one, but I would still like to take the chance to do a brief introduction about myself if you do not know me. My name is CP Quek. I'm the Chief Asia-Pacific and Americas Officer for KION Group. I started my career starting from ABB and then moving to GE, Eaton, and then in the last 15 years, I'm one of the happiest guys on earth simply because I joined a company called KION . Over the last 15 years, I've been starting my career running our business in China, Asia-Pacific. I joined the board since IPO day one, and most recently, I take over the responsibility for Americas.
I'm very happy to be here today to share with you something about China, which is one of the most important markets for KION ITS and also SES going forward. If you look at the first slide, this gives you a quick glance about where we are as KION in China. I think the key messages I want you to take away is that China is not new to KION . We know China very well, and we have done very well there. You can see from the slide, we have been there since 1993, 27 years ago, starting in a place called Xiamen down south. Over the years, I think we have been growing ourselves to become the largest foreign player. As Gordon said, we are number three behind two big Chinese giants.
We are probably, if not the first foreign player who actually went into China and actively pursuing our business in this marketplace. We are now running our China operation with two unique brands of KION , which is part of our multi-brand strategy, namely Linde and Baoli, so that we can cater for the wide Chinese customer needs. You can see that we have almost close to 4,000 employees, where more than half of them are actually sales and service. Actually, we are always being dubbed the sales and service machine in our industry. Many of our competitors are eyeing for our talent. As well, we are not just selling and servicing in China. We have built up over the years our R&D facility in China, where now we have close to 350 R&D engineers being there.
As well, the remaining people, which are more operation, factory, manufacturing, supply chain related, which they are now running the operation from two of our facilities in Xiamen down south and in Jingjiang, pretty close to Shanghai area. Over the years, we have done our homework. We have done a lot of localization in China in order to be successful there, where you can see that 90% of our products and components are actually locally produced and sourced. This is a significant advantage that we have compared to some of our foreign competitors. I think since we say we are doing well, why do we need to have a new plan? The market has evolved tremendously. In order to keep up with the market changes, we aim even higher.
We want to raise the bar to make sure that we really can enter to be really the top one or two. That is why we are creating this new era, new strategy that we hope we will show you in the following slide. There are four highlights you can see here in the slide. First, I think I'm sure you would agree that China is and will continue to be the largest forklift market in the world, especially when it comes to units. Even though the growth rate in the recent year has somewhat normalized as what we call in China, the mega trend of such as urbanization, such as mechanization, e-commerce, and all those, which are growing tremendously in China, still continues.
Also, the sheer size of the Chinese market is so huge that it is a market that we have to invest further, which I'll explain later more. Secondly, I think we can capitalize and leverage on the solid foundation that we have actually built over the years, be it branding. If you go to China, Linde, everybody in the forklift market knows about Linde. The people, as I mentioned just now, the talent that we have. As well, we do have one of our largest anchor investors, Weichai, which also has a very strong position in China. Our next strategy insight will be focusing on how to leverage on this to bring us to the next level. We will develop a strategy that will further upgrade our R&D capability to develop new products for new segments, namely the value segment, which I'll talk about.
We have to further expand our sales and service network to better cover what we call the lower-tier city, which in the past we were not in. Of course, we need to build up capacity to build efficiently this new value segment product. Ultimately, not only will this help us to grow in China, but it will also enable KION to use this product to also win in other parts of the world. Finally, of course, all this does not come free. I think Gordon and Anke have mentioned that we will be making an investment of EUR 100 million. I remember this is maybe the largest investment we have made since 27 years ago when we put up our big Xiamen plant down south in China. I will provide you more details in the subsequent slide.
Why do we say China is such an important market? I think first, let's look at GDP. I think China's GDP is now a significant part of the world GDP. It says 17% here, but I saw somewhere it says 19%. Out of that, 30% of the world forklift that we sold globally in a year comes from China. If you look at what is KION , we only have 14% of our order intake of forklifts coming within the group, which means it is a significant upside potential if we can grow further our market share in China by selling simply just more trucks. Not just China is the largest single marketplace, but as well, the growth rate over the past year is simply tremendous.
If you look at the slide, you will see the CAGR in the last five years are at a staggering 12%, which even last year, 2019, was actually a pretty difficult year. China still grew at 8.6%, if I'm not wrong. As I said, even with the GDP normalizing, we still expect the growth of the Chinese market to continue and faster than all other markets. As Andreas showed us now, I think the CAGR for the next five years will easily be between at least 5% to 6%. How do we meet this market development and really capitalize on that so that we can continue to grow? As Gordon actually highlighted before, there are two emerging key market trends which will drive the future of the market.
Number one, the growing value segment, because in the past, you will see Chinese are very much an eco, we call economy segment. This is really growing. Second, the acceleration of the electrification, which actually already happened in the warehouse segment, but not yet in the counterbalance truck, but it is coming. Over the years, we can see our Chinese customers have actually changed their buying behavior, moving from eco to value, moving from just buying on price, and now they're starting to buy on values. This means not everything is just based on price. They will look at factors like branding, your after-service, quality, functionality of your products as a brand. I think this really is good news for us.
