Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Lufthansa Group Capital Markets Day 2025. I'm Marc Nettesheim from Investor Relations, and I'm really glad that you all made the effort to come here to Munich today. It's the first Capital Markets Day since 2019. Many things are going on in our company, and we are looking very forward to telling you where we stand today and where we are heading tomorrow. Let me give you a quick run through the day and introduce to you the speakers that you will see on stage here today. We'll kick it off with our CEO, Carsten Spohr. He'll talk about the market environment, our strategy, and our integrating operating model. And then we'll talk about our non-hub airline business units. For this, the CEO, Jens Bischof, for Eurowings, CEO, Ashwin Bhat, for Lufthansa Cargo.
We'll both speak about their strategies and outlook, and the COO of Lufthansa Technik, Harald Gloy, will talk you through the progress they're making on the growth program, Ambition 2030. Then for passenger airlines, Carsten will again talk about our market position, the strength of our connectivity, and the growth areas going forward. Then our CCO, Dieter Vranckx, will talk you through how we're going to achieve this growth ambition through a commercially integrated offer and an integrated setup. After lunch break, you will hear about what role fleet modernization and fleet productivity are playing in our value creation. This you will hear from Stefan Kreuzpaintner and Alexander Feuersänger. These two gentlemen are responsible for the question on how many aircraft, which aircraft are being bought, where to allocate them, and which route is being flown by which airline.
Thereafter, our CTO, Grazia Vittadini, will talk you through our innovation capabilities and projects, both facing the customer and behind the scenes, and then Jörg Beißel, CFO of our main airline, the Lufthansa Airlines, will give you an update on the Lufthansa turnaround program. He'll do this together with our group CFO, Till Streichert, who will also speak about group-wide transformation measures, and finally, everything you have heard up until then will come together in our new midterm financial targets, which will, of course, again be presented by Till Streichert, and then there will be a room for questions and answers. If you look towards my right-hand side, you will see an aircraft. It's a new A350-900, and during lunch break and after the Q&A session, you will have the opportunity to walk through that aircraft and get a first-hand impression of our new premium product, Allegris.
This aircraft has arrived from San Francisco today in the morning and will leave to Bangalore in the late afternoon, so it has to push back exactly at 4:50 P.M. in order to generate EBIT for our new midterm targets, just to make you aware of that, and Carsten, I think this A350 is a perfect proof point for us now for real entering the new level, the next level in terms of quality, value creation, and productivity, and with that, let's kick it off. Over to you.
Yeah, Marc, thanks, and of course, also on not only my behalf, but on behalf of the whole executive board and more or less the whole top management, welcome to Munich for what I believe is an overdue Capital Markets Day, and having it in Munich, I think, is a message in itself.
If I think about our competitors them having a Capital Markets Day, I'm pretty sure they always would be in Paris, London, Atlanta, Chicago. I'm going through my biggest competitors. I guess Doha, Dubai, they don't have Capital Markets Days. There's no Capital Markets. So that's an obvious thing to do. In our case, there is no such obvious home of Lufthansa, and I think Munich is a message in itself. We are here indeed because this is a favorite hub of our passengers. It's also a favorite hub of our, or more or less favorite hub of our controllers because we own part of this building, 40%. So fees and charges come back to a certain degree to our P&L. But it's also sending a message in itself. What's different about the Lufthansa Group than our large competitors?
In German, we have the famous saying, "Keine Zukunft, ohne Herkunft." In English, I think it's, "You know your roots. You have to know your roots to know your future." So let me, even though we want to talk about midterm targets today and of course the future, let me take you a little bit back to where Lufthansa Group comes from and Lufthansa comes from and why we are doing things a little bit differently than others that have to. Some of you might know it started, of course. I leave the pre-war days away for today, which is what we are celebrating soon with 100 years of the first Lufthansa. But we go back to 1955 when Lufthansa, after being grounded for 10 years due to the Allied decisions, had to go back to compete within Europe initially. And this was all regulated.
So very soon, you know, the so-called economic miracle of Germany and, of course, the economic power of Germany brought Lufthansa in the front line. But then in the early 1980s, when first liberalization from the US and then hub management as the two driving forces of global aviation came to Europe, our predecessors realized there's no way that you stay in the top league, even in Europe, without a major catchment. And there's only two major catchments in Europe in those days. It was Paris, obviously, after London. And it was obvious, if we just compete in the same business model as our largest competitors in Paris and London, we will not get anywhere and we'll be maximum number three forever.
Many decisions, which we will be talking about today, were born in those days to focus not only on the passenger business, but also to focus on cargo, with Germany still being the largest export economy in the world. Technik, Lufthansa Technik, which was created in the 1990s, was such a big part of German engineering and Lufthansa engineering and way of thinking. People realized this is more than just an internal service unit. That was more or less the birth thought to create a Lufthansa Technik, now number one in the world. Harald will talk about it. Also, Frankfurt, physically, you're all too young to remember, half of it was owned by the U.S. Air Force. So that airport, as large as it looked, did not give any room at all to expand with the growth rates people expected. The second hub was created.
And all of us who ever worked in network management more than one week will know that having two hubs is much worse than having one hub because physically, the number of connections, of course, is best when you have a mega hub like in Istanbul or Dubai. But even that eventually showed Lufthansa will not be able to play the role that the German economy, being our legacy, would allow us to play. And future decisions were driven by that. To create a global alliance was more or less done and innovated by Lufthansa. To have joint ventures, to consolidate without doing M&A, Lufthansa, and we'll show you later, still number one in this regard in the world.
Pushing Cargo and Technik, already mentioned, but also one day when all of our competitors more or less reduced their networks to their hubs only and gave up the non-hub services to the big low-cost carriers which entered Europe. We in Germany, we in Lufthansa said we can't do that because the economic power of Germany is so well distributed. We need to make sure that we don't lose all these catchments as a market, which is how initially Germanwings, and after that failed due to too high cost, Eurowings, which Jens, the CEO, will talk about in a minute, were created. What we are doing in a way is paying tribute to our history and the geographical disadvantage we have at least compared to our European competitors and of course even more to some other global competitors. We will now take this to the next level.
This is why we invited you today. We believe that we have now found answers, structures, made the right investments, right decisions to bring this company to the next level, which will not only take care of the disadvantages, but actually leverage that different business model to create value others cannot create. You are lagging behind. We'll be very open and frank to you about this today and the reasons behind it, some internal, some external. But we believe there is a strategy built on what I just explained to you in our history, which will allow us to create value for our shareholders as a European number one, which we are by now, which others cannot do as easily. And of course, in the end, we'll look forward to discuss that with you.
So now being number one by size, whatever it is, ASKs, number of aircraft, having a portfolio, especially of course Lufthansa Technik playing a role in its own, others don't have, having come to a fairly integrated model of multi-hubbing, we will now also take to the next level. And Dieter Vranckx, our Chief Commercial Officer and our Chief Network Officer, will talk about that. And by that, also creating some ability to manage the company through crisis is, I think, part of the storyline today. Not again ignoring our geographical disadvantage, but turning it into an upside. Think about the economy of Germany, which is finally picking up by the way we come to that. So this is where we are today. We strongly believe in Lufthansa. Size matters. Size also has downsides. Size creates complexity. Size can sometimes make it more difficult to manage your staff.
Generally, the smaller the airline, the more happier the staff is. So that's a challenge internally, but also for our external competitors who are even larger than us. But in the end, in this industry, with more consolidation to come and the large non-European carriers already one day, some of them today dominating in terms of size, you know, Lufthansa is number four in the world and all three ahead of us are the three American mega carriers. We need to turn the size into an advantage also on the non-size-driven KPIs, which we have worked on hard over the last years: operational stability, customer satisfaction. And mentioned again, for us, market and size is not passenger only. It is always also looking at cargo and Lufthansa Technik. And my favorite number about Technik, I'll come to that.
The size of MRO is just as large as the size for airplanes every year. We'll come to that later on, which shows you that this topic probably even today, as we talk about it more, doesn't get the same attention it deserves. Coming out of the crisis, going through the crisis, we have, we want to be honest here, some reds, some greens, some grays. We definitely lag behind some of our competitors when it comes to financial performance. And also until this summer, we lagged behind in operational performance. Why is that? I think, and I'm the one responsible, so happy to take the blame, we probably cut a little bit too deep in COVID. We didn't know, like nobody, what was coming. We knew that we will not get any free money. It will all have to be paid back at fairly high interest rates.
We didn't have a shareholder like my friends in IAG with Qatar, who basically said, "We'll take you through whatever it takes." So we cut deep. And we were even complimented for that by the capital markets. And thank you for that because it helped in dark days. But looking back to it now, we probably cut deeper than the recovery would have required us to do. And then, welcome to Germany, the inflexibility of our labor markets, the inflexibility of our infrastructure partners made it even more difficult to overcome that disadvantage. So here we are. And you fortunately not anymore on the customer and operation side, but on the financial side, we are not where we were compared to our peers before the COVID. And also today, of course, one of the messages is that we will get back and beyond.
In COVID, it was very much focused on saving jobs. After COVID, we focused on the employees. After COVID, it was very much about ramping up, so we focused on customers, and now it's time for shareholders again. I think that's a natural logic running an airline, but for sure, it's not a coincidence that we invite you all here today, and we want to show you how we want to get there to create more value than at least we have done in the past. That, of course, includes very obvious KPIs. You already read, we believe, and Till Streichert will go into this in more detail. We believe that we can easily double our margins in the next years. Why? Because we believe in our transformation programs. We have seen already the best operational performance this summer of the last decade.
We definitely believe we can even bring that up further next year. And that's a basis for customer satisfaction. It's a basis for financial performance. We have an unseen number of airplanes to be rolled out. We will touch that numerous times. The head of the fleet management will also talk to you, Alexander, but also I will touch on this in my second part because this has such a huge leverage that even we, with all the history and all the big orders we have done in the past, have never seen anything like it. And also, as I mentioned, for us, still 25% of our turnover comes from Germany. And that market obviously has been a downside over the last years. And we believe strongly that we have seen the worst here as well with the stimulus and others. Overall, our strategy is an element of stability.
A big ship with 105,000 people, you don't turn on the spot and you shouldn't even touch the control wheels too often, too significantly. It's my view what a strategy is all about. It has to create some stability because some of the decisions we take are done for decades. You don't buy ITA to make money the next two years. You buy it for decades to be part of your group. If you order an aircraft now, it joins our fleet in the early 30s. So I think this industry is about long-term value creation. Therefore, it's about long-term strategy. So our strategy, you've read before, you've seen before, will not surprise you because we believe in things like the multi-hub, multi-AOC, and multi-brand model.
We believe to maintain the leading European cargo company, Lufthansa Cargo, global role of a leading MRO, Lufthansa Technik, we're not going to give up. Maybe why there's somebody in the back office. This is very much creating an echo here. So can you turn that down, at least on stage maybe for me? Otherwise, it will be a pain for the whole. Thank you. All right. So this in general is something which will take you through the day, and you see adaptations. You will see and hear where we have to adjust our strategy, where we want to be even more strict in applying our ROCE strategy of putting our investments where profitability and returns for shareholders is highest, but in the end, we believe that's a strategy built for the future we're proud of, and that brings me to how the company is set up.
Also, this will not surprise you. We sit on four strong pillars, by far the strongest, of course, our multi-hub airlines, which create more or less EUR 27 billion in revenues in 2024. Then point to point, very much again rooted in the German fact that the economic power is so much spread out in Germany compared to Paris or in Barcelona and Madrid or in Istanbul and other countries. Logistics we'll touch on later in MRO, already mentioned a couple of times. Of course, it's a story and a success story in itself. On top of that, we try to create synergies as much as we can, and I will come to this in a minute, how we do this, how we're going to do it differently from now on, but this business model also in certain aspects at least creates something like a natural hedge.
You saw that in the crisis when passengers were basically grounded, cargo took off. In our case, of course, with record results. Also, we all know about the volatility of the passenger business, cargo even more volatile, MRO, very much a long-term stable B2B business. Harald will come to this, so there's an element of a natural hedge in here, which we believe creates value, and there's also, of course, internal synergies which create value. If I think about the Pratt & Whitney disaster, we are able to bring our aircraft back almost half the time our competitors do because Lufthansa Technik and their capabilities can be used. When I talk about the business model being adapted, let me talk briefly about this. We obviously have the four pillars again I just showed you.
Then on the right side, you see Technik and Cargo very much doing their own business, are only attached to the headquarters by the corporate functions. Sometimes for the management, it's already too much, right, Harald, and right, Ashwin? But at least the other functions leave you alone. And that's obvious. You have corporate audit, you have investor relations, naturally. You have the legal department. Of course, they are part of Lufthansa, 100% fully consolidated. Or think about top management rotations. Of course, they are part of this. When we then move a little bit to the left, point to point, we call it aligned. Jens Bischof and his team, and we will come to that after my speech, already has more freedom. Think about IT, Navitaire, driving point to point. Of course, the full-fledged Amadeus driving all our hub airlines.
Also, the brand expectations in point-to-point are different than they are in the multi-hub service. The overlap is limited. So already there, the airline group functions you see in the upper left have an impact, but not to the same dimension as they do for, of course, on the left, the fully integrated hub airlines. Currently, obviously, you know, starting with Lufthansa, Swiss, Austrian, and Brussels – four, we just about to add ITA to this. We'll come to this later on. Dieter will explain to you on the integration process. And that we take to the next level where we kind of follow the logic that when you are a customer of the Lufthansa Group as a passenger customer, not talking cargo and Technik now, as a customer, your interfaces are all Group: call centers, frequent flyer program, sales channels around the world.
When you then are turned into a guest on board of one of our airlines, the airline takes over. So there is the CEO of Austrian, Annette. She will make sure that when you enter the world of Austrian, the lounges in Vienna, the check-in counters, and of course, the airplane, Austrian takes care. Brand, catering, the service on board. So that's a little bit how we try to draw a line, how far we want to go in integration. We believe in multi-brand. There will be no such thing as a Lufthansa Switzerland also in the next years. But again, back office functions, wherever you are perceived as a customer. And don't forget, half of all customers in Lufthansa who connect in the Lufthansa Group already use more than one brand. And also, as you might know, in our case, connecting customers are the majority.
We only have a third of point-to-point customers. So that shows a little bit the logic, and we'll come to more detail, especially Dieter, throughout the day. All this is based on a team of more than 100,000 people. And if I may say, when we talk to each other from the financial point of view, as corporate people, we sometimes see HR and people as a burden. We love to talk about the overpaid pilots and the overpaid pension schemes. And when we announce like today that we will definitely become more efficient on the admin side with 20% of 20,000 non-operational people leaving over the next year, the share price goes up because in a way, we know the cost will come down.
But if I compare our business to the U.S., I'm very happy to say that still staff in our industry in Europe and surely in all modesty in Lufthansa is an upside to our business because we find and attract people which not only other airlines cannot, even other companies cannot. When I talk to other German CEOs, they all complain about the difficulties to recruit and how demographics make it difficult for them. In our case, we have 30 applications per open position. So I think it's important to maintain the balance that staff in our industry is not only a cost element, but rather a USP for those who know how to manage it, and we've put a lot of focus on that.
So coming to an end of my little opening, as I mentioned before, by far the most important, of course, are our passenger airlines, where we have lately, through operational improvements, be it technically, regularity, punctuality, but also be it service elements all the way from catering to lounges come a long way. Of course, by far the most important of this is the Lufthansa Airlines turnaround. The boss of this program, together with Till, will present you in the afternoon where we are going, how we're going to achieve the target of EUR 2.5 billion uplift by 2028. But also all the other airlines are not at the margins where we want them to be. Even Swiss, also the CEO is here. He is the master of the class inside Lufthansa. But when he meets his friends from Iberia and British Airways, I tell him, "Shape up, Jens.
