Good afternoon. Maybe you get yourself a drink and some crap food. I'm very, very happy to welcome you to your capital markets day here in Frankfurt. Unfortunately outside, it's a little bit cloudy, but I think what we have to present and show today is anything else than cloudy. I'm very, very happy to have you here, very happy to have a lot of shareholders, stakeholders, interested party at the stream. We roughly had 150 registrations for today. Quite a crowd here, also a big group at the stream. What is on the agenda? What are we going to do today? I will give you a brief introduction on us.
Company and business model. I will give you an update. I will give you a flashback of what we did and what we are going to do and what is our plan and what was promised, what was delivered. Then we kind of have two exciting insights on two of our portfolio companies. On the one hand, La Rochette. We have Pierre-Yves here as the Managing Director, a paper business in France. Then we have Frigoscandia, a cooling logistic business in the Nordics, where we have just literally two hours ago made an add-on, our twelfth acquisition in this year. There we have Christian Klingler, also Managing Director, and he will present Frigoscandia. Then we will round up with a guidance and with a little bit more insight on it.
At least for the people here in the room, you're more than welcome to stay and have a few chats afterwards here. I guess most of you know who I am, Johannes Laumann. I'm the CIO of the group. Joined Mutares 2016. I'm in the board since mid-2019, and I'm basically responsible on the capital market side, but also on all the acquisitions, portfolio development, et cetera. What I believe, and this is what it says on the slide, we deliver what we promise. We don't want to heavily over-deliver, but we never want to under-deliver. I think it's very important to deliver and have trust in doing deals. We deliver deals, we deliver turnaround, and we deliver the trust of the people.
Those are the three ingredients, the main ingredients for our success we had in the last 2.5, three years, and which I'm very confident we will have in the years to come. Quick on our story for the new people, founded in 2008. We hosted the first capital markets day in 2019. Bond together with Pareto, so we also have some people from you guys here today. We did the capital increase in 2021. The latest number in this presentation is the number 12, as we have acquired a cooling logistics company in Sweden just today. Our target, where we wanna go, is in 2025, reach to EUR 7 billion in group revenues.
We want to be perceived as the leading private equity firm when it comes to turnaround business. I think when we see our journey, which we have done in the past years, what we have said and what we have delivered in the first capital markets day in 2019, where we have said, we come from EUR 1 billion, we want to go to EUR 5 billion. This was already delivered much earlier. I'm very proud to host you here today. Now, let's start a little bit more with the insight and then enjoy the day here today. At home, I don't know if you have joy or at the office, but at least we are sure we will do here. Looking at our company business model.
Who we are, what are we doing, how is our performance? Basically, what we do is we do two kinds of deals, two kinds of transactions. One is we go to large corporates, and we look for the unloved child, the unloved businesses. Recently, we did an acquisition not far from here with Deutsche Bahn. We bought a business from them in Denmark and Poland and Serbia. This was a strategic exit they wanted to do. It was an unloved child. You talk to the guys at Deutsche Bahn, they had very little idea what the business is about. That was not core, it was not performing well, and they just want to get rid of it because it didn't fit their strategy. Similar type of things we acquired from Siemens Energy.
Business after the demerger with Siemens AG, they defined a core strategy and they wanted to get rid of one or the other businesses. We are the ones then to give them a solution to their problem, right? We are the ones carving out this business. We are the ones putting it at stand-alone, turning around the business. You can imagine those are not diamonds. At the end, we, one of the investors in New York once said to me, "You buy garbage and you try for diamonds." I think this is exactly what we do. We try to turn around, and at the end, we try to exit then the business. That's the first deal. The other deal you just saw today. We acquired Frigoscandia. Christian was in the team.
We have also Carl here, who is heading the Nordics. We bought Frigoscandia from Posten Norge, right? Not their main business, cooling logistics. We bought this business a good year ago and we developed this business and now we did an add-on, strategic add-on to the businesses we have. The strategic angle on this one is quite simple, and Christian will also be able to answer more on this. With Frigoscandia we are very, very strong in certain regions in Sweden, but we are very weak in a very important region, and the acquisition we did now is the number one exactly in this region. We kind of enlarged our footprint, we enlarged the density of our business in the country.
This is the second part of the deal we did, and altogether, we transacted 12 times this year already. What is the main purpose? What is the main trigger of doing that? I can explain you what we do, starting from suppliers and customers. The main trigger is we try to bring leadership and entrepreneurship in those businesses. If businesses are in a corporate since tens of years, there is no entrepreneurship, there is no leadership, there is no responsibility for the entire business. This is what we try to bring in. This is the major challenge, which is very hard to measure, is to bring entrepreneurship in the business. This is how we run Mutares, and this DNA we try to bring into our operations. A little bit to the numbers.