Next, I think most of you read from the papers that the Chinese government is actively pushing the change of old power to new power, which means electrification, not just in the car industry, but as well in the forklift industry. With the tighter, stricter environmental regulation, the electrification will accelerate very fast, especially driven by the total cost of ownership of lithium-ion powered trucks. As most of you know, a lot of the cells, which means the core of the lithium-ion, are produced in China. This is really giving them the scale to really bring the scale effect and drive the cost and drive the adoption of this technology in the China market much faster than any place else.
We believe by 2025, the shift of the counterbalance truck from diesel engine-driven truck to electric will be easily reaching half, which right now is barely less than 20%. Again, this is a good development for KION because this is where we are strong in. We have to capitalize on these two emerging trends in order to win further in the marketplace. To address these two major trends, we have put up a comprehensive growth strategy built around how to capture these two trends. Our key strategy actually has three core parts. One, we have to have a new product that caters for the value segment. We simply just cannot use a premium truck or the current Baoli truck to just serve for this market if we want to be competitive.
We need a new facility in order to produce this truck and an R&D center to make sure we get this product fully developed in the speed that we need. Of course, we need to sell this through a new network that can really cover this segment of customers. In this whole strategy, our shareholder, Weichai, will also help us out along the way in some of the strategy. I will give further explanation of each of these in the subsequent slide. First, products. In order to ensure we have the right product, which is truly competitive and that can serve this value segment, I think there are four key enablers here that we believe with these four, we can be successful. As I said just now, the market trends toward electrification actually are great news for KION , simply because KION is the market dealer.
We are the market leader in electric powertrain. As Gordon said, more than 80% of our trucks are electric-driven. We are the leader in this area. We also can leverage on Weichai. If you read the news that they are investing heavily in new energy, be it fuel cell, be it lithium-ion, I think this is what we can tap on. Secondly, addressing the value segment, which you may think it is new to us, but actually it is not. We are not starting from scratch. Over the past few years, actually, we have accumulated a good base of experience by launching the Linde so-called smart line, which is not a premium product, but which is actually tackling what we call the high-value segment. As well, Baoli also has a range of ECB or electric counterbalance trucks that are also addressing the value segment.
I think this really gives us some good experience in how to promote this kind of truck, balancing between premium and value, and knowing how to mitigate cannibalization and risk on our premium customers. Of course, the game changer in this new truck is really the new modular product design that our team is working on now. This is our secret weapon. What we are doing is we will be able to leverage on this new platform. We can create all kinds of variants of new products. We can switch between E to IC. We can move from a small tonnage to a higher tonnage simply using the common component. It is just like a puzzle. You can put it up and effectively create this modular concept. Our team now is able to work on that with high speed, high agility.
With this concept, we can achieve the economy of scale, which in the past, we do not have. In the past, we just had Xiamen premium product, Baoli eco product, but there is no synergy across all the components that we are using. I think this is a game changer, and we can use this to really outperform our competition who is now serving this segment. Lastly, as Gordon mentioned just now as well, it is all about people. We are also making structural changes within our Chinese organization. We want to make sure that the structure that we are putting in place will enable our Chinese team to be able to empower and really make decisions, move things on quickly in a Chinese speed. In order to compete with the Chinese players, you have to play a different ball game.
We are making this kind of organization changes from R&D, sales and service organization, production, sourcing strategy. I think this will change the way how we run and compete with the local Chinese leader. Next, we need to be able to sell this very nice product, competitive products to the marketplace. To do so, we need to dramatically expand our market coverage, simply because in the past, we are more a premium player. The coverage we have is more on the customer that really appreciates our products. Now we really have to increase our touchpoint to customers that we did not serve in the past. From the map, you can see that the blue dots here in the map are actually showing the existing network that we have. Under the new strategy, we will expand our point of sales.
Currently, we have less than 300 in the total Chinese. We will increase it to more than 500 points of sales moving forward, especially increasing our coverage, focusing on the key economic zones such as the One Belt One Road, Yangtze River Basin, and etc. Of course, as I mentioned just now, there are a lot of lower-tier cities which we did not cover in the past. Now with the right product, we can cover those cities. Also, by adopting a brand new KION multi-brand dealer approach, we will have a brand new dedicated exclusive KION dealer, not Linde dealer, not Baoli dealer, but these are KION dealers that will be given a portfolio of products to serve their customers in a selected geographic coverage. I think this will really help us to expand our market coverage.
Of course, we will still further strengthen the existing network of Linde and Baoli because the market is still growing. Lastly, we will further complement our network expansion by working closely with Weichai, Sinotruk . I think you guys know all the setup of Weichai. We can leverage on the existing dealership network, service provider service point that they have, parts distribution center that they have throughout China. I think this is an added advantage that none of our competitors has yet, but we need to capitalize on that. To meet the sales target, of course, we need to build the product in the right place efficiently. Therefore, the plan, as just now you have seen, we will be constructing a new production plant in Jinan.