You're not yet matching the real competitors." We come to this because we believe that everybody in the Lufthansa Group can move forward. Again, if there is one such thing as a single leverage lever, it is fleet. We'll be talking about that briefly now in more detail tomorrow. We're currently operating the way too high number of 13 different wide bodies in our various fleets. The record number of six of these airplanes will come down over the next years. Actually, the majority already in 2026. I was reading the Bernstein report. How could Lufthansa get into that mess in the first place? Many reasons. Probably big mistakes in the 1990s of ordering too many 340s instead of 777s. Ordering too many 340s versus 330s as well. That's a price you pay for more than 20 years later.
Also, surely some bad luck when we looked at the 777 being ordered in 2013 and supposed to be delivered in 2020, now being delivered 2026. But also, of course, the complexity of non-homogeneous growth when you do M&A. Okay? When you buy an airline, like now we bought ITA, they bring along the 330-900, which we deliberately had decided not to buy. So it does take some time to clean up. But depending if you count the 777X and the 777-300 as one or two aircraft types and how you count the 350-900 to the 1000, we end up between six and nine types as of the end of this decade, creating a huge leverage. Some numbers next to it. The operational assets fleet will go up to 814. By 2030, more than 200 of that will be wide bodies. Next-gen aircraft will go almost to 60%.
The wide body share, as mentioned, will grow, and we'll come to this in the afternoon, faster than the narrow body share because we see there is room for consolidation on the customer side. Point-to-point is what I mentioned before, a big part of our success very much based on the logic of the German market. That's why I've now invited Jens to join on stage because I also want to be honest to you because some of you are sometimes honest to us. How good is the track record of Lufthansa when it comes to delivering a turnaround story? And sometimes management you perceive as not being perfect. Sometimes, at least for the Germans in the room, we know that this is not an easy country to do restructuring and a turnaround.
But I think Jens has proven the best in class in Eurowings, where many, many never believed that we ever make money on non-hub flying. And now you're among the highest margins in the group. So thanks for listening. You'll be back to you on markets in a few minutes, but I'll hand over to Jens now for our success story of Eurowings and Germanwings to a certain degree was before that first. Thank you.
Thank you, Carsten. Thank you. And the whole story is three slides long and 10 minutes. So just to manage expectation. Thank you very much. I'm happy to take over the baton from Carsten. And certainly, as you can see, I will introduce really briefly the business description and the business model of Eurowings on the one hand side.
I'll try to lead you a little bit around the turnaround stories, but also more importantly in the third slide, where we're heading to and what is up next in order to boost even profitability. So Eurowings is basically the point-to-point airline of the Lufthansa Group, focusing on point-to-point Europe and, of course, also on medium haul, especially with the new technology, the Neo is in our fleet. And we are based on a value for money concept. What does it mean? It basically means that we are operating like a low-cost airline on the one-hand side, simple, easy, efficient, productive. On the other side, we have an enhanced customer experience. As an example, we are fully compatible for our frequent flyers when it comes to the status benefits, especially on board and on the ground.
Our strategic role within the Lufthansa Group is certainly that we're looking after the German big cities aside from Frankfurt and Munich, which basically means, as Carsten already elaborated, we do not have a Paris, we do not have a London, but there are many centers of gravity, and we're covering the catchments around Stuttgart, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, where we've in the meantime achieved the market leadership. In total, we're operating 13 bases throughout Europe, eight in Germany and five around in Europe. And we are operating on a size of about 120 aircraft right now. We're the market leader, as I said already, in four German catchments, very important. And we are also scaling quite significantly our presence in Berlin.
We have tripled our presence over the last two years in Berlin, which makes the Lufthansa Group the biggest operator out of Berlin, which is certainly a very, very important task, and our stronghold on a European level is, of course, Mallorca, where we have the biggest European base with almost 10 aircraft stationed there and more than 400 weekly flights to and from Palma de Mallorca in summertime, and then we operate also selective other European bases. We're the biggest and largest leisure airline in Germany, so we have shifted the focus from business focus to leisure focused over the COVID time, and with 60% leisure share in our network, we're basically creating a nice share and participating from overproportional growth, which is happening on the leisure side, where still 40% of our network is dedicated to business and EU city destinations.
We have two AOCs, one in Germany, one located in Malta, which gives us high flexibility in order to use the production setup in this regard. And we're scaling properly. As I already said, we've tripled our presence in Berlin, as an example, by times three over the last two years. And also our ancillary revenues have doubled over the last three years. We compare ourselves a little bit more to Transavia and Vueling in order to make that clear because we're supporting the Lufthansa Group in the backyard, as I said, here in Germany, especially, but also throughout Europe. And of course, as you can see from the rather dark days in 2019, where the margin was significantly negative, we have managed during and after COVID a margin improvement to a sizable 7%, which certainly should not mean the end of what we're doing.
Brings me to the next slide. That was a little bit the legacy Carsten was talking about. We had a lot of legacy like the predecessor company like Germanwings. We even were operating long-haul services from decentral cities in Germany, actually subleased by another company, another group company. We also had to digest the integration of 50% of the Air Berlin fleet when the insolvency happened in Air Berlin. And as you can see, if we look back into 2018, and that's just an example and not the worst example, where we lost about EUR 230 million in EBIT every year. And as I said, sometimes even more. Whereas right now, we have turned around the company quite significantly. I would say we've cleaned it up. We are looking at the short and the medium haul with the two AOCs.
We are basically right-sized, which means we dimension ourselves according to the winter needs. And the summer peaks are basically covered with wet lease operation, which also gives us a nice advantage on the cost side because we don't have to carry over the costs over the winter for the entire 120 aircraft, which we have. There's a huge lift, as you can see, in the P&L of the Lufthansa Group. And I believe it's a great fit to the strategy of the Lufthansa Group because we were also awarded by Skytrax recently with a four-star award. And now in 2025, we've been named the best low-cost airline in Europe. But there's more to come. As I said, I think if we look on executing the strategy, there are three major fields I want to talk about.
Number one, it's obviously new fleet coming in, new aircraft, the value proposition based on the value segment we're operating in, and also the leisure expansion. Of course, the new fleet is a big issue for us. We're still operating out of the 100 own aircraft, which we have. We operate 30 A319 still, which is on the CEO side, classic engine option, with the award of 40 new Boeing 737 MAX 8, which the group assigned to Eurowings. We're able to increase the range of the fleet, which gives us more opportunity, especially on the medium-haul routes. It does obviously increase the earning capacity quite significantly by 39 seats if you compare it to the A319. But even if we substitute some of the A320s, we will even earn nine seats more as earning capacity.
And of course, the efficiency, especially on the longer rounds, are up to 30% lower operating costs, lower emissions, lower fuel burn versus the previous generation. If we look at the value proposition, we are now introducing, actually in eight weeks from now, on our Berlin-Dubai route, which we serve non-stop, we are introducing a premium business seat, which is a more comfort and more spaceful seat in the business class on the medium-haul routes. It's a very flexible concept, which is great because we can take the seats out overnight and restool basically for all economy usage if we need it. And that makes it, of course, very, very efficient. And we see that there is a huge revenue and yield uplift, which we will generate versus the current business class, which is the continental setup, as you all know from shorter routes.
It also will lift our NPS significantly, by the way, at 45 right now. So that's paying off also very nicely. And certainly, it will also boost our ancillary revenue performance. That brings me to Eurowings Holidays, which is an expansion in the leisure segment. It's actually asset light. We used to operate this in a commission model, but as of this year in 2025, we formed an own entity in the leisure arena and created our own tour operator. But asset light, because we will not own hotel beds, we're just focusing on the tour operator segment. Like you know that from jet2holidays.com or basically also from easyJet holidays, we're growing significantly. It's already a sizable triple-digit million business, which is already existing. It's delivering nice returns because the sweet spot for us is certainly we can do a lot of direct sales.
We have 23 million customers each year at Eurowings. We have over 40 million enrolled members in Miles & More. So we can use the strengths of the group in order to boost the direct sales of Eurowings Holidays. And that will bring us also not only to Germany's top 10 tour operators over the next few years, but will also be reflected in our margins, which we generate. Which basically means Eurowings has evolved to a successful and efficient point-to-point business model within the Lufthansa Group. I think we are a good complement to the group with the focus I just described. There's a significant contribution to the group's P&L. We have restructured. It's completed. We're delivering on the strategy. And we're benefiting on the other side of the group by using fleet advantages, fuel advantages, procurement, corporate sales, and so on and so forth.
And we're basically the speedboat a little bit for the Lufthansa Group. If you look at the premium business seat, you will also see that this might also point into a direction which might be useful for the group itself. We can lead the company with a great deal of entrepreneurship. Carsten already elaborated on that. And that makes us very flexible and gives us the chance to even increase the margin beyond the 7% I just showed before. And that's pretty much what I wanted to show. However, we're not the only ones who are having a proven track record in flexibly reacting to changing market conditions. The same holds true for Lufthansa Cargo, and Ashwin is already getting ready. So I would like to hand over to you, Ashwin, because my 10 minutes are up. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jens.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are all living in a disrupted, volatile, and a complex world. We experience it every day through geopolitical shifts, economic uncertainty, and in our case, supply chain disruptions. Air Cargo, even though it accounts or represents only 2% of global trade by volume, 2% by volume, accounts for 35% by value, and this shows you the strategic importance of Air Cargo for businesses. In spite of the challenges and the risks, Air Cargo continues to show resilience because globalization is not dead. It's just changing. Lufthansa Cargo stands out as one of the most trusted brands in the global Air Cargo industry, standing for flexibility, quality, and most important is expertise of its people. I would like to take you through three slides about our business, about our market, our strategy, and about our ambition.
Lufthansa Cargo operates a fleet of 22 dedicated freighters, which accounts for 50% of our total capacity. The other 50% comes from the belly of the group passenger airlines, including our newest addition, ITA Airways. Just to give you some context, the belly capacity of ITA alone equals to three 777 freighters. This supports our mission of enabling global business. In the next coming months, we will also be combining the belly capacity of Swiss International Air Lines, ensuring that the total cargo capacity of the group is managed out of one hand. Lufthansa Cargo is focused on profitable growth. We do that by leveraging our global presence and our network strength. In addition, we target high-yield and care-intensive market segment because the brand that we represent is highly valued in this segment. There are two proof points for this growth story that I'm telling you.
You see here on this is the first: our market position. Our IATA revenue freight ton kilometer ranking has increased or risen from number eight in 2020 to number four mid of this year. The second one proof point is our financials. In 2019, our EBIT was 1 million EUR, and it has risen in 2024 to 251 million EUR. While Air Cargo is inherently volatile, there are opportunities in this volatility. That's what Lufthansa Cargo leverages, the volatility by bringing stability as well as reliability to our customers and translating this volatility into tangible values. With that, I come to the next slide, which is about our market. Despite the volatility and uncertainty, Air Cargo is forecasted to grow by 3.2% annually through 2028. For the period January to June 2025, Air Cargo grew by 3.1%.
And for the same period, Lufthansa Cargo grew by 7.5%, clearly outperforming the market or the industry. And that's what you saw in the previous slide in terms of our ranking coming to number four for IATA freight ton kilometer. While our hub and being based in Germany and our hub in Frankfurt is clearly an advantage for us, managing the bellies of the group airlines makes us the home carrier in five out of the top 10 air cargo markets in Europe, which collectively accounts for two-thirds of the total air cargo volumes in Europe. And that's a huge advantage when the trade landscape is shifting to have a diverse catchment area. And that's what we try to leverage. Obviously, having hubs around Europe also gives us the operational flexibility during these uncertain or volatile times.
Air cargo is growing, and Lufthansa Cargo is well placed to grab those opportunities by its market presence and serving the diverse demand base. Also, I would say the evolving demand base, which is coming, which brings me to the last slide. Lufthansa Cargo clearly has the ambition to be among the top three air cargo carriers in the world. Driving this ambition to become the top three is our strategy called Bold Moves, which has three focus or key areas. The first one is competitive core. The second is profitable growth. The third is our people and culture. With the advances in technology, in robotics, in automation, we want to take that advantage and focus on modernization, in cost efficiency, and in productivity. The best example of this is the EUR 600 million investment which we are making in Frankfurt.
We are building a completely new hub, which we proudly call as the future Air Cargo hub of Europe. This investment of EUR 600 million is the single largest investment of the group outside of fleet. Profitable growth. With trade lanes shifting, whereas the supply chain is being reshaped, we clearly see an opportunity. It's not just about stabilizing or about making a better presence in the market we serve. It's also about expanding, expanding into new markets, what China plus X is going to bring, or into new trade lanes, be it over the Trans-Pacific. That's what the focus is about: profitable growth. Profitable growth is also about utilizing the super cycle investment, which is happening in Europe and the rest of the world.
It's about learning new skills and, more important, creating new business models to serve new industries, which is coming up, be it semiconductors, be it pharmaceutical, aviation, or e-commerce. And that's what we have seen. Last year, the big one was about e-commerce. Now it is about server racks, which is being transported. And the last but not least is about our people. Developing talent and fostering new culture is great to execute successfully our strategy. But since Air Cargo is a people's business, developing people and having the right people is clearly a competitive advantage. Lufthansa Cargo is going to navigate the complexity and the volatility which we see around in the world.
We have the people, we have the expertise, we have the network, and more important, the people delivering value to our customers and stakeholders, but also fulfilling our purpose of connecting people, cultures, and economies in a sustainable way. And if I may add, one shipment at a time. Thank you very much. Open for any questions during the break. While Lufthansa Cargo is looking to become the top three in the world, there is already a business unit within the group who's number one in their area, Lufthansa Technik. Last year, you heard them during the Capital Markets Day. They presented to you their strategy. And today, we have Harald Gloy, Chief Operating Officer, to give you the status. Harald, stage is all yours.
Thank you. All right. Thank you. And thank you, Ashwin.
Indeed, we presented our Ambition 2030 strategy to you in Hamburg about 10 months ago. Today, it's all about reconfirming this strategy. For a little recap, Lufthansa Technik is the OEM independent MRO provider. We have a broad range of products and services in our portfolio. We call it nose to tail. A big portion of our business is based on long-term contracts. We do have a symbiotic relationship with the Lufthansa Group and the Lufthansa Group Airlines. I would say much more than Carsten said, just corporate functions. There's much, much more we work together, of course, and this is important for us on a market-based arm's-length market principle. This strategy is supported by the MRO market development, a market which is resilient, which is growing, and which has a market size of about $150 billion.
In 2024, our revenue grew to more than EUR 7 billion. We achieved a record EBIT of more than EUR 600 million, which led to a robust EBIT margin of 8.5%, and this shows we are on track and we are on our way to deliver on Ambition 2030. Ambition 2030 comes with clear financial targets, as already also presented in Hamburg, and for 2030, these are more than EUR 10 billion in revenue, more than 10% EBIT margin, more than 50% cash conversion, and about 15% ROCE. We do realize our Ambition 2030 strategy by focusing on these three strategic layers. First, we underlie our claim as leading MRO provider with investments in capability and capacity on a worldwide basis, and there are major examples to come in a few moments. The second layer is that we contribute significantly to transform our industry through digital.
Of course, we also benefit from this transition. As a reminder, we are also, as part of our portfolio, a provider of software solutions. The decade to come is, of course, a decade of a big transformation. We transform also ourselves by our program, Digitize the Core. Just one highlight out of this portfolio, we are growing our digital tech ops ecosystem very successfully with the AMOS, the leading maintenance and engineering software solutions for airlines, with the AVIATAR, our prediction and analytics platform, and not to forget with flydocs offering solutions all around aircraft documentation. With all this together, we have already 11,000 aircraft being served on our digital platforms. The third layer, of course, is to grow in new products, markets, and business models.