2021, we have reported EUR 2.551 billion of net profit in the holding, 2.46 earnings per share and dividend of EUR 1.50. You see the guidance of this year, EUR 4.072 billion of holding profit, which will mathematically result in earnings per share of 3.49. Our target is the EUR 7 billion. We grew more than EUR 1 billion every year since 2019, and I'm very sure we will continue to do that. We started from a billion in 2019, we are now at four, and our target is to go to EUR 7 billion. With the same ratios of holding that income, and then the target earnings per share is obviously a mathematical calculation based on the registered shares by, as of today. This is the journey.
This is the cross path. This is the journey a lot of you on the stream, but also here have followed us and be with us. I think we are very confident as a board to run this journey, and we are very confident as a board to be successful on our journey. How did we grow? What is our asset? Why do we win? The power of winning. Why are we successful? First of all, we have a European focus. Our business, buying garbage, turning into diamonds, is basically a local business. You cannot sit in Munich or Frankfurt and expect that you receive offers for transactions in Sweden, in Spain, in Paris, in Milan. We extended our footprint heavily, and we currently operate out of 10 countries in Europe.
I think this is one of the major trigger, and you see a lot of country heads here today. You can meet also later, obviously. This is our, one of our success factors, one of our drivers. We are the local guys. We don't operate with a helicopter principle. We have a local M&A team at site, and we have local operations people at the end to fix the companies. Secondly, we have three diversified segments. I think this is important to understand, and let me spend a few minutes on this. We have that for two reasons. We have the segment of automotive, we have the segment of project business, so say, equipment business, and we have the segment of goods and services. The one reason is for the companies we own in our portfolio, it's an absolute risk mitigation.
Because you have automotive, which is an early cycle, and I think the majority of the people in the room and at home or at the office will agree this is not the most lovely business segment at the moment. Then we have the project business, which is a very late cycle business. An impact on macroeconomic waves you will feel later. Auto, you will feel immediately, okay? If the world goes in trouble, you feel it on auto. You don't feel it on the project business. It's a kind of a mitigation. Then goods and services, we have businesses which are very stable and a little bit or almost independently from macroeconomic situations. We have, for example, cooling logistics for food and pharma, right? You need to eat whatever the economy does. We have with SABO, a lawnmower business.
I mean, the grass grows, doesn't matter if the economy goes up and down. This is kind of the flat business. From a portfolio perspective, we are kind of balanced. We have always a segment which is in trouble, we have always a segment which is good, and we have one segment which is stable. This is kind of a balance. On the other side, when it comes to an acquisition or exit perspective, we always have an opportunity to buy and to sell. We have an opportunity to buy in segments which are in trouble. At the moment, we have seen, and in the last months, we have transacted a lot in the automotive industry. We have bought Cimos, we have bought a EUR 500 million business from MANN+HUMMEL, we have bought a EUR 200 million business from Magna.
We have transacted a lot on the buy side, on the auto side, because that's the segment in trouble. We also can transact on the sell side, on the strong segments. We have just signed, and the closing will happen in the next weeks. We have just signed a project business of the Nordics and Donges, which was the second largest exit we have ever produced at Mutares level. Very strong business. Project business, construction business, very solid, very stable, good, profitable business at the moment. We can transact on the buy side when there are trouble, and we can transact on the sell side on the parts which are good. Then on the company size, this is rather opportunistic, but I think our sweet spot has moved up.
Our sweet spot is in the range of EUR 100-300 million companies, which we acquire and then turn around and put together. The turnaround hero, and I know the word is a little bit pushy. This is what I believe is the power of winning. If you believe you're a hero, if you believe you win, if you believe you win the deal, if you believe the operation people believe we're gonna make this turnaround no matter the company is sht. If we believe we believe in the people, then we win. The combination of the three is, for me, something I describe it as the power of winning. Maybe it's a stupid wording, but if you believe in winning, you win. I believe if we want to win a deal, we win the deal, right? I
Unfortunately, winners will be remembered, right? You can tell me who win the Football World Cup, but you will have hard times to tell me who was second and third. Coming up quickly to the numbers, because I believe we are extremely transparent and a lot of our reporting is available also online. You have seen we are on track. When you see Q1 and Q2, 2022, half year was EUR 1.8 billion, which was an increase of almost EUR 700 million in turnover. The profitability level and then coming to our guidance of EUR 4 billion and 72 million. In this profitability level, we have three sources of how the holding makes money. This is the three sources are triggering every decision we take on daily basis.
The first source is income through consulting and management fees. This is when our 130 people fly out on a Monday morning, go to our portfolios, work with the management, or if they don't behave, work without, but try to fix the companies. This roughly will generate EUR 75 million of turnover in the holding and will contribute around EUR 25 million of profitability to this. Second stream is the dividend stream. If companies are doing well, you see companies later on in the details. If companies are doing well, obviously, if there is a dividend capacity, we ask them to dividend money. That's the second stream. There, of course, we are a little bit cautious, especially in these times. There the expectation is around 15 million of it. Then the last source is the exit source.