If you don't know where Jinan is, Jinan is the capital of Shandong Province, which is one of the largest provinces in China. This plant will be one of the largest in the entire KION production footprint in terms of size. It is about 220,000 sq m. In terms of the state-of-the-art facility, fully automated, mixed line, you can produce EIC commonly in the production line. The new modular value platform product will be built in this plant. I'm very excited to tell you that we are now commencing the work on this plant within this year, and the production will be starting in 2022. As I said, this is our largest investment we have made since many years back. This new plant is made possible through a joint venture with Weichai, where we own 95%, Weichai owns 5%.
Actually, this plant is part of the overall gigantic Weichai Industrial Park in this area called Laiwu. If you have not been there, it is a small village now, but it will be big with a big production facility. The production plant is only one aspect of the EUR 100 million investment that we put in. At the same location, we are building up a new R&D center. This R&D center will be focusing on this new value truck, which is what we call KGCB, KION Global Counterbalance Truck. It will be the center of excellence for our global market. We have to put a team to be able to design the product that meets the need and the speed that we need for the Chinese market. Of course, this will further strengthen our position globally.
I'm confident that if we can be competitive in China, we will be competitive in any way around the world. Finally, I think to wrap up all this action plan, how will this impact our future position in the Chinese market? I think, as mentioned in the beginning, even though we are now the leading foreign player, actually we have more than 50% market share among all the foreign players. If you look at the total market size, which is mainly dominated by the Chinese with eco product, we just merely have single-digit market share. This is not enough. When we mention a new era, which means we have to put in effort to really double up our market share. In this case, we will be enjoying a double-digit market share if we do this right.
Also in our business plan, our quantity or the volume and the sales revenue that we will be producing by 2025 will be doubled. Of course, I know you guys are very concerned about short-term margin dilution. Yes, it will give some short-term margin pressure in the beginning of stage mainly because of the initial investment, the setup cost. Overall, this new value product, I have to tell you, it is a profitable product, as good as what we have as of today. Overall, we will be able to grow our EBIT margin to double-digit by 2025. Again, not forgetting, all this benefit will spill over to not just China, but the rest of the world because we can use this product to serve other markets who need these kinds of products. As a conclusion, our future in China is bright.
I am very, very excited to see things coming in. Again, thank you for listening. With this, I will pass on to Hasan, who will now talk about our SES, our Dematic business, which is also equally exciting. I look forward to all the questions that you may have during our Q&A session later. Thank you very much.
Thanks. Thank you, CP. I would say it is a little bit more than equally exciting, but we will see about that, right? First, for those of you who have not met me, my name is Hasan Dandashly , as introduced by Gordon earlier in the day, and I am the President and CEO for Dematic. A little about me is I spent 20 years of my life before here with GE and 15 years with Honeywell.
I have about 20 years of software business kind of leadership and 15 between industrial and industrial services businesses. Having had a very diverse career, people ask me, "Well, why this? What is it that you like about what you're doing at KION ? And why did you come to KION ?" I've been here since May of 2018, as I said. As I said, I've been very fortunate to really work in multiple industries, from industrial control with Honeywell and avionics to transportation, power generation, oil and gas in GE. When I come to work every day, I feel like I'm a kid in a toy store. I say, "Honestly, I have the opportunity to work in what I call 21st-century economy," right?
Bringing together mechatronics, software, robotics, digital together to do things that you see the output of at your doorstep every day with deliveries that come to you. This is truly an exciting time for our industry today and for years to come. Let's talk about why is that. This is an industry. The best way I would describe it is in transformation. Automation is at the heart of this transformation, not only because it provides for efficiency, because everybody wants to run their operations better and cheaper and faster, but it is because it is actually empowering and inventing new business models for our customers. They're doing things today with automation that they couldn't dream of, or those business models did not exist until now. For 200 years, Dematic has led the industry in providing specific solutions for customers' needs in the verticals that they operate in.
We have the broadest set of technology products. We have the scale and the footprint to make sure that we're able to deliver to our customers in every part of the world that we operate in. Execution speed and standardizing what we deliver, the components, will drive not only top-line growth, but bottom-line efficiency. Our services capabilities and our services network, as I will show you a bit later, truly make us lifelong partners to our customers. Last, but definitely not least, software and technology are the intelligent part of intelligent supply chain. We are very excited about DAI joining our KION and Dematic family, and I will talk a bit more about that towards the end of the presentation. What is driving this transformation? As you could see from the chart, all the metrics are pointing to continued growth.
Urbanization is at 55%, and people continue to move into cities. That drives more and more need for e-commerce and the solutions that we do. What used to be a luxury only one year ago, we do not have to go that far. This is how far we go. Today, it is just what you all expect, right? Groceries deliveries to your front door in two hours, everything else in two days, and the ability to return for free. There are new normals that are being defined very fast in our industry and supply chain solutions. You are used to a department store or to a grocery store handling thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of SKUs. One e-commerce provider, you can all guess the name, handles 350 million SKUs. This is the store of tomorrow, 350 million SKUs.
Consumers, all of us, want to shop any way we want, from the store, from e-commerce, pickup, return. That is driving this whole concept that we call omnichannel in our industry. The most striking number on this page, if you have to remember one, is called 10%. Of all the warehouses that exist today, only 10% are automated warehouses. We project that over the next 30 years, that will become 65%. Just look at the opportunity to drive more efficiency and more automation for all our customers for years to come. What does this mean to our market size? Our market size will double between now and 2027. Gordon, early in the presentation, showed you that the market size for SCS will become larger than the market size for ITS by 2027.