An important element of this nowadays is, of course, defense, and we have a closer look inside in a few minutes. And now I would like to show you that theory becomes reality step by step, four examples how and where we invest to expand our business. First, I would like to go to Calgary in Canada. There we will operate a new state-of-the-art engine maintenance facility together with a test facility focusing on the most modern LEAP engine types. It will be Canada's first testing facility of these aircraft types, engine types, sorry, and we will start operations there in 2027. The second example here goes to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the U.S. There you see the abbreviation ACS. This shows that we are here talking about aircraft components, aircraft component services. There we are expanding in two steps.
The first step will be already completed in a few months from now, and we will immediately continue with a second step of expansion. We have already a significant footprint there, but we decided to grow even faster and further because the demand is there, the conditions are good, the labor market is favorable, and last but not least, we think it makes sense to serve the U.S. market even more from inside the country. The overall expansion there is about 8,000 square meters, and the workforce will grow from today about 500 employees to nearly 1,000. The third example takes us to Europe, to Santa Maria da Feira, which is located a little bit south of Porto in Portugal.
There you see the abbreviation engine and ACS, so we are not repairing full engines there, but all sorts of components coming off the engines or from other areas of the aircraft. This is another triple-digit million investment for us, and the strategic idea and target is to put much more capacity also into Europe alongside our facilities and locations, Hamburg and Frankfurt. We will have up to 700 new employees there. The first we've already welcomed, and they are already undergoing training in a rented test facility, and our own facility will also start operation there in about two and a half years from now. The fourth example here on this slide brings us to Asia-Pacific. We are talking about the Philippines, and Clark is a potential location for this. We want to further participate in widebody base maintenance business.
APEC is the right region to do so because the business is growing there. APEC attracts more and more international customers, of course, due to favorable cost position. And this is especially important for this labor-intensive product. The project is in an early stage. The Clark Airport is of interest for us because it's A380 capable and has sufficient land available. And of course, in general, the Philippines are attractive for us with high advantages in labor cost and labor availability. It is in a planning phase, and we will update you as soon as we have news on this one. Now, the examples for the third layer, defense. We all feel and witness the momentum the defense area and the defense sector has. We, as LHT, will participate and will benefit from this momentum, and we will grow beyond our former core business. What drives this development?
Of course, it's driven by rising budgets and spending in Germany, the Zeitenwende 2.0. We see pressure on performance and fleet modernization of the military fleets, and we see multinational approaches in order to strengthen Europe's defense industry. What are our proof points in this area? Of course, the German Air Force A350, A321, A319, and Globals. We support these aircraft of the special air mission wing of the German Ministry of Defense in daily operation on the technical side. We are responsible for managing the fleet for the CAMO, the Continuing Airworthiness Management Organization, and we are responsible for maintaining the aircraft, the engines, delivering components, and all sorts of spare parts. Now, the next example. Now it becomes even more military, the P-8 Poseidon aircraft.
In a few weeks, the German Navy, in this case, will begin receiving P-8 Poseidon aircraft, an armed maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft. We will be responsible for a wide range of services in flight or in service products for this aircraft type. The preparation has already started long ago, and it will not take too long when we welcome the first aircraft in our location, in our hangar in Hamburg, and our service goes far beyond the German military. For instance, we serve already the P-8 Poseidon aircraft of the Air New Zealand Military. Next is the CH-47 Chinook, heavy-lift transport helicopter. The German armed forces will receive 60 of these helicopter types for cargo and troop transport, for medical evacuation and search and rescue missions. We will take care together with others of the initial sustainment and the subsequent in-service support even of these helicopters.
Our main services include logistical support, warehousing, consumables, expendable supply, and of course, contract management, fulfillment, and product integration, so that everything goes smooth together. Another example is the Global 6000 Pegasus. With Pegasus, German Air Force is acquiring a modern system for airborne long-range surveillance and reconnaissance in short signals intelligence. Lufthansa Technik is a key subcontractor responsible for procurement and system integration of the three Bombardier Global 6000 aircraft. Finally, we come to the F-35 fighter jet. The German Air Force will receive 35 F-35s in due time. They will succeed the Tornado fighter. They will be, and they are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Lufthansa Technik is nominated being part of the industrial team to support, and we offer a wide range of product services, and now it's about that the Air Force decides who is doing what.
And with this quick insight into defense, I would say it's still, with all this broadness, it's still a relatively new area of growth for us. We're looking forward. My key message today to you is Ambition 2030 at Lufthansa Technik is in execution. And with this, we are going back to the core and the heart of the Lufthansa Group, the passenger airline business. I hand back to Carsten Spohr for digging into market environment and market positioning. Thank you very much.
You can tell there are so many good things to say, but Technik was impossible in 10 minutes, so more or less another capital markets day for Technik. And rightly so. Let's talk about the market in a broader sense, though.
This chart, I'm sure, is all full of things you already know because you do this as a full-time job to look into the markets we operate in. Maybe having our view, I will try to catch up sometime, will help. We all start with number one, understand, and I think we feel it among friends and family. Travel, especially after COVID again, has gotten a new push as being part of our lifestyle. We see it. Interesting enough, the younger our passengers are, the more they travel on leisure. You see it in the end, after retirement. We all look forward to that, I know. In between, think about corporate, think about the time constraints, fine. That, I think, is something which is there to stay. I don't see how you can turn that back.
Emerging markets, people from other parts of the world and North America and Europe start with the growing middle class to discover travel more and more. At least with our long-range flight, we dig into that market, and that's one of the reasons I come to this in a minute, and Dieter and Stefan in more detail, why we are believing to grow more on intercon in the next years than we do on cont. Leisure, replacing and even overtaking by far the replacement of corporate over the last years after COVID. We believe this will grow by three times in the next 15 years. Globally, we even have our own airlines focused on this. I'll come to this.
Without repeating what my colleagues already said, cargo, my summary for cargo is always the messier the world, the more cargo is needed because 60%-70% of our cargo is unplanned shipments. The other part is, you know, it's valuables or pharmaceuticals which have to be flown anyway. But if supply chains are in a mess, that's when Lufthansa, not only Lufthansa Cargo, unfortunately, air cargo comes in to fix it. The next years, I think we all agree, will be rather messy compared to the last years before COVID. That's the future of cargo. Then on Technik, I always repeat my favorite. Oh, by the way, on cargo, as I opened up, we have no London, we have no Paris. On cargo, we have the London because Frankfurt, but Frankfurt is for passengers. London is for passengers.
Frankfurt is for cargo, and that will stay. On MRO, I'll only repeat the number. The market has a size of 150 billion every year. That's more or less the sum of all OEMs combined, Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, and the others, which more or less says you spend as much on an airplane through its lifecycle on maintenance as you paid to buy it, which our controller, Jan Knikker, he's here, will confirm to you is true as well in Lufthansa. So that market, I think, on the OEM side has much more visibility. You all know about Airbus and Boeing. When it comes to MRO, much less visibility. That's why we are so happy to have cargo well positioned there. So all that sounds good. And again, I think you have all heard it before.
What makes me even more optimistic for the next years is the resilience we have seen. I've been around more than 30 years. I've been around in different positions through the two Iraq wars, 9/11, bird flu, COVID. COVID surely hit us. All the others, you can see a tendency that the market becomes more and more resilient, and people around the world tend to continue to fly. Now, all that combined with the supply chain for years, in my view, being restricted, not only on the first layer, Airbus, Boeing, the engine manufacturers, all three, GE, Pratt, Rolls-Royce, but also second, third, fourth tier suppliers all have huge challenges. To believe that would be overcome quickly, I think, is naive, and nobody really says that anymore. So I think for the next years, we're talking 2030, midterm, for sure, we see supply in terms of number of airplanes being restricted.
Airplanes, of course, partly are flown longer, including Lufthansa, to compensate a part of this. Good for Lufthansa Technik again, but it will not be able also in our case. We're missing 41 widebodies. We put 23 older airplanes into the air, but 18 we just couldn't find, and the routes had to be canceled. More or less, that's true for the whole industry, maybe not as much quite as it is for us. So this is a very nice balance between supply and demand, in my view, for years to come. Consolidation in Europe, I think, is an underestimated element for making our industry a more healthy and more value-creating industry. Why? First of all, we are way behind from the U.S. So also to get the right size of airlines, let's try to bring airlines more together. And we, of course, have done our share.
So we have our two large competitors in Europe. Consolidation drives rationalization. It's the small airlines which sometimes show irrational behavior in the market. Once you're part of something bigger, it's much more about value creation. It's much more about discipline. And we see that in Lufthansa, whereas the overall growth, of course, is discussed on a group level. I promise you, it would be a lot higher if all the airlines in the Lufthansa Group could decide on their own growth. Then, in my view, that's something Andrew and I, for example, don't agree on when we sometimes discuss. I think it's much cheaper to grow with full airplanes you buy than to grow with empty airplanes you buy from Toulouse and Seattle.
We spend less than €1 billion on ITA, and we more or less can have access to 100 airplanes which already arrive in our business model more or less full. We believe we can make them more full. We surely believe we can make yields higher. We surely believe we can bring the cost down. But imagine you would have that in terms of gaining market share done through buying airplanes in Seattle and Toulouse and kill, or not maybe kill, but fight for it from somebody else. So I think this effect, of course, a little bit simplified, I believe, is all driving the positive elements of consolidation. We hope there's more to come. Doesn't even need to be always us. I think it's good for the industry in general to see more consolidation. Well, size matters. I mentioned that in my opening.
As I mentioned, we are number one in terms of ASKs. Right now, we believe also for some time to be number four in the world. Maybe it's a position we cannot hold forever. Eventually, maybe the Gulf carriers or the government-owned Chinese carriers who don't need to watch out for value creation will overtake us. But it's a good position to be a global player. And it doesn't matter so much if you're number four or five or six, I think, but you want to play in that league for FFP, for your brand awareness in other markets and so on. Talking about this, it's not just important on the left that you have local brand strength.
Of course, it's also about how you create value for your brands, or in our case, the Lufthansa Group brand, which we are establishing now for that reason in third markets outside of your home markets. It's obvious when you operate six hubs, you create a connectivity which even is not matched by any single hub in Europe. So my logic from the beginning, it's much more in terms of math and network management, easier to operate one mega hub than two or three. Eventually, the business model tilts. In our case, 14, I'll show you later on, connections between Athens and New York, I think not even a mega hub of any existing size right now could offer. So eventually, we turned our downside into an upside.
We took some time, and we're definitely behind to also maintain one USP of the Lufthansa Group, which is our premium offer. The Allegris product you see at the 350 later on, I think, is still the state of the art for the industry in first class in business. Especially, please look at premium economy, especially as investors. The most profitable part of the airplane is premium economy. You like the first class better, I know, as a passenger, but as investors, make sure you check out the premium economy. And that, I think, is something where, for the known reasons, delays in certification, of course, COVID, falling behind with supply chain problems in Toulouse. We were not where we want to be with Allegris, but we're now rolling it out more or less one aircraft every three weeks, and we'll catch up quick.
That, on top of our market positioning when it comes to how valuable is the market. Everybody living in a country like Germany has many things to complain. The truth is also, though, these are the most affluent markets we have in Europe. Our average real GDP per capita is EUR 46,400 per capita. Our two competitors are quite a bit behind there if you look at this, more than 10% behind us. In our non-home markets, we very surprisingly are sometimes number two and at least number three, but also there's many where we are number one. Think about Greece, think about Eastern Europe. I think it's not only about your home position, but also your position in other markets where size matters. We, again, are wrapping this under the Lufthansa Group brand more and more. Dieter will explain this in a minute.
We try to leverage our size. When it comes to the hub positioning itself, you might not be surprised, at least the network experts among you, that we have a higher market share in our home markets than our competitors have in their home markets. That in a way makes sense because it's, again, the other side of the medal of how I opened up this morning. In Paris and London, if that's your home market, everybody wants to fly there. To fly to Frankfurt or Munich, by the way, is much less attractive by the catchment of this part. So that's why we are stronger in our home markets relative terms than our competitors in there. Or if you go to the U.S., it's easier to defend Atlanta than to defend Miami because everybody wants to fly to Miami.
Let's be honest, the only reason to fly to Atlanta is to connect on Delta, at least in my view. Don't tell the people in Atlanta I said that. Of course, I'm joking, but in relative terms, that of course applies, and that's why Delta's market position is much stronger in Atlanta than whatever American is in Miami, and the same you see here, but it's not only about the home market itself. We, of course, with all modesty, are number one with our home brands in our home markets, but you see number two and three also quite a bit the Lufthansa Group brands show up. Of course, the Lufthansa Airlines brand is still our strongest brand besides the home markets, but also Swiss, not surprisingly, plays a strong role in Austria, for example.
Or Edelweiss is able to be the number one or number two brand in Switzerland after Swiss. So I think these brands matter in our industry. And remember, I told you before, we only leverage diversity or field fight, as we call it, where it creates value. Everything else we do behind the curtain only once, even more with the business model we introduced to you later on today. And this is why we are positioning ourselves as being quite powerful with all of our brands in our home markets. Now, connectivity. Again, ideally, you would have started in the 1980s with one mega hub. We sure didn't have. We even didn't have all of Frankfurt Airport due to the military. Over the years, we created a multi-hub model.
And Stefan Kreuzpaintner, I will explain that in more detail, where over the last years already, when it came to long haul, we orchestrate that centrally. So right now, we connect Athens 14 times to New York, and more or less, that's every 45 minutes. Not exactly, but you see a wonderful spread across the day how we connect, and of course, the other way around. We have more than 18,000, almost 19,000 O&Ds in our system. We have 242 direct interconnections from all our intercon hubs. And I think not seen enough in terms of its importance is our position in the tertiary markets. Tirana, out of all places, we connect not 14 times like Athens, but six times. Nobody can do that in a single hub.
If you think about hopefully soon the Ukraine conflict coming to an end, Ukraine reopening, one day probably Russia reopening, Eastern Europe will be more important again. Basically, it's full of secondary and tertiary markets, which we are number one by far. That on a more abstract level, put into numbers, shows you, and let's stick on the right side of this chart, the breadth of our network on the X-axis and the depth. How often per week do we connect markets on the Y-axis? You see, not surprisingly, that we are over the years now with our multi-hub have passed our two better positioned competitors when it comes to the single hub. Of course, Paris and London are still very strong hubs, but the combination of our hub system creates a better position in both dimensions.
That now brings us to something which I mentioned also in my opening joint ventures. Lufthansa, again, knowing that our hub is not the same as Paris, London, New York, you name it, started very early to take our experience from Star Alliance, which we created, into the next level, joint ventures. As of today, we are operating 32 partnerships in general, not locally, but centrally, and five of them are joint ventures where we more or less act as if we were one entity, at least commercial entity. Obviously, legal entities in our industry don't exist, and that creates an enormous 30% of all revenue through partnerships, of course, United and Air Canada or United alone being as strong as all the others combined.
That has been a significant improvement of our market position in those markets and the other way around because the connectivity I just showed you our hubs provide, of course, makes us so interesting for United, for Air China, for Singapore Airlines because that connectivity nobody else can offer. And that's why this is a win-win, which has created very stable joint ventures. So I think beyond the pure financial performance, I think also the relationship element in these joint ventures is very stable because we need them more than our competitors in London and Paris need joint ventures. And we give more to our joint venture partners than the relevant joint venture partners get out of Paris and London in their own markets. So this, I believe, gives us a head start. And that, of course, brings me to my final message in terms of growth.
Where do we believe to grow in the future? We all know that currently Lufthansa is still a little bit smaller than in 2019. And the aircraft shortage in the Lufthansa main line is the main driver for this. Also, the operational challenges at the German airports in the last years will be catching up probably to 2019 next year, more or less. And we have identified three broad areas of growth. One, I mentioned it briefly, we already interconnect beyond continents because the most dynamic markets in the world are not in Europe and also not in North America. So if you want to go tap into those markets, either in other industries, you would buy or build a factory there. You can't do that in aviation. So in our case, we just fly there more often. 787 is a great aircraft to tap into new markets.