We cannot have a EUR 72 million result without an exit. We can have a EUR 35-40 million result, but we cannot have a EUR 72 million. We need exits. We have performed not one now in the Nordics. Matter of fact, that the project business segment and the goods and service business segment at the moment is quite strong. I do expect more there before we all rock under the Christmas tree. Those three sources are super important for us. Those are equally important, and those are triggering our daily decisions. Our daily decisions are triggering, can we get management fees and consulting fees out of it? Is this company able to dividend money? Are we able to sell the company at the end with a profit? How do we judge those sources? It starts with the acquisition.
How do we decide for a deal? How do I decide for a deal and then try to convince my fellow board member colleagues and supervisory board colleagues? When I look at the deal, I think three things are important. The first thing is, can we make money with the deal? Our target is 7-10 times of every invested EUR I want back over the lifetime. Lifetime, three to six years of the holding period. 7-10 times I want my money back. First decision. Second one is, I only acquire companies which I understand and where I believe my operational team can do an impact. So basically, where I say I only acquire companies where I believe I buy cheap. The third one is I acquire companies where I believe they have a good product and a good management in the mix.
Depends a little bit on the company. If it's a company which relies on product and people are, you know, just a lovely side effect, then we look on the product. If we believe in a company which is a people intense company, I want to see the management. I give you an example on the Deutsche Bahn deal, which we just signed. It's a EUR 400 million business. The majority of the business sits in Denmark. We will be soon very proud owners of, I think, 960 buses, 120 trains. I think we have some water taxis included and car sharing. We'll be one very big mobility provider in Denmark. This is a people business.
I flew to Copenhagen and I wanted to meet the entire management of this business. I wanted to see who we acquire because that's at the end, the USP and know how I acquire. It's important for me, do I get my money back? Can I make a difference? Do I buy cheap? Can I get a return? Do I buy cheap? And do I have a good company, product and management wise? This maybe sounds familiar to the one of the others. There is someone in Omaha who has similar ideas. But it's for me in a very, very small scale, I think is extremely valid on the turnaround sector. Right? Because if I don't believe in the people, if I don't believe in the deal, and if I don't believe in the turnaround, I should not touch the company.
That is how we acquire companies. We have an acquisition investment of EUR 270 million currently—EUR 207 million currently in our portfolio. This is the very, very small portion of this is purchase price. The very large portion is what we call contribution. When we acquired, same for Deutsche Bahn or with the big asset of Lapeyre in France, which I think Mark Friedrich was here last year, the one in Obertshausen, LMS, which we bought from Magna, or the one from MANN+HUMMEL we bought. A large portion of this is equity contribution into the portfolio. It's the skin in the game. The Deutsche Bahn, you don't negotiate too much. You don't squeeze out the last penny in this, in the purchase price, right? They want to make sure that they have a solution.
They want to make sure they never hear back from this asset. They force us to contribute cash into the equity of the company rather than paying them a purchase price. They are more cautious in going concern of the company. We have invested EUR 277 million at the end of September, honestly, not as of today, but three weeks ago, in our businesses. Then on the rocky road of realignment and optimization, we do invest in our portfolio, and those have a lot of different sources. Sometimes we are obliged by the SPA to or by the purchase contract to provide certain guarantees, to provide certain fundings, to provide in working capital.
This is something which we had to invest in the automotive sector after COVID. You know, when the working capital was obviously down because call-off numbers were low, and then suddenly call-off numbers picked up. While automotive, I think, and I worked for Porsche, God, more than 15 years ago. It was quite a stable business. You had the break in August, and you had the break in winter. The other months were like, on the call-offs, were like quite flat. What we see the last three years is rocking. You have from, there are deviations of 60, 70% per month. That you need to cover in the working capital swings, right? This is part of the investment.
We have gross CapEx. We're currently, for example, for Donges, fighting for a EUR 70 million order, where we need to invest into equipment, which pays off over the project time of 18 months. We first have to invest in this to get this EUR 70 million order. The investment in CapEx is then supported by us. At the end of the day, it's a mathematical exercise, what you see on the right-hand side with those two investments together and with my decision target of 7-10x, you will come to EUR 2.5-3.6 billion of ROIC, which we want to win back. This is how we make decision to buy. This is how we make decisions to turn around.
This is also then at the end, we make decision, are we ready for exit? Is the company ready for exit? Is the potential buyer universe ready to buy? This is what I'm confronted day to day. If I believe in something, I try to convince board and supervisory board. This is our, this is basically our success story of earnings. It all starts to win a transaction. If you don't have a company, if you don't have a deal, you cannot turn it around, you cannot take out management fees, you cannot take out dividends, you cannot exit. Why do companies sell to us? Why do we win the deal and not the, whatever, my cousin's private equity in Singapore? Why does Mutares? Why do we win a deal? I think you see it on the left side.