I always tell my younger brother here, Andreas, that I'm too old and too impatient to wait until then. The race is on. We'll see where it goes. I can't wait till 2027. The growth is happening in all regions, as you see. Nobody is excluded from that growth. The 10 most developed economies by 2030 will have 5.4% less labor. E-commerce, that is today at 14%, will grow to 22% in five years. That always continues to drive growth. These are the business models we know today, and the business models of tomorrow we're going to learn every year. One interesting fact is between the holiday season, at least in North America, but similar to the rest of the world, starts on Thanksgiving Day and kind of goes all the way to New Year's. Last year, between Thanksgiving and New Year's, $100 billion of product was returned.
That was up EUR 6 billion from the year before. The product that gets returned needs to be processed, and that's going to continue. It needs to get back on the shelf as soon as possible. That will continue. A lot of that gets discarded, by the way, today, the product, because they just don't know how to process it to get it back. It gets into a landfill. That is going to continue to create more opportunities for automation. Why is it that Dematic is so well positioned in order not to benefit from this, but to continue to drive this industry forward? As you could see in our mission, I don't have to read it to you. We offer solutions in vertical markets to meet our customers' needs.
We start by working very closely with our customers if they are in the apparel business or pure play e-commerce or in groceries or general merchandise to develop a solution that meets their needs. We have the broader set of products that are out there in the industry. We bring our product technology that we have, combining it with our advanced software to create a solution for our customers. We have our engineering workforce, our manufacturing footprint, our project management that brings all that together in order to deliver to our customers. We back it up by the most diverse service network that exists in our industry in order to make sure that we are staying with our customers. The average age of a distribution center is 20 years. Sometimes when we do really good with them, it goes even longer than that.
I'll show you an example a little bit later. If you received a parcel at your doorstep this week, and I'm sure you have because otherwise something is wrong, right? It is very likely that it is one of the 18.5 million parcels that Dematic equipment is processing every day in all corners of the world. That's how deep we are. That's how broad we are in our customer base. By the way, we have only done this for 200 years. How do we do all of this? This is a description of all the different product technologies that we have. In a distribution center, you start by having to convey product. You have to sort product in a very busy highway system inside a distribution center. You have to store the product or the pallet or the tote, lift it up, bring it down.
You have to pick it either manually using workstations and things like this, or robotically by having the robot picking in order to deliver. You have to palletize, build a pallet, or depalletize a pallet. We also have AGV systems. We have 12,000 ASRS machines that are installed globally. I was recently visiting China, and I went to the foundry that Weichai has, our shareholder. Walking around, and I'm looking, I said, "As you could tell, foundry is not a very clean place, right?" I see a yellow column, the Dematic yellow. We've had a shuttle installed there from before KION even knew who Weichai is. It made me very proud to see that our technology has existed there for a long time. We invented the term multi-shuttle. We have the Dematic Multi-Shuttle, and we have 17,000 multi-shuttles that are installed globally.
We just announced our newest generation of the DMS last week. Automated guided or automatically guided vehicles. These are forklifts and trucks that have no drivers. They have no place for the driver to sit, that are fully automated, that we provide. We lead the market in providing these in conjunction with our systems. We are combining that experience with what we know about forklifts and trucks, and IKE will present that to you to truly become the most competitive and successful mobile automation provider across our industry. We are able to, and what you see in the middle is what we call Dematic IQ. It is that software that glues everything together, and it is the intelligence that comes into the system.
We are able to package these products, and you'll see a couple of examples from a small offering to a very large offering that could be a very large distribution center. We deliver this globally, everywhere. We are where our customers need us, from defining the solution to delivering the solution. When we work with our customers, as I will show you in a minute, we spend a good amount of time developing a solution for them. We have the expertise in all the regions we operate in to develop these solutions locally and then to deliver them locally. We operate in 29 countries worldwide. We have 11 factories that cover the globe. We have 50 service centers that provide services to our customers. We have the most skilled workforce in our industry, and we're very proud to have more than 3,000 engineers.
This is a technology and engineering-intensive business. Having the know-how is critical. You have heard before, every time you talked about challenges, is getting enough qualified people to meet the challenges of the industry. We are very proud to have these engineers. How does it all come together? Three major steps that I will go over. We start first working with our customers to develop a solution jointly. You saw during the lunch, if you were up and were in the back, what we call Dematic IQ , the ability to virtualize what your solution is. This is not a gimmick. This is not just like some third-party piece of software we get, and you can look at it like you do with games. We actually sit down, and we define what the solution is for our customers together.
We model it so that we are able to show them how it looks. They can go look at it. They can see it because prints and charts and drawings are one thing. Putting your goggles and walking through your distribution center is something else. More importantly, we simulate it because you're building a distribution center that you will get a year, two years, three years from now to meet your business needs then. You have to be able to say, "Is it going to do that?" We actually do a fairly high-definition simulation to make sure it meets the needs. We have a lot of what I would call internal IP, a lot of digital tools that we use in order to model, define, design, and estimate these systems that we do with our customers upfront. That's step one.