Discover and Edelweiss as brands have the right cost structure to tap into new markets. We've seen a lot more growth than con, actually by the factor of two. We believe Rome is underutilized, huge cost advantage. It's in our network the largest nonstop intercon O&D, funny enough. All the O&Ds basically on the top league in Europe are out of Paris and London. I think at number 40, Herr Kreuzpaintner, the first one shows up, which we are more or less serving as a home. That's Rome, New York. Very much underutilized by ITA, just as an example. We believe we can do a lot more in Rome. Also, geographically, it's already 1,000 km shorter towards the emerging markets of Africa and Latin America. We will try to leverage that over the next years.
And last but not least, leisure, mentioned before, growing, growing, growing in terms of our market. In the Lufthansa Group, we used to have 8% leisure only 10 years ago. We're now at 25% leisure when it comes to value creation. And we believe that with having the right airlines, which is something I think important, we can even grow that share within Lufthansa profitably. Where we are not growing, and that's the lower end, is connecting in Europe. We, at least in Lufthansa, in our multi-hub network, have too much connecting passengers, partly due to the lack of intercon capacity. You still need the fleet. And then when you have the aircraft, the seats, you fill them with connecting passengers. That's not our strategic intent. So we believe we can do a lot on consolidating connecting.
Stefan will even give you an example later on how very specifically we can serve in the future with five A320 aircraft where today we need six. And all the others will not surprise you. North America is where the money is. So of course, our growth will be allocated and prioritized due to the value creation for our shareholders, which we can achieve by it. And as this is such a big part driven by leisure in the future, we are proud to say that we probably have three because we also count Eurowings in that category airlines, which are perfectly positioned for leisure, be it their brand, be it their product, be it maybe most important their cost position. So as I mentioned, we have tripled our touristic. I should say leisure. That was not quite right.
I think the better English term is touristic share in the group. So where there is a company behind it like TUI or others where there's package deals, we brought it to 25% out of eight. We now have a combined fleet of 20 wide bodies and 150 more or less narrow bodies over the three airlines mentioned to you. And that will play a larger role in the f uture due to the, again, match of brand, product, and cost structure.
Thank you, Carsten. And yeah, we heard about growth in the markets, growth for the Lufthansa Group. And basically, I will give you an overview first on the One Group, network airlines, and the second part will be more specifically on the commercial offer.
Growth in combination with several hubs is a challenge you have to manage because we are six hubs, which we manage with all the traffic flows, and we want to grow. Therefore, we have a twofold approach to make that happen in an efficient and also revenue-driving way. First of all, on the left-hand side, you have the One Group approach. On the One Group approach, we talk about revenue management, pricing, also group brand servicing. Those are services we offer under the One Group approach. That means synergies, efficiency to get it into the market and driving more value. On the right-hand side, we still have the local airlines. As mentioned before, the brands will continue to exist.
On the local airline side, what is very important is that there is a high responsibility for operational excellence for the product, especially onboard experience, because we want to make sure that the values of the brand are also reflecting to what the customers deliver, what the customers experience, and what we deliver to the customers. At the end of the day, the question is how much of the One Group and how much of the local is the right mix going forward, and if you look at this picture, you clearly see starting from the left with the local approach going totally to the right on the group approach. If you take some of the American carriers like United, they're totally on the right. It's one brand, one approach, several hubs, but one system, everything is with one system and one approach. On the left is a total opposite.
It's a local airline with local specificities, local systems, but also local processes. Now, it's clear for us, the Lufthansa Group is moving more to the right, and moving more to the right means that we have been already moving to the right in the last couple of years. As you know, we went into matrix more or less eight years ago where we started to bundle a lot of functions, especially on the commercial side to get more synergies out of the group, and we're going to move even further to the right. Why is the left still important? It's because on the left side, you create a connection to the customer, and we all know the experience of a customer going on board an Austrian Airlines aircraft or going on board a Lufthansa aircraft.
The statement which always comes back is, "I feel already like being in Germany," or "I feel already like being at home," and then the door closes. That kind of a feeling we don't want to lose. That's where the brand value comes into play. If we look a little bit more in detail on where do we go more to the right, if you look where we were, we were not all on the left-hand side, as I mentioned before. But if you take the first three elements, which are the core commercial functions, airline steering, commercial, customer, and brand, we're basically moving the last blocks which we have, which were underaligned and unified into the One Group. Why? Because we believe there is a lot of synergy possibilities with the One Group approach on the commercial side, number one.
Number two, managing it as One Group will give us revenue potential and revenue opportunities. But also on the operation side, technology side, and Gartner will talk about it later, we are moving to the right. We're not always moving totally to the right, to the group, but we believe there is a lot of value in having development done only once and then being used for the several airlines. There is a difference between aligned and unified, whereby you can have a back-end system which is completely the same system and you just paint it in the colors of the airlines, or you have systems which you buy and you implement separately into the different airlines, everything with the highest degree of synergies. So where does ITA stand in this picture?
First of all, the reason of ITA joining our group, first of all, fourth largest economy in Europe, third largest airline market in Europe, and fourth largest global market for us as a Lufthansa Group behind the home market, U.K. and the U.S. With the addition of ITA, we have another five-star hub into our system. We have a geographic advantage because, as you know, we're looking into South America also to drive more growth there. Also ITA, with the geographical position of Rome, can be a really great match. Finally, agile setup and low cost, low location cost, those two are combined.
The experience we have, and I personally have, is that when airlines go through a bankruptcy, through a difficult time, and have a chance to reset their structures, their processes, and how they invest in the right tools, that they have a huge chance to set up not only low-cost structure, but they also have a chance to have a very efficient structure. And that's really something which, with the insolvency of Alitalia, also happened after Swissair went down and Swiss was created, Sabena went down, and Brussels Airlines was created. Also here, ITA really took advantage of that opportunity to reset structures, processes, the way they approach IT. And I visited, of course, already six, seven months ago, ITA in Rome.
And we basically, I was impressed by the fact that they have the whole management and all the teams on two floors of the building with full open space, very efficient and very driven to synergies. So on the timeline, we are aiming for the fastest integration of ITA into our six-hub system and into our group of airlines. And why? Well, because we have been learning. We have been learning first with Swiss a while ago, then with Austrian Airlines and with Brussels Airlines, how it is to integrate airlines. And in the beginning, when you have first the first airline where you basically integrate it first on the big topics, but then through the matrix, you learn on what can be done faster, what can be done earlier, and how can we speed up the process of integration.
As you can see, we have already applied for Star Alliance integration, which basically we took them out of the SkyTeam. We have the cooperation and the partnership between Miles & More and Volare, the loyalty systems. We have the Lufthansa Cargo and ITA Cargo partnership, which was very, very important. We have also moved the airlines on the hubs on Frankfurt and Munich into our hubs so we can connect them into our systems. Also, lounges, first codeshare flights have been launched. We have already 200,000 bookings on codeshare flights, which is quite an impressive number. Also here, we aim for making sure that we click them into the synergy potential of the group. At the same time, we want to keep the local atmosphere, the local efficiency of the airline at ITA.
So always the combination of those two topics are really key to how we drive the integration further. And many people ask, yeah, is it really, are there really a lot of synergies if you don't have 100% of ITA? And basically, we will have 70%-80% of the synergies we are aiming for. We will already deliver before the full ownership of ITA. As you can see, on the network and hub optimization, that's the topic which I mentioned before. We have already, we are busy with integrating them into our sales organization. I will talk to the sales about the sales organization later. Miles & More, connection to the loyalty system of Volare. We have done the cargo management, all these topics already en route. And then we have, of course, the Star Alliance integration and the integration of ITA into two joint ventures.
Knowing how important the North Atlantic is for us, but also for ITA, that's of course an important step to drive further synergies and the power of not only the group, the Lufthansa Group, but drive the power of the joint ventures as well in Asia and in the North Atlantic and to help ITA to bring them to the next level. Now probably a little bit more on the technical side, we go one level deeper on the commercial offer. The question is there, I mean, before I go deeper into the commercial offer topic, who are the customers of the Lufthansa Group? And how do we drive customer value further? First of all, we have seen that now we have already 70% of servicing of Lufthansa Group customers done through digital tools.
That could be the app, could be the dot-com, could be any other digital tool. And we will continue to drive digital competencies on the customer level because digital competencies, and that we learned the hard way during Corona, are scalable and scalable at huge amounts, whereby call centers are very efficient. But if you want 1,000 people more, it takes you at least six months until they're trained. So we believe strongly in digital competencies and digital delivery on the customer side, and not only on the servicing side, but also on the revenue generation side. We see that people who basically book in digital channels are bringing us 5% more average revenue.
And it's also because we are able in digital channels to be much more specific on what products match to which person, number one, how do we bring it to the person, and how do we sell our products? And that's really important. And all this cannot happen without digital tools which are performant. And we had some issues with the app, and we fixed that. We have currently a 4.6 rating on App Store for the Lufthansa Group App. And the Lufthansa Group App is one of the clear examples of what I mentioned before. In the background, one system, one technology, full efficiency. In the front, you have the colors of the different airlines. So it gives the look and feel of the brands. Also on Miles & More, 161% increase in monthly enrollments in 2024 compared to 2021. So we're driving that value forward.
At the end, if you deliver a high degree of digital competencies and you deliver a high degree of digital products which are appreciated by the customer, you will increase your repeat bookings. What are the four building blocks commercially we're working on? First of all, group-wide commercial steering. Now that we have moved on the whole commercial platform with network planning, also on the European side, pricing and full revenue management, we basically have all the commercial levers in place to drive more steering and to drive more value out of the group performance. The second one is the umbrella brand. As I mentioned before, the One Group part where we align strongly the synergies and where we make sure that we have one approach, we have a premium consistent delivery across the whole journey.
We make sure that we use the synergies behind the curtain, but we drive the group value in front of the curtain. The group brand comes into play. We had the group brand in the past, not this brand, but a group approach when it comes to sales, which basically a salesperson was selling four or five different airlines. But now we will also bring it onto the B2C level. Then we have the loyalty program, Miles & More, which is really supporting also the premium and the digital approach. We have the premium customer offering, which basically is something which for me has always two parts. One part of the premium offering is the hard product, seats, aircrafts. The other one is the soft one, cabin crew. We have the world's best cabin crews.
If you look at the different brands and the huge value cabin crew servicing plays into the NPS and into the values we have, the soft factors are equally important, and then we deliver a premium consistent customer experience. So if you look at the commercial steering, we basically have four key topics: the network planning and management, the sales and distribution, revenue management, and offer placement and partnership management. What is important to understand is if we say we move the group more to the right and we bundle the competencies and we work from a group approach, then we are talking about virtual teams. We want to make sure that we keep the knowledge where the knowledge is, but we bring people together in a virtual way with one process, one direction, one target, one strategy, and one way forward.
That's very important because we have competencies which basically the different airlines have been building up in the past in the different hubs. And we don't want by physically moving people to demolish all the knowledge which has been built up in the airlines. And it's important to stay very close to the operational side of the airlines. On the sales and distribution, it's a team which basically is already the longest in a full group approach. This was integrated already eight years ago. And they work fully with the approach of representing the different brands and the different hubs in the different markets which we have. So customer choice is important. Carsten mentioned it, 210 destinations and unlimited number of combinations of long-haul offers out of the different hubs and out of the different markets.
But also on the tool side, we want to excel with the introduction of AI into the pricing, revenue management, also network side. I'll come to that later. And especially cost efficiency and resilience. We have to become and be very flexible in how we adjust capacity. With the switch from more corporate to more leisure type of traffic, we also see that there is a much bigger variation in capacity between winter and summer, and that has to be managed actively. So if we look now at the network and what we are planning for, some topics we already touched before, and I won't repeat them, but the first one is growth in intercon.
While IATA is giving a forecast of around 4%, we are planning to overtake or overproportionally grow the intercon capacity because we believe there is a lot of value in the intercon markets, number one, but also on the intercon profitability. So we want to take advantage of the segments where a higher profitability is very clear. Secondly, on the connected network, we need to reconfigure the connected network. Different reasons. First one is that, of course, we have a high share of point-to-point business on the connected side, which is good and very profitable. We have a share of connected intercons, which is also very good. But we have also the non-point-to-point connect, connect Europe, Europe connect traffic, which basically is extremely low margin and which is not the traffic we want to continue to have at such a high degree.
We want to optimize the way we organize the connected network. Looking now at the picture on the left, we had to make a picture on it. If we have six aircraft flying out of the different hubs to Oslo, then the question is, do we need from each of the hubs to fly to the same destination? Isn't there a more optimal way to redistribute the capacity and to use the metal which we have in order to drive more revenue and more value? The goal must be to start optimizing the feed and the connection to Oslo out of the hubs in a way that it allows us to redeploy the capacity we free up. Because if we wouldn't fly from one hub out of the six, we would still fly from five hubs to Oslo.
We would have one aircraft with which we could offer a new destination, for example, Bergen. So therefore, we need to start looking within the group approach at the holistic picture of the connected network, the connected network development. And at the end of the day, it's very important that we have the right combination between the optimal holistic network planning from a group perspective and the best fit for the hub. So to bring that together will be the way forward. And we have also another element which is playing into this. If you fly from all the hubs to a destination, you cannot always have an Airbus A220 or an A320 to offer that capacity. You might need smaller aircraft.
If you start to fly from four or five hubs to a destination and you optimize it and you gear the traffic through those hubs, you basically are able to simplify also fleet structures on the Cont side. Simplifying fleet structure means higher operational excellence and also synergies on that side. The final part is, of course, the value, the high-value summer passengers. We have seen a lot of drive and push and shift to the leisure part. At the end of the day, a lot of leisure is nice, but it creates a lot of volatility. High peaks in summer and a lower demand in winter. We will use actively also the wet lease capacities we have to drive more efficiencies and to follow the trend of summer and winter on those traffics. At the end of the day, it's about driving more revenue.
It's about driving more value to the customer, but it's also about effectiveness and cost consciousness. And if we look at the sales teams, which we basically have integrated already years ago, we have been able to reduce the cost of sales by 1.6 percentage points in the last couple of years. And that's quite a big number because we are not a company who's spending billions on marketing or on sales. So the 1.6 percentage points is an important move to show that efficiency and delivering synergies is also there playing a role. And on the right-hand side, you clearly see that basically if you take the direct channels, which is our dot-com, our app, and the Direct Connect, which we have, is already almost 75% of our distribution.
Being able to drive more through the direct channels and through Direct Connect is giving us the opportunity not only to save cost. One percentage point of shift to the direct channels, be it dot-com or NDC, is saving us more than EUR 2 million of costs per year. But secondly, as I said before, we are able to better position the products at the customer side because we manage the channels directly. So also the IATA One Order will play an important role. It will help us to drive this digital transformation. It will help us to simplify processes. It will help us on the cost side, and it will also make sure that we have a unified retail-focused order.
Having that strategy combined with the direction we want to go in, it will help us with more synergies, also a consistent customer experience, and it will take away still some inefficiencies in between the different airlines. We're looking at 10%-15% cost reduction when we would retire from the legacy systems. And at the end, also on the revenue generation part, 2%-3% additional revenue in the scope. But also AI is something which is not stopping at our table. AI is a technology which we want to drive further. We want to make sure that we have in flight steering, in pricing, in seat reservations, in all the different commercial elements which drive revenue, we want to build AI in. We have therefore invested quite a bit in driving AI into our systems and making sure that AI supports the human factor.