Step two is where the hard work begins, right? We have to actually build these systems. We build them from what we call vertical market-based subsystems and solutions. We take a solution that we could use in different industries or different verticals, and then we put them together in order to create a system for our customers. We try to drive a lot of reusability because that improves our cost, our quality, and our bottom line. We always make sure that we are maintaining and delivering the specific customer needs that they need. Step three is we deliver this regionally. We have to be close to our customers. You can't be shipping cranes all over the world. You can't be shipping installation labor. We actually deliver this very regionally. We have 500 excellent project managers that lead these projects from simple to complex.
We get product from our factories. We get product from our resale partners. We have installation crews globally, and we deliver these for our customers. We do this across many verticals. If you are Zara or PepsiCo or ALDI in completely different business segments, verticals, you really do not need a conveyor or a shuttle. That just does not mean anything to you. You need a solution that meets the specific needs that you have for the way you want to run your business within your vertical. This is where we have the experienced solution developers that understand these different markets, that work with many customers, that are able to truly develop a solution to meet that customer's needs.
The technology components that we use, and you can look across at them and say, "Well, they're all the same." You tell me, Hasan, that e-commerce is different than apparel, different than groceries, general merchandise, because I have to have expertise in those markets. I can't go and sell a general merchandise what I sell an apparel company. It's different needs. I have to understand their market and how it operates. The DMS, the Dematic Multi-Shuttle, can move totes that are full of frozen chicken or high-end apparel, and it doesn't matter. It's the same. The AGV, actually, we're very proud, moves the currency for the Federal Reserve in the U.S. It also moves servers for Google, the same AGV. It's just customized differently.
Our pouch systems, we have a pouch system that is used heavily in returns processing because you could drop the item, the gut pouch package. Now we're looking at using it to bag potato chips because you don't want to get them crushed. Then we package our products, third-party partners, and our software to deliver an end solution to the customer in this vertical market. Let me give you a couple of examples of what we're doing. This is a leading luxury retailer that life for luxury retailers was simple. You have a big department store. You have a big name. You're sitting in a big mall, and customers are coming to you, and you sell, and life is good, right? You do a lot of your sales between two or three weeks before Christmas and New Year's.
This luxury retailer was looking to say, "How do I optimize my whole supply chain?" They needed to fulfill a large network of stores. You need to populate, you need to push product to your stores. You have to get the right product and the right size groups in the right location based on the population of that location, what sizes you need, and what product they want at the right time of the year. You really have to use the intelligence to say, "How do I get these products to these stores?" At the same time, you also have to be in e-commerce. You can't be anymore a luxury retailer without being very active in e-commerce. They needed to truly implement a very effective omnichannel. You can buy anywhere. You can return anywhere.
It's the flexibility for the consumer to be able to buy online, buy in the store, return here and there, vice versa. It all works. Given that they are in apparel, and now e-commerce is taking a bigger portion of their business, they have to deliver e-commerce. What do we all do, right? We order the size we like to fit in, the size that we are in, and the size that we might need after the holidays. Then we have to return two out of the three. If they're not efficiently managing their returns, their business will get impacted heavily, right? It's not like groceries; you don't return them. Apparel, high-end luxury apparel, if they're not able to process the returns and get them back on the shelf, they can't stay in business. They came to us.
They are building what we call a Jumbo Distribution Center. To give you an idea of size, you can fit 16 American football, not soccer, not European football fields within that distribution center. It delivers 500,000 parcels or units, clothing basically, or shoes or whatever, every day. They had to come to somebody that has a proven track record, the technology, the dependability that will be around in order and the scale to deliver this. That was Dematic. As you go to many shows—I just want to use this here to underscore this point because you all go to industry shows—many times you see very shiny widgets. People could come up and invent an AMR or whatever. There are very few that can do what we do, that have the scale, the capability, the product, and the software to do this.
Doing distribution centers like this is a big vote of what is it that we're able to do. Now let me take you to the other side of this formula to small and fast, okay? You've heard before about urbanization, micro-fulfillment. This is the system that, with the urbanization growing, that you should be able to fit in the back of a grocery store or the basement of a building in order to do fulfillment either for delivery at home or for what we call click and collect. What's exciting for us here is the first one was speed. When we looked at this and we said, "This is a market we need to be in," from when we generated the idea until we had the first one up and running in one of our factories to demonstrate to customers, it was six months.
We were able to do this because we knew this space. We knew the customers. We were able to reuse standard components that we have to build it, and we built it in six months. To install it, it only takes 12 weeks. As we speak, one installed and is running and is delivering product in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Another one is being installed and soon will start operating in Europe. Hopefully next time you click and collect your groceries, or they get delivered at your home, there will come complements of Dematic technology. Now let's bring this to life and get you to see—did it go? Okay. What's exciting about this, to say just a couple more words, is you might look at this and say, "Okay, you've done multi-shuttles. You told me you have 17,000 of them.
You just put a few of them in the back of a store. How is that so exciting? It's a lot more than that, right? Because this system doesn't only have our mechatronics and this. It has the software capability and the intelligence to do both fulfilling from this system and fulfilling from the store because not everything you're able to get from the automated system. You have to go and collect it from the store. We have the apps that the person is going and collecting from the store to prepare an order. The system is also optimizing based on what product is moving fast, what you have on sale, what you have this, what goes into the shuttle versus what gets fulfilled manually using the app, and how you populate the shuttle as it goes.
There's a lot of intelligence that has to factor the way the grocer is running their business at that time and what's selling today. It's a hot day versus a cold day. What's on promotion and what's not. So far, I've described to you how we bring solutions together. We work with our customers early on. We understand their needs. We develop a solution. We bring our products, our software, our know-how, our scale, our execution capability, and deliver to our customers. Now we have systems up and running. Today, we have 6,000 installed systems out there that we provide services on. That is a huge opportunity for us and a huge opportunity for our customers. Before I get into what we deliver, I want to take you back to that large, what I call the Jumbo DC that we are building as we speak.
24 four years ago, we built a small distribution center for that customer. We have provided services over 24 years. That distribution center is delivering better, more throughput, more efficiency today than it did 24 years ago. Every year we serviced it. We made it better. That is why when this customer was looking now at completely changing their business model and doing something big, we were a partner of choice because we have proven what we can do with our customers when we stay with them. We have a comprehensive portfolio that you see in the chart from parts, repairs, field services, resident services, consultancy, modernization, and upgrades. I want to walk you through two distinct examples that are on the right.
That one shows you what we do for an existing customer and how we keep their stuff up and running, and one that brings our digital technology to life. At the top on the right, we have a major retailer with 43 sites that we have built for them. We started a program to do what we call modernization and upgrades. We send a bunch of experts. They walk through the distribution center, and they generate ideas for how we can make things better for the customer. By the time we did two or three distribution centers for these guys, it clicked into their head. They actually got pre-authorization, sent a purchasing person walking around with our team and issuing purchase orders as they were going and making recommendations for what need to do. The result, the part sales for that customer went up 26%.
More importantly, and we're very proud of, the throughput in their distribution centers went up 7%. Just think about how that drives productivity for these retailers that we're serving. The second example is a Fortune 500 industrial company that we do work in that we're piloting what we call predictive maintenance. Instead of waiting for things to fail or just follow our maintenance procedures, we instrumented a lot of their systems and were able to detect all the signals, be able to predict the failure before it happens, intervene right at the right moment, and make sure that we make the repairs that are needed. By doing that, they are able to achieve five weeks' payback. Our services are very comprehensive. Now we're truly utilizing digital in order to make sure that we continue to advance these.
Services, as I showed you or talked to you earlier, is not only good because it drives more service business. It drives systems business. It drives service business and contributes significantly to our bottom line. Now let's get into the intelligent part of intelligent supply chain. The automation in our industry started in order to save labor and to save space. It was about saying, "I need to have less labor because labor is expensive and is not available, and I have less space. I need to convey product. I need to sort product. I need to lift it up and down and store it." Today, automation in our industry is truly about transforming business and creating new business models that did not exist before. The intelligence in that supply chain comes from software.
One thing I like to say is that the good thing about software and the bad thing about software is the laws of physics do not apply to software. The possibilities are limitless to what you can do. This is where the creativity comes in to truly drive business models for our customers and growth for them. Let us kind of go through what does software do in our industry. You hear us say, "We're excited about software. We're investing in software," and say, "But I see AGVs and I see shuttles. I see all that stuff." Where does software come in? If you look at the bottom layer, what we call programmable logic controllers, this is the software that is intended to control all the moving parts that are moving in a distribution center. Give you an example.
A distribution center could have 13 km of conveyor that is running around. That requires hundreds of thousands of motors and drives and everything to kind of control it and drive it. We have in one 1.2 million total positions for the shuttle. So the shuttle has to hit 1.2 million, has to move. This is the software at the bottom layer that keeps all that equipment running and running in sync. When I first started, I said, "Well, I've worked on jet engines. How complex could this be?" Right? I've worked on jet engines that fly and fly nonstop.
When you look at these distribution centers and you get in and you find the huge number of rotating equipment and moving parts that has to move all the time, move in sync, and move reliably and cannot stop, you get a sense of complexity that is completely different. It is that software that's keeping all that stuff moving. You move one step up to what we call warehouse control system. Now all the equipment is running, is moving, is doing its job. Now you have product that is coming in and a product that needs to get fulfilled, either for a package to go to your house or a pallet to go to another distribution center or whatever.
The software is making all these decisions on what product is flowing where and how is it getting ready to meet the requirements of the customer that is running that distribution center. That is a very complex problem that requires a lot of intelligence in the software, not just simple data processing, a lot of intelligence in order to execute these missions and optimize what you get from these distribution centers. That is a competitive advantage that everybody wants to have is, "How do I optimize this so that my product is moving properly, being optimized and delivering to my business needs?" You get up to the warehouse management system where you could be managing both automated warehouses or manual warehouses, and you get into managing labor, managing inventory, and the operations in general.