And maybe not to be underestimated, the last part is that we're creating now a system which basically is going to connect the commercial network planning with the operational excellence. In the past, many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, whenever we were developing a network, we did the best to get the best network with the best commercial value. And then we checked on the operational side, how robust is this operational? Can you manage? Do you have the pilots? Do you have the productivity? Now we're going to connect them real life. And that means that there will be a constant connection between operational excellence and making sure we do the right thing for the operational side and the commercial excellence on the other side. And that's quite a powerful tool. It's in the making. A lot of teams are working on that, but that's next generation commercial.
I talked about the brand, and when we take the touch points, the lounges, the aircraft, also livery, brand architecture, but also the boarding pass, that's all driven by the commercial One Group approach. And therefore, for us, it's really important to have the Lufthansa Group because the Lufthansa Group does what? It delivers consistency. It delivers a known experience which goes across the different airlines, and it's something which is recognizable. So it should give trust. And that's why one of the values we have is trust at every altitude. That doesn't mean that the local brands don't play a role. The local brands will bring the values of the country, the values of the carrier to life, and will make sure there is a perfect harmony between the One Group on the one hand with the Lufthansa Group brands and the local brands.
Where is the difference? The difference is basically because on the top, you see this is the whole chain on the group, on the group brands with all the touch points I mentioned before. On the bottom is where the guests are or the passengers with the branding, the marketing. If we look at the current effect on the performance KPIs, we basically improved the NPS with 13 points compared to last year. We improved the customer satisfaction with seven percentage points. We have been focusing a lot on stability, a lot on delivering high quality to the customer, making sure we bring the customer from A to B in a high quality and with the perfect operational excellence element. This has been also delivering us the right values.
Coming now to the loyalty program, well, basically Miles & More, you know, is our loyalty program, but it's more than a loyalty program. It also includes payment. We just launched new credit cards in Belgium with Beobank. We launched the credit cards, a new cooperation with Deutsche Bank here in Germany and with Erste Bank in Austria. So we're driving that value further. Of course, Miles & More, as you know, has also partnerships in the market and is present in retail. But the question is, are we on the right track? And what do we see? We basically see that 17% additional revenue is coming from Miles & More members, which basically made their first redemption. 40% of the customers who redeem Miles for business class are ready to book premium cabins again. So we are starting to see a clear connection between loyalty and repeat bookings.
That's really bringing it to the next level. Increase 12 months active Miles & More members, more than 50% more active members, up to six million active members we have now, a total at the Miles & More side of 40 million. Is this enough? No, we want more because there is more to get out of a loyalty program. There is more to get out of a loyalty ecosystem. There are four key building blocks which will help us to drive the topic forward. First of all is loyalty retailing, personalized offers, member engagement, driving more active members. This is really what we are going for. Currency retailing, Miles & More, the points, everything people collect. Can we do more? Of course, we can do more.
We will dynamically expand the usage of the points, dynamically expand what we can do with the points and make sure that it's also integrated as a payment technology or a payment method. Partner retailing, we need to make sure we leverage the strategic partnerships, bring more loyalty value, and at the end, media retailing. Advertising revenue has a lot of potential, and one of the preconditions of this topic is, of course, connectivity on board, and with connectivity on board, you have immediately thousands and thousands of people which you are locked in a tube during eight hours where there is a lot of potential to drive media retailing, and what is the goal? The goal is to more than double the value we have today with a clear direction to go more on the currency partner and media retailing.
So those three gray blocks, this is what we believe in. There is a lot of future, a lot of revenue potential, and at the end, a lot of EBIT potential on those three. So we are going to change the balance between the loyalty retailing and the other elements from a 50-50 to a 70-30 to drive more value. Also, driving more additional members and active members will be a prerequisite to do that going forward. So we're leading in the premium segment. And at the end of the day, when you look at the higher share we have on the long-haul premium classes, we have the top position with 13%. We are ahead of IAG and Air France, but also on the revenue per available seat kilometer, the RASK in 2024, we were number one.
We aim at continuing that position and to expand even further our premium offer, not only on the seats, which we have launched with Allegris and we will have with SWISS Senses Live, but also with the premium airport experience. Five-star airports, Munich and now also Rome, part of the portfolio, top Skytrax awards for Frankfurt and Zurich. And we will continue to invest because we believe there is a very strong link between premium and loyalty. And if you look at the different products on the left-hand side, you basically have a beautiful example of what it means to be One Group on the one hand, but have local brands and the local flavor. We have the Allegris seat, which was developed for the premium hub airlines, which will be used by Swiss and Lufthansa.
Looking different, different touch and feel, but at the end, it's the same seat. And thirdly, we need to make sure that we also use that opportunity to flexibly adjust LOPA across the different markets. And finally, we have a very clear objective. It's not about the seats only. I mentioned the cabin crew, but also our booking channels, the technology we use, the digital tools will allow us to bring more value and to give a higher relevance to the passenger, number one, to individualize the product more. And if you go now to the dot-com, you basically, if you're booking Allegris and you click on the seat, you will get a nice picture and you will get a nice view of what it means to book that seat. So those developments and those elements are going to drive further premium positioning, but also revenues clearly forward.
This is my final slide, and then I'm coming to an end, but this is a clear view. By 2030, we will have almost all aircraft on the long haul of Swiss and Lufthansa equipped with the new seat concept. We have seen a high satisfaction of customers of Allegris, and we expect exactly the same effect on the Swiss aircraft. The willingness to pay, because at the end of the day, it's nice to bring out new seats, but are people willing to pay for it more? First of all, we have a 9% average increase in yields on those Allegris routes. So there is a clear willingness to pay for quality, number one. Number two, by having five different seats in the concept, we are able to generate additional ancillary revenues, which is the advanced seat reservation.
With the first indications we have today, we believe that with advanced seat reservation, we'll have up to one million per aircraft per year, which we can generate revenue and generate value by making sure that people have the opportunity to select the right seat for the right passenger, and not so unimportant, rebooking of 90%. We have never seen that before. 90% rebooking, people which are extremely happy with the seat are coming back to buy again an Allegris seat. People are now looking at where do I have an Allegris aircraft so I can change my travel and make sure I sit on an Allegris aircraft.
These are topics which combine excellence, premium in the product, premium in the implementation of the product, driving innovation in the market, making sure we have the tools to support the sale and the servicing of innovation, and then making sure this is done in an end-to-end base, and that's how the future looks: digital, premium, excellence, and customers which are happy, coming back again and again, driving revenue, and at the end, a lot of value for the Lufthansa Group. Thank you very much.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Welcome back from the break, and I hope you had a great A350 Allegris experience. What better topic to start with now than with fleet today? My name is Alexander Feuersänger.
I'm heading fleet management, and together with Stefan, SVP for the commercial offer, we are excited to talk to you about how our fleet modernization and productivity strategy is a cornerstone for value creation of Lufthansa Group. On that note, the fleet management unit has just recently been newly created through the merger of the former technical and commercial departments, and now with the sustainability team joining in as well. This is a newly integrated fleet management group function, which enables us to create a truly holistic view on fleet, which allows us to maximize the value along the whole lifecycle of our aircraft, from fleet strategy to acquisition to specification operations, technical operations of the aircraft to phase out, with a strong focus on lifecycle and asset management. In this new setup, we have a very clear fundamental principle. Every fleet allocation is capital allocation.
So every fleet decision we make is a capital allocation decision because all the fleet decisions we take directly impact the return on capital for Lufthansa Group, ultimately impacting the ROCE and the shareholder value. So as head of fleet management, it's my team's core duty to make sure that every fleet decision is taken with a disciplined capital allocation approach. And with this new structure, we are better positioned than ever to steer the fleet as a strategic asset across the group airlines to create both financial and operational performance while meeting our sustainability targets. Now, Stefan, to you for words of introduction.
Yeah, thank you, Alexander. Also from my side, dear ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to this afternoon and to this part of fleet management and productivity.
My name is Stefan Kreuzpaintner, and I'm responsible for the commercial offer, as the title said, and that includes network management, revenue management, and the airline partnerships we have in the group. And from a network management perspective, of course, it is essential in order to be commercially and financially successful to deploy the right aircraft, the right fleet, at the right airline within the group, the right hub, the right market, and then finally the right route level. And that basically, Alexander and myself, we do together. Alexander more from the fleet perspective and myself more from the network perspective in order to make sure that basically the assets we deploy, we make the highest returns and we increase productivity. And since we are doing that on a daily basis, we also jointly present that slot now. Over to you, Alexander.
Thanks, Stefan, and we'll come back to you in a minute, so let's talk about fleet. The vision for Lufthansa Group's fleet is very clear and ambitious. We are committed to transforming our fleet by 2030 along five core attributes. It's modernity, it's sustainability, simplicity, productivity, and flexibility, so as many of you are aware, and we mentioned it already earlier today, we invested a lot into operational stability this year. 20% of the widebody aircraft of the Lufthansa mainline have been used as operational reserves in order to cover for the deficiencies of the old technology fleet, so a lot of investment into stabilizing the operations, and that has really paid off, and it worked well. The aging fleet, however, is something that will now disappear, and our fleet will become more and more modern.
The renewed and modern fleet will exhibit much more technical reliability and will be more efficient, which will allow us to reduce the number of aircraft reserves we currently operate. Our target is to achieve a 65% ratio of next-generation aircraft of widebodies in our fleet, but our fleet will also be more sustainable. The new fleet is expected to achieve a 30% in fuel consumption reduction. This will pay into both our financial targets, but especially into our environmental targets that we strive to achieve. Moreover, the fleet will be more simplified. We will strive to reduce the complexity in our fleet, and we'll talk about that in a minute, and we will harmonize the fleet across the group, and this will streamline operational shortcomings. We will have much more reduced maintenance efforts.
We will have crewing advancements, and we will also have savings in allocating the aircraft across the group. We also plan. Thank you, Carsten. Yeah, we heard about growth in the markets, growth for the Lufthansa Group. Basically, I will give you an overview first on the One Group, network airlines, and the second part will be more specifically on the commercial offer. Growth in combination with several hubs is a challenge you have to manage because we have six hubs which we manage with all the traffic flows, and we want to grow. Therefore, we have a twofold approach to make that happen in an efficient and also revenue-driving way. First of all, on the left-hand side, you have the One Group approach. On the One Group approach, we talk about revenue management, pricing, also group brand servicing.
Those are services we offer under the One Group approach. That means synergies, efficiency to get it into the market, and driving more value. On the right-hand side, we still have the local airlines. And as mentioned before, the brands will continue to exist. On the local airline side, what is very important is that there is a high responsibility for operational excellence for the product, especially onboard experience, because we want to make sure that the values of the brand are also reflecting to what the customers deliver, what the customers experience, and what we deliver to the customers. At the end of the day, the question is how much of the One Group and how much of the local is the right mix going forward.
If you look at this picture, you clearly see starting from the left with the local approach going totally to the right on the group approach. If you take some of the American carriers like United, they're totally on the right. It's one brand, one approach, several hubs, but one system. Everything is with one system and one approach. On the left is the total opposite. It's a local airline with local specificities, local systems, but also local processes. Now, it's clear for us, the Lufthansa Group is moving more to the right. And moving more to the right means that we have been already moving to the right in the last couple of years.
As you know, we went into matrix more or less eight years ago where we started to bundle a lot of functions, especially on the commercial side, to get more synergies out of the group. And we're going to move even further to the right. Why is the left still important? It's because on the left side, you create a connection to the customer. And we all know the experience of a customer going on board an Austrian Airlines aircraft or going on board a Lufthansa aircraft. The statement which always comes back is, "I feel already like being in Germany," or "I feel already like being at home," and then the door closes. That kind of a feeling we don't want to lose. That's where the brand value comes into play.
If we look a little bit more in detail on where do we go more to the right, if you look where we were, we were not all on the left-hand side, as I mentioned before. But if you take the first three elements, which are the core commercial functions, airline steering, commercial, customer, and brand, we're basically moving the last blocks which we have, which were underaligned and unified into the One Group. Why? Because we believe there is a lot of synergy possibilities with the One Group approach on the commercial side, number one. And number two, managing it as a One Group will give us revenue potential and revenue opportunities. But also on the operation side, technology side, and Grazia will talk about it later, we are moving to the right.
We're not always moving totally to the right, to the group, but we believe there is a lot of value in having development done only once and then being used for the several airlines. And there is a difference between aligned and unified, whereby you can have a back-end system which is completely the same system and you just paint it in the colors of the airlines, or you have systems which you buy and you implement separately into the different airlines, everything with the highest degree of synergies. So where does ITA stand in this picture? First of all, the reason of ITA joining our group: first of all, fourth largest economy in Europe, third largest airline market in Europe, and fourth largest global market for us as a Lufthansa Group behind the home market, UK, and the US.
So we have, with the addition of ITA, another five-star hub in our system. We have a geographic advantage because, as you know, we're looking into South America also to drive more growth there, and also ITA, with the geographical position of Rome, can be a really great match. Finally, agile setup and low cost, low location cost, those two are combined. The experience we have, and I personally have, is that when airlines go through a bankruptcy, through a difficult time, and have a chance to reset their structures, their processes, and how they invest in the right tools, that they have a huge chance to set up a not only low-cost structure, but they also have a chance to have a very efficient structure.
That's really something which, with the insolvency of Alitalia, also happened after Swissair went down and Swiss was created, Sabena went down and Brussels Airlines was created. Also here, ITA really took advantage of that opportunity to reset structures, processes, the way they approach IT. I visited, of course, already six, seven months ago, ITA in Rome, and I was impressed by the fact that they have the whole management and all the teams on two floors of the building with full open space, very efficient and very driven to synergies. On the timeline, we are aiming for the fastest integration of ITA into our six-hub system and into our group of airlines. Why? Because we have been learning. We have been learning first with Swiss a while ago, then with Austrian Airlines and with Brussels Airlines, how it is to integrate airlines.
In the beginning, when you have first-to-first airline, where you basically integrate it first on the big topics, but then through the matrix, you learn on what can be done faster, what can be done earlier, and how can we speed up the process of integration. As you can see, we have already applied for Star Alliance integration, which basically we took them out of the SkyTeam. We have the cooperation and the partnership between Miles & More and Volare, the loyalty systems. We have the Lufthansa Cargo and ITA Cargo partnership, which was very, very important. We have also moved the airlines on the hubs on Frankfurt and Munich into our hubs so we can connect them into our systems. Also, lounges, first codeshare flights have been launched. We have already 200,000 bookings on codeshare flights, which is quite an impressive number.
And also here, we aim for making sure that we click them into the synergy potential of the group. And at the same time, we want to keep the local atmosphere, the local efficiency of the airline at ITA. So always the combination of those two topics are really key to how we drive the integration further. And many people ask, yeah, are there really a lot of synergies if you don't have 100% of ITA? And basically, we will have 70%-80% of the synergies we are aiming for. We will already deliver before the full ownership of ITA. As you can see, on the network and hub optimization, that's the topic which I mentioned before. We are busy with integrating them into our sales organization. I will talk about the sales organization later. Miles & More, connection to the loyalty system of Volare.
We have done the cargo management, all these topics already en route, and then we have, of course, the Star Alliance integration and the integration of ITA into two joint ventures. Knowing how important the North Atlantic is for us, but also for ITA, that's, of course, an important step to drive further synergies and the power of not only the group, the Lufthansa Group, but drive the power of the joint ventures as well in Asia and in the North Atlantic and to help ITA to bring them to the next level, so now, probably a little bit more on the technical side, we go one level deeper on the commercial offer, and the question is there, I mean, before I go deeper into the commercial offer topic, who are the customers of the Lufthansa Group? And how do we drive customer value further?
First of all, we have seen that now we have already 70% of servicing of Lufthansa Group customers done through digital tools. That could be the app, could be the dot-com, could be any other digital tool, and we will continue to drive digital competencies on the customer level because digital competencies, and that we learned the hard way during Corona, are scalable and scalable at huge amounts, whereby call centers are very efficient, but if you want 1,000 people more, it takes you at least six months until they're trained, so we believe strongly in digital competencies and digital delivery on the customer side, and not only on the servicing side, but also on the revenue generation side. We see that people who basically book in digital channels are bringing us 5% more average revenue.
It's also because we are able in digital channels to be much more specific on what products match to which person, number one, how do we bring it to the person, and how do we sell our products? That's really important. All this cannot happen without digital tools which are performant. We had some issues with the app, and we fixed that. We have currently a 4.6 rating on App Store for the Lufthansa Group App. The Lufthansa Group App is one of the clear examples of what I mentioned before. In the background, one system, one technology, full efficiency. In the front, you have the colors of the different airlines. It gives the look and feel of the brands. Also on Miles & More, 161% increase in monthly enrollments in 2024 compared to 2021. We're driving that value forward.
And at the end, if you deliver a high degree of digital competencies and you deliver a high degree of digital products which are appreciated by the customer, you will increase your repeat bookings. So what are the four building blocks commercially we're working on? First of all, group-wide commercial steering. Now that we have moved on the whole commercial platform with network planning, also on the European side, pricing and full revenue management, we basically have all the commercial levers in place to drive more steering and to drive more value out of the group performance. The second one is the umbrella brand.
As I mentioned before, the One Group part where we align strongly the synergies and where we make sure that we have one approach, we have a premium consistent delivery across the whole journey, and we make sure that we use the synergies behind the curtain, but we drive the group value in front of the curtain. The group brand comes into play, and we had the group brand in the past, not this brand, but a group approach when it comes to sales, which basically a salesperson was selling four or five different airlines, but now we will also bring it onto the B2C level, then we have the loyalty program, Miles & More, which is really supporting also the premium and the digital approach, and we have the premium customer offering, which basically is something which for me has always two parts.
One part of the premium offering is the hard product, seats, aircraft. The other one is the soft one, cabin crew. We have the world's best cabin crews. If you look at the different brands and the huge value cabin crew servicing plays into the NPS and into the values we have, the soft factors are equally important, and then we deliver a premium consistent customer experience. So if you look at the commercial steering, we basically have four key topics: the network planning and management, the sales and distribution, revenue management, and offer placement and partnership management. What is important to understand is if we say we move the group more to the right and we bundle the competencies and we work from a group approach, then we are talking about virtual teams.
We want to make sure that we keep the knowledge where the knowledge is, but we bring people together in a virtual way with one process, one direction, one target, one strategy, and one way forward. That's very important because we have competencies which basically the different airlines have been building up in the past in the different hubs. And we don't want by physically moving people to demolish all the knowledge which has been built up in the airlines. And it's important to stay very close to the operational side of the airlines. On the sales and distribution, it's a team which basically is already the longest in a full group approach. This was integrated already eight years ago, and they work fully with the approach of representing the different brands and the different hubs in the different markets which we have. So customer choice is important.
Carsten mentioned it, 210 destinations and unlimited number of combinations of long-haul offers out of the different hubs and out of the different markets. But also on the tool side, we want to excel with the introduction of AI into the pricing, revenue management, also network side. I'll come to that later. And especially cost efficiency and resilience. We have to become and be very flexible in how we adjust capacity. With the switch from more corporate to more leisure type of traffic, we also see that there is a much bigger variation in capacity between winter and summer, and that has to be managed actively. So if we look now at the network and what we are planning for, some topics we already touched before, and I won't repeat them, but the first one is growth in intercoms.
While IATA is giving a forecast of around 4%, we are planning to overtake or overproportionally grow the intercon capacity because we believe there is a lot of value in the intercon markets, number one, but also on the intercon profitability, so we want to take advantage of the segments where a higher profitability is very clear. Secondly, on the con network, we need to reconfigure the con network. Different reasons. First one is that, of course, we have a high share of point-to-point business on the con side, which is good and very profitable. We have a share of con intercon, which is also very good. But we have also the non-point-to-point connecting Europe connecting traffic, which basically is extremely low margin and which is not the traffic we want to continue to have at such a high degree.
We want to optimize the way we organize the connection network. Looking now at the picture on the left, we have to make a picture of it. If we have six aircraft flying out of the different hubs to Oslo, then the question is, do we need from each of the hubs to fly to the same destination? Isn't there a more optimal way to redistribute the capacity and use the metal which we have in order to drive more revenue and more value? At the end of the day, the goal must be to start optimizing the feed and the connection to Oslo out of the hubs in a way that it allows us to redeploy the capacity we free up. Because if we wouldn't fly from one hub out of the six, we would still fly from five hubs to Oslo.
We would have one aircraft with which we could offer a new destination, for example, Bergen, so therefore, we need to start looking within the group approach at the holistic picture of the con network, the con network development, and at the end of the day, it's very important that we have the right combination between the optimal holistic network planning from a group perspective and the best fit for the hub, so to bring that together will be the way forward, and we have also another element which is playing into this. If you fly from all the hubs to a destination, you cannot always have an Airbus A220 or an A320 to offer that capacity. You might need smaller aircraft.
If you start to fly from four or five hubs to a destination and you optimize it and you gear the traffic through those hubs, you basically are able to simplify also fleet structures on the connect side. And simplifying fleet structure means higher operational excellence and also synergies on that side. And the final part is, of course, the value, the high-value summer passengers. We have seen a lot of drive and push and shift to the leisure part. At the end of the day, a lot of leisure is nice, but it creates a lot of volatility. High peaks in summer and a lower demand in winter. We will use actively also the wet lease capacities we have to drive more efficiencies and to follow the trend of summer and winter on those traffics. At the end of the day, it's about driving more revenue.
It's about driving more value to the customer, but it's also about effectiveness and cost consciousness. And if we look at the sales teams, which we basically have integrated already years ago, we have been able to reduce the cost of sales by 1.6 percentage points in the last couple of years. And that's quite a big number because we are not a company who's spending billions on marketing or on sales. So the 1.6 percentage points is an important move to show that efficiency and delivering synergies is also there playing a role. And on the right-hand side, you clearly see that basically if you take the direct channels, which is our dot-com, our app, and the Direct Connect, which we have, is already almost 75% of our distribution.
Being able to drive more through the direct channels and through Direct Connect is giving us the opportunity not only to save cost. One percentage point of shift to the direct channels, be it dot-com or NDC, is saving us more than EUR two million of costs per year. Secondly, as I said before, we are able to better position the products at the customer side because we manage the channels directly. Also the IATA One Order will play an important role. It will help us to drive this digital transformation. It will help us to simplify processes. It will help us on the cost side, and it will also make sure that we have a unified retail-focused order.
So having that strategy combined with the direction we want to go in, it will help us with more synergies, also a consistent customer experience, and it will take away still some inefficiencies in between the different airlines. We're looking at 10%-15% cost reduction when we would retire from the legacy systems. And at the end, also on the revenue generation part, 2%-3% additional revenue in the scope. But also AI is something which is not stopping at our table. AI is a technology which we want to drive further. We want to make sure that we have in flight steering, in pricing, in seat reservations, in all the different commercial elements which drive revenue, we want to build AI in. We have therefore invested quite a bit in driving AI into our systems and making sure that AI supports the human factor.
Maybe not to be underestimated, the last part is that we're creating now a system which basically is going to connect the commercial network planning with the operational excellence. In the past, many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, whenever we were developing a network, we did the best to get the best network with the best commercial value. And then we checked on the operational side, how robust is this operational? Can you manage? Do you have the pilots? Do you have the productivity? Now we're going to connect them in real life. And that means that there will be a constant connection between operational excellence and making sure we do the right thing for the operational side and the commercial excellence on the other side. And that's quite a powerful tool. It's in the making. A lot of teams are working on that, but that's next generation commercial.
I talked about the brand, and when we take the touch points, the lounges, the aircraft, also livery, brand architecture, but also the boarding pass, that's all driven by the commercial One Group approach. And therefore, for us, it's really important to have the Lufthansa Group because the Lufthansa Group does what? It delivers consistency. It delivers a known experience which goes across the different airlines, and it's something which is recognizable. So it should give trust. And that's why one of the values we have is trust at every altitude. That doesn't mean that the local brands don't play a role. The local brands will bring the values of the country, the values of the carrier to life, and will make sure there is a perfect harmony between the One Group, on the one hand, with the Lufthansa Group brands and the local brands.
So where is the difference? Well, the difference is basically because on the top, you see this is the whole chain on the group, on the group brand with all the touch points I mentioned before. And on the bottom is where the guests are or the passengers with the branding, the marketing. And if we look at the current effect on the performance KPIs, we basically improved the NPS with 13 points compared to last year, and we improved the customer satisfaction with seven percentage points. So we have been focusing a lot on stability, a lot on delivering high quality to the customer, making sure we bring the customer from A to B in a high quality and with the perfect operational excellence element. And this has been also delivering us the right values.
Coming now to the loyalty program, well, basically Miles & More, you know, is our loyalty program, but it's more than a loyalty program. It also includes payment. We just launched new credit cards in Belgium with Beobank. We launched the credit card, a new cooperation with Deutsche Bank here in Germany and with Erste Bank in Austria. So we're driving that value further. Of course, Miles & More, as you know, has also partnerships in the market and is present in retail. But the question is, are we on the right track? And what do we see? We basically see that 17% additional revenue is coming from Miles & More members, which basically made their first redemption. 40% of the customers who redeem miles for business class are ready to book premium cabins again. So we are starting to see a clear connection between loyalty and repeat bookings.
And that's really bringing it to the next level. Increase 12 months active Miles & More members, more than 50% more active members, up to six million active members we have now, a total at the Miles & More side of 40 million. And is this enough? No. We want more because there is more to get out of a loyalty program. There is more to get out of a loyalty ecosystem. And there are four key building blocks which will help us to drive the topic forward. First of all is loyalty retailing, personalized offers, member engagement, driving more active members. This is really what we are going for. Currency retailing, Miles & More, the points, everything people collect. Can we do more? Of course, we can do more.
We will dynamically expand the usage of the points, dynamically expand what we can do with the points and make sure that it's also integrated as a payment technology or a payment method. Partner retailing, that we need to make sure we leverage the strategic partnerships, bring more loyalty value. And at the end, media retailing. Advertising revenue has a lot of potential. And one of the preconditions of this topic is, of course, connectivity on board. And with connectivity on board, you have immediately thousands and thousands of people which you are locked in a tube during eight hours where there is a lot of potential to drive media retailing. And what is the goal? The goal is to more than double the value we have today with a clear direction to go more on the currency partner and media retailing.
Those three gray blocks, this is what we believe in. There is a lot of future, a lot of revenue potential, and at the end, a lot of EBIT potential on those three. So we are going to change the balance between the loyalty retailing and the other elements from a 50-50 to a 70-30 to drive more value. Also, driving more additional members and active members will be a prerequisite to do that going forward. So we're leading in the premium segment. And at the end of the day, when you look at the higher share we have on the long-haul premium classes, we have the top position with 13%. We are ahead of IAG and Air France, but also on the revenue per available seat kilometer, the RASK in 2024, we were number one.
We aim at continuing that position and to expand even further our premium offer, not only on the seats, which we have launched with Allegris and we will have with SWISS Senses Live, but also with the premium airport experience. Five-star airports, Munich and now also Rome, part of the portfolio, top Skytrax award for Frankfurt and Zurich, and we will continue to invest because we believe there is a very strong link between premium and loyalty, and if you look at the different products on the left-hand side, you basically have a beautiful example of what it means to be One Group on the one hand, but have local brands and the local flavor. We have the Allegris seat, which was developed for the premium hub airlines, which will be used by Swiss and Lufthansa.
Looking different, different touch and feel, but at the end, it's the same seat. And thirdly, we need to make sure that we also use that opportunity to flexibly adjust a LOPA across the different markets. And finally, we have a very clear objective. It's not about the seats only. I mentioned the cabin crew, but also our booking channels, the technology we use, the digital tools will allow us to bring more value and to give a higher relevance to the passenger, number one, to individualize the product more. And if you go now to the dot-com, you basically, if you're booking Allegris and you click on the seat, you will get a nice picture and you will get a nice view of what it means to book that seat. So those developments and those elements are going to drive further premium positioning, but also revenues clearly forward.
This is my final slide, and then I'm coming to an end, but this is a clear view. By 2030, we will have almost all aircraft on the long haul of Swiss and Lufthansa equipped with the new seat concept. We have seen a high satisfaction of customers of Allegris, and we expect exactly the same effect on the Swiss aircraft. The willingness to pay, because at the end of the day, it's nice to bring out new seats, but are people willing to pay for it more? First of all, we have a 9% average increase in yields on those Allegris routes. There is a clear willingness to pay for quality, number one. Number two, by having five different seats in the concept, we are able to generate additional ancillary revenues, which is the advanced seat reservation.
With the first indications we have today, we believe that with advanced seat reservation, we'll have up to one million per aircraft per year, which we can generate revenue and generate value by making sure that people have the opportunity to select the right seat for the right passenger, and not so unimportant, rebooking of 90%. We have never seen that before. 90% rebooking, people which are extremely happy with the seat are coming back to buy again an Allegris seat. People are now looking at where do I have an Allegris aircraft so I can change my travel and make sure I sit on an Allegris aircraft.
These are topics which combine excellence, premium in the product, premium in the implementation of the product, driving innovation in the market, making sure we have the tools to support the sale and the servicing of innovation, and then making sure this is done on an end-to-end basis. That's how the future looks: digital, premium, excellence, and customers which are happy, coming back again and again, driving revenue, and at the end, a lot of value for the Lufthansa Group. Thank you very much.
Good afternoon, everyone. Let me start by setting the expectations for what you will be hearing from me today, starting with the architecture for change, the three layers which turn every euro spent into digital and tech compound across the whole group.
I will then move to show how this translates into speed and quality for our digital tools, how this monetizes through ancillaries and drives hard P&L impact for our airline operations. I will then conclude with an overview on 2030 and on the discipline with which we intend scaling. Now, if there's one thing to keep in mind, it's this: one backbone, AI-ready by design with relentless focus on business outcomes. But so let's start. Let's start with a three-layer system. I mean, value at scale does not come from tools in isolation. It comes from a system, and our transformation system is structured very deliberately across three reinforcing layers. On customer side, we are innovating at scale across all touch points, and we are building on shared foundations so that what works for one airline can be read across to other brands.
On airline operations, we're introducing AI-supported decision-making, which takes us from very static rules to a system based rather on dynamic optimization scenarios. More on that to follow. Underpinning both, a group-wide digital and IT transformation program to streamline and harmonize the platforms, to reduce redundancies, to strengthen cyber defense, and basically shorten significantly our time to market so that any new feature reaches our customers, our operators, and our crews quickly and reliably. So it's this three-layer system that makes value generation tangible and repeatable across our group. Now, within this structure, our Digital Hangar drives quality and speed, operating on a unified tech stack, which is flexible enough to allow for brand differentiation, but also standardized enough for scalability. Just as important, we design with the customer at the very center, with personalized moments, contextual information, and AI-supported information that is both timely and relevant.
Let me give you a couple of proof points to substantiate all this. In our hangar, we have over 400 experts working hand in hand with developers coming from our IT subsidiaries in an agile mode with true end-to-end accountability. Now, what does that mean? It means that who develops products is also accountable to roll them out into service, to measure the outcomes, and to iterate in production. And this setup does pay off as we have already seen our speed to market being lifted by over 50%. And this is very visible in the cadence of our releases and also in the responsiveness to our customers' feedbacks. The scale is very tangible: 630,000 daily users of our app. Now, with this scale, any even small improvement in reliability, usability does translate into material impact.