You get into supply chain execution, which is outside the four walls of the warehouse that you see circled in yellow. That is about order and demand management, transportation, retail management, click and collect, things that get into the network in a general way. You have your ERPs, just like every business. You need to have your ERP to run your business. What we have, what we call digital, right? Digital portfolio. You have already seen examples of a digital twin that Andreas talked about before or the digital twin that you saw with the Dematic IQ and also the remote monitoring and diagnostics that he showed you for ITS and predictive maintenance that I talked about. All of these things are kind of under a digital portfolio. Why are we so excited for DAI joining our team?
You look at where you see IQ, these are the offerings that we had. We've been very comprehensive at the PLC level, at the WCS level, and we had capability at the WMS level, but DAI had a more complete capability at the WMS level. We've partnered with them before to deliver large systems that require a large WMS. They also bring supply chain execution capability for small and medium-sized customers that will open doors for us to get into more automation as these customers start moving along their automation journey. If I talk a little bit more specifically about the different elements of DAI, with what we have in software and the capability they bring, we are clearly number one in providing WMS, WCS, WES offerings in our marketplace. We're the undisputed leader in that area. With their supply chain, it opens up new doors.
It allows us to become more relevant for our customers in areas that we did not get into before that is outside the four walls of the distribution center. They are a very well-run company with more than EUR 40 million in sales that has been growing fairly well, more than 25% in adjusted EBIT. What is very exciting is the stickiness of the customer. More than 70% of their revenue came from services on software. To do services on software, to do that well, you're doing something right because you're not changing, moving equipment that you have to replace all the time. We know this company well. We have a great cultural fit with their people, and we've done many projects together for the last 20 years. Not to mention, as Anke mentioned, it's a nice, attractive, and a fairly exciting market space that we got.
It's a nice multiple. Before I move to financials, I wanted to kind of share with you this is honestly one of my internal charts that got added late in the game to the presentation because I wanted to share with you what the priorities that my team and I are living by every day. It's kind of a different twist at my presentation because this is what we look at in the mirror every day. We're driving to outpace the market growth. It's a market that's growing very nicely. We want to outpace it. We're driving to make sure that we are growing our EBIT, and we're driving to make sure that we continue to balance our portfolio. We are in the project business.
As Gordon told you, we're not cyclical, but our projects kind of move up and down because you get large projects, you get small projects. You can't always compare quarter over quarter, year over year per quarter. Overall, we're growing, but we have that project size that impacts results. We want to continue to balance our portfolio. We do that by focusing on these five priorities in the order you see. We start by execution. We have a brand name that everybody knows, 200 years. We continue to execute for our customers. They will keep coming. We execute better. We drive the top line, and we drive the bottom line, and we get more efficiency. We're focused on making sure that we continue to drive our solutions. We are in the solution business, not in a product business.
We have to make sure that we continue to drive standardization in our components to make sure that we can get more leverage, continue to drive our services to get more share of services and to get more margin coming out of that, and again, truly making sure that software and technology are at the forefront of what we do because that is what will differentiate us going into today and into the future. That is what our customers need from us every day. Now, moving to financials from where Anke, our CFO, left, we want to build on the great performance we had in 2019, and we will drive revenues to increase anywhere between +5% to +18%. We will drive EBIT and drive to get EBIT leverage and drive that to grow anywhere from +5% to +23%.
As I wrap up, I want to take you back to where I started. The market fundamentals are strong. We're truly kids in a toy store. This is great. We're seeing it as we look at it, and it will continue for a while. We've led for 200 years. I don't think I'll be around 200 years from now, but we want to make sure that we continue to lead as we go into the future with our capability, with our scale, with our technology, and with our know-how. We're focused on execution, on standardization to drive both the top line and the bottom line. Technology and software are truly the key differentiators for us, and we are putting our words into action by bringing Digital Applications International into our family. I would now like to welcome our Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Eike Böhm, to the stage.
Thank you, Hasan.
What a nice story of growth. Also, Andreas, what a nice story you told us about growth. I will tell you an even better story of growth. Before I start with this, let me introduce myself. I am Eike Böhm, the Chief Technology Officer of KION Group since five years now. Before this, I spent 27 years of my career in the automotive industry. Now, if you think about automotive industries, what are the two most sexiest things in automotive? First is electric drive, better electric vehicles, e-vehicles. Second one is autonomous driving. Now think about combining autonomous driving, electric driving in our industry. This is mobile automation. So autonomously driving electric industrial trucks. KION is a company that has the best prerequisites to lead the industry also in this field. Why?
First of all, today, just today, KION has a pole position in this market, which is extremely growing. I will come to this, but think of today. We have roughly EUR 2 billion in this market of mobile automation. In 2023, it will sum up to EUR 11 billion, which is exponential growth. Second is that this mobile automation story provides significant benefit for our customer. It's highly profitable for customers buying mobile automation solutions. Third is that KION , our company with ITS segment, with SCS segment, with a Dematic IQ software platform, has perfect prerequisites to leverage synergies from our production, from our technology. Last but not least, number four is that KION , with the sales force of STILL, with the sales force of Linde, with the sales force of Dematic, can leverage cross-selling opportunities.