Indeed, the hangar, in this sense, has already delivered a 2.7-time in-year return, both new revenues and cost savings, such as the EUR 50 million cost savings driven by self-service and automation. And this is a component which is due to increase. If you think that already today, more than 60% of all rebookings are absolutely automated and digital. And again, these are real effects. It's not projections. Our ancillary strategy builds exactly on that foundation. I mean, the principle is clear. Ancillaries must be a seamless part of the customer journey and not just an afterthought. When offers are relevant, timed to the context of the passenger, and when in our frictionless to purchase, we see conversion rates increasing and satisfaction improving. In this sense, we have streamlined our booking flows, optimized the product portfolio, and indeed, we place offers there where it makes sense for the traveler.
We're also enhancing our omnichannel levers, be it strengthening the partner sales, optimizing NDC displays, or deepening B2B partnerships so that our partners see the same clarity our customers do see. Now, looking ahead, we see the digital channel share increasing on a trajectory to increase from more than 70% today up to well over 80% in 2030. And similarly, we also see the ancillary revenue going from 12 EUR per pax today, doubling exactly in 2030. And again, these are not marketing figures or initiatives. They rely on integrated data on a very consistent user interface and on flawless delivery. And it's a kind of virtuous circle, I would say. Better relevance drives conversion. Conversion yields more data, and more data allows us to sharpen even more our relevance. The outcome is, all in all, a structurally higher ancillary trajectory with a significantly lower distribution friction.
In operations, we show how AI tools translate directly into P&L impact without having to wait for a full overhaul of our legacy systems. Now, this is not abstract, and just this morning, we had to cancel one of our Frankfurt-Munich flights, and some of you may have been impacted on the way here, and I can only regret the disruption this caused. Fact is, it was a tough Monday. We had to take out a service for aircraft which suffered from bird and lightning strikes. That happens. We could guarantee seats to all passengers, rebooking them on the following flight, which we could operate with a larger aircraft, one of our 787 Dreamliners, ensuring that everyone could reach Munich. Now, this is exactly the kind of decision our cancellation impact analyzer supports.
In case of unavoidable irregularities and eventual cancellations, what the tool does is, rather than optimizing just with one KPI in mind, is to really compare scenarios and flag the option with the lowest combined cost and impact for our customers. This is not a prototype. It was used more than 100 times last week alone. Our colleagues at Swiss could avoid already EUR 500,000 costs in Q2 alone using the impact analyzer. And again, just to give you an impression, just to give you a feeling for the scale, whenever, again, we have no choice but to cancel on long-haul routes, the cost we avoid by using this tool goes from EUR 60,000 to EUR 90,000. So that is definitely material. Next step is to extend the principle to group-wide network irregularities and delay avoidance. The principle is always the same.
Real-time decision support to minimize customer impact and contain costs while strengthening stability. Over time, these tools will become part of the day-to-day flow, no longer special add-on projects, but really built-in capabilities of how we run our airlines on a day-to-day basis. Moving to 2030, our ambition is unambiguous. We intend, being Europe's digital leader, generating more than EUR 200 million in cost saving yearly, plus business value on top on customer side, for instance, value coming from seamless journey, from AI-driven personalization, and overall higher conversion rates when it comes to ancillaries and significantly higher satisfaction. In operations, we will see flight planning optimization integrated across the group, and we will see more smart automation at the gate as well as at the ramp.
Under the hood, a future-proof IT landscape, indeed, with standardized platforms, pooled tech talent, and indeed ensuring digital excellence scales well beyond the customer and operation realms, for instance, into HR or finance value streams. This is how we connect clear financial outcomes with sustained operational excellence. But so to conclude, we have the structure, we have the teams, we have the platform strategy in place, and our use cases are already delivering significant outcomes. The path forward is about discipline scaling and also very focused capital allocation in initiatives that truly do tilt the scale for our customers, for our operation, and of course, for our P&L. With your support, we will compound these gains throughout 2030 and beyond as the digital and tech transformation continues being implemented with more proof points every month. The same certainly holds true for the Lufthansa Group internal transformation initiatives.
And right after me, too, we'll give you an insight on the group-wide transformation programs. And right after, Jörg will take you through a deep dive and an update on the Lufthansa Airlines turnaround program. Teammates, the stage is yours. That was all from me. Thank you for your attention.
Good afternoon, everyone. We are now coming to a hugely important chapter of the day. That is the airlines transformation. And I will very briefly lead into and finish it off. And Jörg will go on to expand on the Lufthansa Airlines case study. So to start off and give you a little bit of the overview, of course, the transformation programs at airline level are not limited to Lufthansa Airlines. They span across all of our airlines, very much focused on ops and commercial excellence.
And they do follow a very structured and a very performance-tracked and best practice-sharing approach. And for Lufthansa Airlines specifically, this, of course, is the Lufthansa Airlines turnaround that we announced already about nine months ago to start off with. But of course, it goes as well across our other hub airlines. There's a sizable number of initiatives, which you can see. And just by contribution, due to the size of Lufthansa Airlines, last year, about 45% of our turnover, you can imagine that also the largest part, about 70% of the contribution and EBIT uplift, we do expect from the Lufthansa Airlines to come over the next years to come. And with that, Jörg, over to you.
Thank you, Till. And yeah, also welcome from my side. I'm happy to present to you the turnaround, the transformation program of Lufthansa Airlines.
I think you will recognize that this is a team effort. My colleagues from the group level or from the groups show you what they are working on, and you will see that this kicks in in our balance sheet and especially in the P&L in the next minutes. Let me start. What is Lufthansa? I think you know Lufthansa Airlines, but that you have an idea of what we are talking about. With our two hubs in Munich and Frankfurt, we are the largest airline of Europe. With our premium proposition and the position in Europe's economic heart, we have the best situation to make a lot of money. The reality check shows that this is different. The economic result of 2024 of Lufthansa Airlines was disappointing and not sufficient, to be very honest on this.
Therefore, this is the reason why we launched turnaround, our program to lift up structurally the EBIT of Lufthansa Airlines. So let me start. Who is or how is turnaround organized and who is driving it? Here on the chart, you can see on the left-hand side all the group functions and the team of the group who is supporting us. We are starting with the central transformation team at Lufthansa Group and secondly with our in-house powerhouses when we deal with digital topics, namely Lufthansa Group, Digital Hangar, Zero-G, or Lufthansa Systems. And also, and Harald already presented this, our most important partner when it comes to MRO topics is Lufthansa Technik, supporting us to improve our technical costs. And Lufthansa Consulting, for example, a specialist, helps us to realize all our projects. And even with external partners, we work together. What is an example here?
Swissport, for example, we started a joint venture to ramp up our self-handling here in Munich. So these are Lufthansa Airlines' external teams helping us. And then we have our own team. More than 150 employees are engaged in turnaround, working on 700 measures. And also the entrepreneurial subsidiaries of Lufthansa Airlines, meaning Air Dolomiti, Discover, and City Airlines, are part of the transformation. So with this, the question is, how comes this all together over time? So we started, and Till already mentioned this, 2024, because we realized already during the year that we will not make the money we need. So the team decided to start turnaround. And there are four pillars of the program. Two of them are group-led. This means fleet dimensioning and growth. And Alexander and Stefan already explained what we are doing, how we develop here on this topic.
The second, I think, Grazia and Dieter already mentioned customer commercial excellence. This will help us also. It's also managed by the group. There are two pillars which are directly managed by Lufthansa Airlines, and this is operational excellence and cost excellence. And I will give you an idea of what happens there. But before I do this, let me start with the financial ambition behind the program. So you can see here the typical bridge. We start in 2024 with a loss of around EUR 100 million. And then the bridge shows how the separate streams or pillars will help us to improve the overall ambition without fleet and growth, because this we put aside and said we have to improve the profitability even without new aircrafts. And the overall ambition is to realize a gross EBIT effect of EUR 2.5 billion until 2028. So we are on our way.
One portion will also be realized at the end of 2025. We will give you the numbers on that when we talk about 2025. But we are really sure that we are able to achieve this EUR 2.5 billion. And this is a moving target because we also take into account headwinds. And these headwinds, for example, are higher depreciation because of new aircraft or just simple cost inflation and all the topics which are working against an improvement. So this is all baked in. And the target behind turnaround, when we talk about the profit in 2028, is a high single-digit EBIT margin from 2028 onwards. So this is a target of the program. The gross effect will be 2.5, but at the end, what counts is adjusted EBIT, and this is what we have in focus.
Even when we always talk about headwinds and we always adjust this bridge when it's necessary. So when we now talk about the first pillar, which is managed by Lufthansa Airlines, it's operational excellence. And operational excellence, last year, we had a really bad development of our stability. You can see it here on the charts, punctuality of 62%, regularity of 97%. The clear task was to say we start with stabilizing the ops because you cannot optimize your company, your processes, the whole organization when your ops is not stable because then you try to manage something which is not manageable. And therefore, in 2025, clear message also from our shareholder was very clear, stabilize the ops. Ensure that you have something which you can work on. And we did it. How do we did it? First of all, we intensified and upgraded our steering of our suppliers.
You can see it here on the chart, on the numbers. We increased the punctuality of our suppliers by more than 10%. It comes not by itself. It sounds so nice. It's a day-by-day work to ensure that the suppliers are able to deliver what they are promised, so to say. Here in Munich, we had last year a very bad experience. This year, Munich is back on track with very high punctuality and regularity. We also worked on the processes which are owned by Lufthansa. We also were there able to improve our punctuality. To be very honest, we adjusted also the hub structure, put in some buffers to make clear this time it counts. We have to deliver stable ops. When you look now at the figures for punctuality and regularity, you see we are back on track.
We were able to improve the stability by 10%, higher punctuality, and an increase of regularity. We meet now the figures of 2019, but this is not the end. What is the result? We see a significant increase of punctuality because at the end, the first thing what we are promising is we bring you from A to B punctual, and now we are able to fulfill it. Therefore, customers are more happy. Not only customers, also our employees are more satisfied because they can deliver what their stands for. Last but not least, we were able to reduce our costs for irregularity. This really kicks in what we are doing here. This is clearly the first step. What has to come? There are some of the topics which I already mentioned. You can see here on the chart.
On the left-hand side, you see the levers what we believe will bring us to the next level in terms of stability and regularity. First of all, the fleet renewal. I think Alexander explained it very detailed. Very simple topic at the end: less irregularities because of technical delays and more simple ops will help us to be more stable and resilient. Secondly, AI-driven decision support. Grazia mentioned the cancel candidate. This is one of our first applications, but more to come and will help us to use AI to stabilize this, then we have a campus cloud. What is a campus cloud? This is a data pool at the hubs where we share data with our suppliers, mainly with the airport, and with this data hub, we are able to do real-time decisions. It's more than just having our own data pool, knowing what is happening in our processes.
We also get an understanding of what is happening in other processes, and last but not least, also mentioned by Alexander and Stefan, the interoperability of the aircraft, so we are faster in react when we see problems or challenges upcoming because of fleet, and this helps us in the operations. In the case there is irregularity, we will be also improving our processes, and there, from my point of view, this is for us clearly a field where AI and digitalization kicks in. You see here a typical process steps in the case of an irregularity, so meaning IREC rebookings, hotel vouchers for passengers who are not able to fly to their destinations, customer claims, and delayed bags, so we increase the number of automation and digitalization here, and let me put one example here, the customer claims.
We just started in 2025, this year, with the automation of customer claims. Just started, we will end the year with a quota of 25% of customer claims, which are handled without a human being, just by the machine. In 2028, we believe we will be able to handle more than 90% of the claims automatically. This dramatically helps to reduce human beings. It was already described in the morning. It's difficult to scale these kinds of services. It's even difficult to react to an IREC situation. In normal times, you have too many people in the call centers. In an IREC time, you have too few. This will be solved via the digitalization and the colleagues from the digital hub. The ambition for the ops is very clear. An industry-leading punctuality of 85%. We want to reduce, and we will reduce.
I'm very sure because 2024 was an awful year. We will reduce our IREC costs by 75%, and we will increase the NPS by 35 points just because of flying and delivering what we are promising. Now let me come; this is the operational side. What we do there, this will directly have an impact. I think there are some proof points in where you see we are on our way to improve, and we will do this further on until 2028. Now we come to the cost excellence pillar, the second one, and also to be honest here, on the left-hand side, you can see that the cost development of Lufthansa Airlines is disappointing. We are weaker than our competitors, and therefore we lost competitiveness, so the target is clear to improve our position on this chart on the left-hand side.
You have an idea as the analysts what will happen in each and every airline. Our goal is to beat inflation until 2030. This is improvement against the inflation. We believe we will improve our position here. What are the major levers on the cost side? You see them on the right-hand side. I will do a deep dive on this on ground ops, what is happening there, tech ops, production, crew productivity, and also on admin on non-personnel costs. First of all, let me start with our ground ops. In Munich and Frankfurt, we have more than 2,000 service professionals. They are dealing with our customers day by day, but there's a huge potential for automation and digitalization. Even more happy customers because if a process runs smoothly, the customer is even more happy.
The first step, and you see this on the check-in and bag drop, I think this is a clear proof point. In 2024, 90% of our economy passengers just dropped off their baggage at our automated system, no longer a contact to a check-in agent. And until 2028, we believe we will increase this also for our premium guests because we observe that the premium guests now use the economy robots to just drop off their luggage because it's so convenient. Two other topics, gate and boarding. For example, at the gate with cameras and AI at the gate, we believe we can reduce our agents per standard connecting flight from two to one. And for a standard intercontinental flight from four to two. So this will dramatically increase the productivity of our staff. And last but not least, service center.
Because of using offshore and nearshoring for our service centers and more digitalization, we will reduce the staff at the airports dramatically. So this all comes with higher productivity and we believe even with a higher customer satisfaction. Next topic, the anchor of stability, but also on costs because this is one of the bigger cost portions, at least the fourth biggest cost portion, which we really can manage by ourselves, technical costs. What we did at Lufthansa Airlines, we outsourced the outcast, not outsourced, sorry. We insourced the engineering and the maintenance from Lufthansa Technik and integrated it in Lufthansa Airlines. And then we changed the backbone, and I think Harald already mentioned it, the state-of-the-art backbone, IT backbone of tech ops is AMOS. And we now implemented AMOS and also implemented the electronic technical logbook, which means the processes now are 100% paperless. This is really an achievement.
Now, from this on, we can use AI, and this you can see on the right-hand side of the chart and digitalization to even reduce our technical costs, and what is a typical example? This R-Check or Ramp Check. Every time an aircraft hits the ground and goes to the position, a technician has to come from the hangar and check tires and, for example, oil of the engine, and we believe, and we are working, there are already test cases. When we use a camera and AI, we can check the tires, and we can use the signals or the digital signals of an aircraft to check the oil, so it's no longer necessary that a technician leaves the hangar, so he can work on the aircraft in the hangar.
We are talking about a two-digit % of technicians we can reduce just that they are not driving to the aircraft and check these two things. Other things, the ecosystem, which is mentioned here. We believe, and we started already with a small portion, that we can offshore engineering topics. We are already started that we have just one CAMO, means one engineering for all the airlines of Lufthansa Airlines. This will reduce the complexity. We are even able to use synergies here, also because we use AMOS for all of the airlines. It's easier to manage the aircraft. The ambition is clear. We have EUR 200 million yearly cost reductions per annum structurally. This is, I think, something which was already mentioned by Stefan. I just want to give you some more information.
We will use our two specialists, the feeder specialist with the greenfield approach. Lufthansa City Airlines is able to come up with a cost advantage of 40%. As Stefan mentioned, greenfield means we have really good working conditions for the feeder. And the same is true for Discover Airlines as a specialist for leisure travel. They have also concrete and very good working conditions for this leisure travel, and therefore, with both airlines, we come up with this 40%, 30% because of higher productivity and 10% because of more competitive compensation packages, and the target is clear, as Stefan already mentioned, 50% of the aircraft will come, 50% of our narrow-body aircraft will be in 2030 with these two airlines, and this is a lever you cannot reach in an existing airline, but also with Lufthansa Classic, we want to improve our productivity.
What is here the big three buckets we want to achieve? The simplified fleet, already mentioned. It's easier. We need less standby crews, for example, because we have less aircraft types. Or with the optimization of the planning routes, which is already ongoing. It's nothing we have to agree with our unions. We, by ourselves, optimize the way we do the rostering for the crews because of new IT systems, AI for standby planning, for example, and so on. We are able to improve the productivity. Currently, we are really on a low level. You can see the 510 flight hours for the cockpit and 570 for the cabin. We believe when we come up also with the unions with an agreement, we will realize 20% without the unions, at least half of it. So we can do things in the existing framework.
And when we come up with solutions with the unions, we will be even able to reach the 20%. And first proof points also there observable because we are able to manage the growth in 2025 and 2026 without hiring of cockpit. And we will, or we just hired some cabin crews, but this we stopped now for 2026. So really able to use the existing team to grow with the airline. Next bucket. All the things I've not mentioned so far, the non-personal costs, what are examples here? For example, we talk about airport cost optimization, dealing with airports, how we can use data together to reduce the costs here. Multiple fuel savings, also mentioned already by Alexander. It has not only an impact on our environmental footprint, but it's clearly a cost topic.
These operational improvements we see, for example. We knew that our quota of using single-engine operations outside here on the apron, that we can improve there when we compare this to our competition. So this is one of the examples to explain how we want to be, even after 15 years of doing fuel efficiency, to be more efficient there. Just let me give one example out of the whole list, aircraft cleaning. So we are now doing aircraft cleaning in the layovers, have two effects. It's much cheaper and it's even higher quality. So in South Africa, for example, we now clean parts of our long-haul fleet in a cheaper way. And it's even more cleaner because it's so difficult to find people who are doing this in Germany. So on the non-personnel cost, we have the huge list of the measures.
On the overhead personnel costs, this is something we do together with a group. We call it admin efficiency. And because also here, digitalization and working together with a group, finding synergies, cancel things, stop work we're currently doing, we have the clear target to realize a cost reduction by 20%. And how this fits together with a group and what is the group number for this, I will hand over to Till. And he will give you an idea what we are talking about in terms of FTE. Thank you.
Thanks. Yeah, thank you, Jörg, so let me now just wrap up this session, which is about the airline transformation, and one topic indeed is about right-sizing. Right-sizing is the organization, not limited to Lufthansa Airlines, but obviously going across the entire group. There has been some public attention to it last end of last week, so here are the numbers. We have launched numerous efficiency programs across the entire group in order to become leaner and more effective, and of course, this is met and supported by a, I would almost say, unprecedented level of digitalization and automation, which obviously provides a substantial opportunity to also do so and become leaner and more effective. Now, let me just go quickly through the numbers. Indeed, we target an efficiency potential of about 20%, which is FTE-based, which is about 4,000 FTE by 2030. This is mainly from the administrative roles.
You could call it or think of it like the non-uniformed staff by and large. And the bigger part of this savings potential will going to come from the German entities. In turn, we plan to build up about 1,500 people in skill and cost-optimized locations outside of Germany. Now, of course, you will want to ask the question, how do you progress? So just a brief comment on that. So about 10% of the targeted full amount of 4,000 FTE, I do expect that we have realized them by the end of the year. There have been already some announcements around call center closure. And equally, as you know, and this is no news, we've equally imposed a hiring freeze throughout the year, which will ultimately going to help us achieving that. Run rate savings in the midterm, about EUR 300 million.
Of course, we've got restructuring costs for that. We quantify them currently with about EUR 400 million over the next few years and of course, as you can imagine, the reductions will be done in consultation and in a socially responsible way with our social partners and I've got now the pleasure to wrap it all up and give you the full rundown on how everything comes together, what you heard throughout the day, how strategy translates into financial targets, and how transformation translates ultimately into value creation so I am around now for about a year, and everything that I've seen led me to being profoundly confident that we've got powerful levers in our hands. We've got a very strategic, a very strong strategic asset base, and I'm convinced we are able to get more out of it. Everything follows the goal of delivering, and let me go here.
Yeah, everything follows the goal of delivering attractive and sustainable returns to our more than 600,000 shareholders that we've got in our base that ultimately owns a company. And let me emphasize as well, in order to drive shareholder return, we need to continue to invest. It's necessary to keep investing into the growth of our business and into strengthening, ultimately, the long-term leadership position at a global level for the group. And I'll come to the investment part a little later specifically when I talk about CapEx. Now, targets are for the years 2028 to 2030, so they are a little further out. However, I do expect that also in the years, as we progress towards that target time horizon, we also see progressive improvement of the financial numbers. What are the targets for the target horizon of 2028 to 2030?
We target an adjusted EBIT margin between 8%-10%, a 15%-20% adjusted ROCE, and we target more than EUR 2.5 billion adjusted free cash flow per year in that target horizon. From a financial framework, we target a solid investment-grade credit rating, and we continue to operate with a liquidity range of about EUR 8 billion-EUR 10 billion. And as part of our focus on strong shareholder remuneration, we remain committed to paying a regular dividend of 20%-40% of net income. I believe these targets are ambitious, yet realistic. And as you've heard, and there was also some public talking about financial steering and even the functional financial controller made it to the media, which I was quite impressed and pleased by. But what can I tell you? Indeed, it is supported by a new financial steering approach.
I think what could be a better testimony than having actually our head of fleet and head of network talking more about return on capital employed than I am doing. So I think that you can take as a proof point of an evolved financial steering. I'm going to now take you through each step, each lever one by one. First, I'll stay at an overview level, unpacking a little bit the EBIT margin, and then I'll go bucket by bucket. In essence, at an overview level, reaching the 8%-10% EBIT margin level means effectively at least doubling 2024 starting point. All of the initiatives that you heard throughout the day fit into that and contribute. My very first comment is it's about capacity growth. In the airline, this is naturally an important aspect.
As you can see here, in terms of size depicted, it is not where the largest part of our margin improvement is reached. It is rather about making the assets under our roof working together in a more effective, in a more efficient way. Second, that takes me to the single biggest lever and benefit. This is leveraging Lufthansa Group synergies, and that is almost half of the margin improvement that we target. And the largest part of that will be going to come from the fleet renewal, and I'll unpack that in a minute as well. Thirdly, Lufthansa Airlines turnaround, which you've heard in the chapter before, is fully embedded and reflected in those numbers. And here, just as a reminder, Lufthansa Airlines is expected to reach a high single-digit EBIT margin as well in the target time horizon.
And fourthly, last point here, of course, there are headwinds. You've got cost increases, we've got cost increases, which we have already fully factored into it, like contracted staff cost increases, regulatory cost headwinds, or also other inflationary cost increases are fully reflected in that. So this is an all-in view from a target point of view. Moving on to the first bucket. So here, really, the focus is on sustainable and profitable passenger airline growth, and this is including as well the Eurowings growth, which contributes to it. And here, my focus is on disciplined and disciplined growth with a clear focus on profitability. You heard Stefan speaking about we allocate capacity and growth ultimately where we've got the best return on capital employed. And this ultimately ensures that out of that growth, we should get an overproportionate benefit.
Examples were that Stefan has highlighted intercon growing twice as fast as con traffic, of course, strengthening our backbone North Atlantic with our joint venture partners, and in those regions that grow fast, Asia-Pacific, Latin America to participate in that growth. The second growth component that is embedded in this bucket is ITA. You know that our goal is to move forward as quickly as we can. Hence, it is a clear assumption to have ITA fully integrated in our target time horizon. That means, of course, ITA's ASKs are coming into the growth fold. And just for reference, last year, ITA had about 40 billion ASK in terms of growth. And the second component that Dieter has been speaking about is very much around the synergies and the synergy realization, which is one of the value levers to come over the years.
Moving on to the biggest bucket, which is really driven by acting as one airline group, leveraging the full potential of the group. And here's the very first one out of those four levers that you can see on the right-hand side is the fleet rollover. And I cannot stress enough, the new aircraft are fundamentally more efficient assets than what we use today. Lower fuel, maintenance, ops cost, together with higher asset utilization, are clear benefits. And of course, they come with new premium and higher cargo belly capacity, which plays on the revenue side. And my key point here is once we fleet them in, so once they arrive, and this was part of the issue also over the past couple of years where we faced delays, once we fleet them in, most of the benefits come automatically.
It's a bit of a mechanical benefit, which obviously is quite important to be, let me say, sure about. In total, the margin uplift from fleet, including the new product, I estimate to be about 3 percentage points in the walk. And there was taking a lion's share in it. Beyond that, of course, commercial excellence. This is outstanding product and services. And you heard it earlier today, Allegris SWISS Senses. You had your own look and feel or have been flying with it already. Customers love it. And we do see strong yield evolution when this product is being used or marketed. Ancillary potential you've seen as well throughout the day. We believe this is a major lever. And so is additional focus on evolving loyalty. Digitalization, Grazia has spoken about it.
This is both cost harmonizing and simplifying IT landscape, and at the same time on the revenue side through our Digital Hangar, which is running already for several years, and of course also moving gradually to modern retailing, moving towards One Order over the years to come, and finally, overhead as the last bucket. I've spoken about it before. This is a contribution of about EUR 300 million of run rate savings on the FTE side. Moving on to the next two buckets. This is the airline cost transformation. Jörg and I presented very much focused on operational excellence, large number of initiatives, and focus as well on automation, and of course, Lufthansa Airlines here, as I said before, to contribute the lion's share in it, and the very last bucket on the right-hand side is Lufthansa Technik and Cargo. Both businesses are extremely well positioned in their respective markets.
For Technik, we do confirm the Ambition 2030 targets, which we have presented last year at the Capital Markets Day. For Lufthansa Cargo, clear trajectory to become top three air cargo player globally. Now, moving on from the EBIT to the ROCE side. When looking at our adjusted ROCE guidance, it is clear that in a capital-intense industry such as ours, ROCE is mainly driven by the EBIT margin improvement that I have just explained. But having said that, we also target the capital base as a second element on the ROCE side. While first with the new aircraft coming in, of course, I do expect that our capital base is continued to grow. At the same time, you have seen quite prominently our levers and goals to ultimately use our asset base in a more productive way, 10%-15% higher asset utilization.
If you think of it, that about 55% of our gross asset base is in essence aircraft. Targeting 10%-15% of higher utilization translates directly into the opportunity for less CapEx or alternatively also lower use of wet leases. In summary, thinking about ROCE, while I do expect that capital base is going up, margin expansion plus better asset utilization net-net will overcompensate the increase of the capital base and therewith lead to a higher return on capital employed. Very briefly about our thinking in terms of capital allocation, and it won't surprise you. At the center of it is the increase in shareholder returns. Here we optimize between different equally important aspects. First, everything starts with continuing to invest into the business, into our strategic priorities, fleet, customer experience, product, Technik, and cargo.
It is equally important that we do keep and retain our investment-grade credit rating to secure attractive funding, and likewise, we are strongly committed to sustainable and growing dividend in line with our dividend policy, and in addition, and only when value accretive and in line with our strategic targets, we, of course, will consider as well inorganic opportunities to continue to play an active role in the market. Let me now take it in turn, starting off with credit rating. We've got a strong balance sheet. It's always been one of the top priorities for Lufthansa, and let me remind you that after COVID, actually Lufthansa was the first European airline that got the investment-grade rating back, so you can see this is important, and we do hold investment-grade ratings with all agencies today.
In the medium term, we aim for a solid investment-grade rating, which is actually a notch up, notwithstanding the full consolidation of ITA in due course. Of course, we've got a time horizon, which is a bit longer in that regard. Moving on to credit profile and funding. No news to you. We've got a diversified debt mix. No funding instrument covers more than about one-third of our funding. We've got a good mix in terms of two-thirds fixed versus one-third floating. And we've got a strong track record in accessing the markets. And let me say as well that 2025 transactions and fundings that we had in the market were quite successful, attractive conditions for us. But let me also stress we are equally grateful for the trust of our debt investors throughout these transactions. We have a balanced maturity profile.
This obviously limits as well the refinancing risk. So you can see about EUR 1-2 billion of repayments each for the foreseeable future. I'm feeling very comfortable with this position and the strengths that we've got through that. Let me move on to liquidity. My view is the airline industry as a whole over the past years has become more resilient. And this is also partly due to stronger liquidity profiles as a consequence of what the entire travel industry has faced throughout COVID. For us, also in the past, a solid liquidity profile has always been part of our DNA. And you can see that we do target, we do continue to target a prudent liquidity level of EUR 8-10 billion as we go along.
Of course, we invest this liquidity in order to reduce the opportunity cost that we've got due to this liquidity level. This takes me to a very important part of the conversation, and that is investment. Of course, out of this position of strengths or balance sheet strengths, we can confidently continue to invest into our strategic priorities. You can see the split of the CapEx over the next couple of years: product, customer experience, digital, Technik, and cargo. Of course, by far largest part goes into aircraft. The delivery delays of the past years, so this backlog is also a CapEx backlog. Of course now turns, and it results into a gross CapEx peak over the next two years, of course assuming current delivery schedules that we've got. Over the next two years alone, we expect to receive about 100 new aircraft.
Let me stress, while gross CapEx peaks, we actively manage our net CapEx to ensure an adequate free cash flow. And this takes me naturally to the topic of fleet financing. In the past, outright ownership of most of our aircraft was a key principle, and we continue to believe that high ownership is an important principle to keep. However, it is equally time to evolve our strategy towards more leasing to make greater use of the strategic benefits of leasing. And these are obviously a higher degree of flexibility when it comes to managing capacity, be it upwards or downwards. Of course, you don't do that overnight. You do that in the usual cycles of six years or 12 years for a narrow body and wide body. And of course, improved capital efficiency as lease costs are below our cost of capital.
So tapping a little bit into the differential in cost of capital between an airline and a lessor. And of course, finally, proactively managing our net CapEx in a prudent way, balancing the peak CapEx that we've got with clear cash flow targets. Therewith, we remain committed to owning the majority of our fleet, but we target round about one-third into leasing with a degree of strategic flexibility. Let me tie it up coming to cash flow, cash flow guidance for our target period. As I've said before, we target more than EUR 2.5 billion per annum in the target period of free cash flow. And I'd like to just stress one point because you may have the question, that's great. It's a couple of years out. What's going to happen in the near term, 2026, 2027?
Of course, while we are not talking about 2026 guidance, we'll do that next year when we speak about our results on 2025. Let me just tell you that, of course, throughout the investment period, we still target a decent free cash flow level, which should be about on or about 2023, 2024 levels. Dividend. So a consistent and reliable annual payout to let our shareholders participate in the dividend is a fundamental principle to us. And that has been the strategy for many years. And you can see the track record of paying a dividend here on the chart. And this is also why we retain our dividend policy of 20%-40% of net income for the time being. And clearly, reaching our profitability targets means also a positive evolution in terms of net income and ultimately dividend distributed.
And that takes me to my very last slide, which is all about free cash flow to equity. So, ladies and gentlemen, let me wrap up and summarize. We've taken you throughout the day through the strategy, the most important initiatives and equally the proof points. And let me reiterate, I do believe with everything that we've shown you today, I believe we are at a turning point where improving margins translates into improved operating cash flow. And I would expect it to double in the target time horizon. And as I said, it's all about attractive and sustainable returns to our shareholders. But for that, we need to continue to invest, which is the CapEx piece of it.
And what's a top priority for myself is that this happens, this investment happens in a disciplined way, ensuring that we get the maximum return out of the capital that we do invest. And as a result, almost like a logical consequence, and this is why I love this chart on the right hand so much, as a logical consequence, if we get this right, our free cash flow to equity is growing at a faster pace than operating cash flow, ultimately targeting to triple in the target horizon. And with that, I am finishing off. Thank you very much.