As Gordon mentioned before, it is somehow the best of both worlds, ITS and SCS overlapping. That is mobile automation. Let me come to the market. The market is today, KION is number one in this market of mobile automation. We have the highest market share. As Hasan said, right now, 8,000 mobile automation units are in the field at customers. These 8,000 driverless vehicles, they carried more than 3.4 billion pallets, and they made a distance of more than 300 million kilometers. Now, again, think back of automobile industry, passenger cars. I think we are even exceeding passenger cars with this. 8,000 fully autonomously driving vehicles since many years and making 300 million kilometers of autonomous driving. This is a proof of the unique experience KION already has in this industry. Of course, we have clear growth targets.
You can see here the columns, expected growth of more than 50% per year. This is dramatic, summing up to EUR 11 billion in 2023. Why is mobile automation so attractive for our customers? Let me come to this. It's very simple because for a customer, installing a mobile automation solution is simply beneficial from a financial perspective. You can see here in the middle a chart about the payback of a mobile automation application. This is not a qualitative chart. This is a quantitative chart based on a real customer installation in Europe. This customer faced the situation that roughly 80%, 80% of the cost of operations is cost for driver, usually. If you take the installation, buy a truck, pay a driver, driver is 80%. Now installing a driverless vehicle, a mobile automation vehicle, it's very attractive.
Second is that, of course, today, and I think Hasan already mentioned this, we have a lack of workforce. Even if you are willing to pay the driver, it's not so easy to find them. There is another reason. If some of you already visited a warehouse or a plant, and if you look at industrial trucks, most of them have scratches. They are damaged because the drivers, unfortunately, do damage trucks. They make accidents. If you look to a mobile automation truck, usually you don't find any scratches because they don't make accidents. This is also a significant cost factor. Last but not least, these mobile automation solutions are more flexible than solutions that have fixed installed equipment like conveyor belts. That is a clear economical reason behind this dramatic growth of the mobile automation market.
Now, let me briefly touch the technical systems we provide or that are existing on the market. Basically, there are three segments of mobile automation vehicles or AGVs, however you call them. KION is the only company in the entire industry offering all three segments. On the left, you can see the so-called bespoke solutions. These are extremely customized vehicles, one or two built, but very, very specific. They are not produced on an assembly line. They are produced on a standplace. They are, of course, quite expensive. In the middle, you find the small batch solutions. These are also handmade vehicles. You build 10, 15 of them, also not on an assembly line, not mass-produced vehicles. They are these small batch solutions in the middle. On the right, you can see what KION is now targeting for massively. These are serial solutions.
These are industrial trucks, as you can find them today, that are automation-ready. They are equipped with the technology you need. Just plug in an automation kit, and then you can use them as an AGV, as a mobile automation equipment. Today, we have in the bespoke segment 5% market share. In the middle, small batch solution, we have roughly 55%. On the right, serial solution, you have 40% today. What you see here on the slide, 25%, and on the right, 70%. This is an expected shift. KION is exactly focusing on this shift, and we provide vehicles being produced in our warehouse plants that can be easily adjusted to mobile automation trucks.
Last but not least, why a fourth reason why KION is able to lead the industry and will, of course, lead the industry on a sustainable basis, this is a cross-selling capability we have. You find two examples here. One is for lower complexity installations, so 5, 10, 9 units, AGVs driving. This is a company called ZKW. This is an Austrian automotive supplier producing lamps, roughly 9,000 employees. They installed a system based on STILL trucks, cross-selling together with Dematic. These trucks are controlled by the Dematic IQ software platform. On the right side, you can see two cross-selling examples. One is an e-commerce application in the United States with 570 units, also together with Dematic, STILL, and Linde in this case. Some of these trucks are even powered by fuel cells.
On the bottom right, you can see the already published Menards deal, which has been a cross-selling activity between Dematic, Linde, and STILL with more than 600 units. That is why KION will lead the industry in mobile automation. To give you a much better impression of what mobile automation is, I have a video for you.
Yeah. Let's look again at this single page of the investment highlights. You know, if you kind of review the entire day that we've spent together, the same facts keep coming up. First of all, this is just a great, wonderful market to be in. It's an attractive market. It's a growing market. I think you've seen enough examples here. Technology is important for the changes in the market going ahead. We are definitely a technology leader.
The changes we've made to the business, both in our services, our production footprint, the way how we do business digital, makes us an increasingly more resilient business model. We are less up and down, much more resilient going forward. We have a clear plan to invest in the future. I hope you understood the background of some of these investments that we made. After all of that, we also have a laser focus on our cost, on our efficiency, and profitability. I think these investment highlights truly do support our path going forward and our profitable growth. On a personal note, I would really like to thank all of you for coming here today and taking the personal time, which is not a selbstverständlichkeit, as we say in German. It's not taken for granted. We really appreciate it.
Thank you also for those of you that joined us via the webcam for the presentation. We would have loved to have you here. Maybe the next time we'll have the opportunity. Our next touchpoints with each other will be the quarterly statement for the first quarter, and that will be in April. We look forward to the roadshows and contact we have with all of you coming up. It's an exciting time. I'm very optimistic about our business, and I thank also the team, everyone, for the great work, great preparation that everyone has done. I think it was a very good event to tell the story of KION emerging and leading the industry. Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, and safe travels back home.
Thank you.
Thank you, everybody.