I believe in every country we operate, we see the transactions valid for us. Close to 5,000 opportunities we look per year, we receive per year. Then roughly 10% we have a look. Have a look in our terms means we go to management presentations, we look into information memos, we go to expert sessions, we conduct site visits, and we are in a data room. On 10%, roughly 400 plus transactions, we look in detail on an annual basis. Our target is to make one transaction a month. Now, it's mathematically not linear. As you see, we have now made 12 and it's October, but this is our target. We have met our target. At the moment, we have met the 12 deals.
We see 83 projects where we are in the data room, where we are conducting site visits. 5 are on the hot list where we are in negotiations of a contract, where we are at the closer to the finish line of a deal, and where we are closer to the point where we make the decision if we want to win the deal or if we don't want to win the deal and say, "Wish you all the best." There is a bit to come here. The first thing, why do we sell to us? Because we see the deal. The second thing is, and you see a little bit here on the right-hand side to sell to us, it's the reputation, it's the brand. It's the track record that we have solved the problem of entities. We have solved the problem of large corporates.
Obviously large corporates, but also state-backed entities. If I retire one day, my first book will be about the acquisition of the state-backed entities, because this is much more fun to talk about, because those are just so heavy tankers. They talk about flexibility and agility. They're everything else than this. There are people for everything. It's amazing. I love to buy from them because there's so much potential to improve. Then very seldom we acquire from private equity firms. Those are most of the time when we do the buy and build, not the transaction on the platform. If we strategically acquire companies, it can be private equity. Typical seller, large corporates who trust us, typical seller, also state-backed entities.
The champions league of this is that you avoid a competitive process, an auction process, right? We have companies, for example, like Magna or like Siemens Energy, who did not engage an investment bank. I'm sorry for the investment bankers here and at home, but they didn't engage anybody. They just approached us and said, "Do you want the deal? Look at it, you get three to four months exclusivity. If you don't want it, I'll bring it to the market." This is the trust and the strength of the brand to say, "Okay, we go to you because we believe you provide us a solution." At the end of the day, I have to admit, it's a people's business. Even though there are a lot of money involved, it's a large corporate.
If it's a 100-meter run, the last five meters, it's two people do a deal together. If you don't connect and if you don't speak the same language, you will not win the deal. We speak the same language because of our operational skills. We speak the same language because we are local in the countries. I think at the end, we also speak the same language because we have good guys and girls at the end of the day. A lot of times, and it was the same with the latest transactions, we didn't pay the highest price, but we had the most reputation, and we had the connection to the seller, and that made a deal. Those are the three points, I think, why we win the deal.
After we have won the deal, the acquisition, we need to do the turnaround. Why do we win a turnaround? I think one of the major things why we win a turnaround is because I think we approach it differently. There is a spirit in this group that you never give up, and you always face the trouble, you always face the storm. When you flashback the last two and a half years, trouble and storms were everywhere, right? Brexit, COVID, war, inflation, energy prices, the auto people, they didn't have chips. There was trouble and storms all over the planet. We have a good example with Mutares, which we recently shared. I have family in Texas, and they raise cattles, okay? You have two type of cattles.
If you have a homey cattle, it doesn't matter, okay? It goes to the house every night and sleeps, it's all fine. You also have wild cattle. If a storm or a blizzard hits the ground, you have two types. You have the bulls and the cows. The cows run away from the storm, and they're exhausted, and the majority of them will die. The bulls will face the storm, have a super hard time because they go, they run, they start running into the storm, into the blizzard, into yeah, into the madness, basically, into the trouble. They have a super hard time, but once they are through, they are through. I think the second part is Mutares. We never run away from something. We always face the issue.
We face the trouble. We are sure and convinced we can do it at the end of the day. I think this is a big difference to others that we face the problems. We know about them, we can judge them, we face them, and we never run away, and we never give up. I think this is the success stories we can tell. You hear two of them today. I don't want to take yours upfront, Pierre-Yves. When you look, for example, at what Pierre-Yves will tell you later on La Rochette, we have a paper business in France. Energy consumption. You can't imagine the increase, and you will tell that later.
You can't imagine the increase of energy consumption in the last 12 months. It's not doubled. We would be super happy if it's doubled. It's not tripled. We would be happy if it's tripled, right? But we faced the storm, and this company remained on a high profitability level because we took actions. We went through the storm, and now you will see later on, the sun is shining quite brightly. Lapeyre, second one. Lapeyre, you heard last year, manufacturer of doors and windows in France. In the first nine months, Lapeyre had a price increase on raw material and energy of more than EUR 50 million on the cost side. 50.
Now, you can run away and cry and die, or you face the storm. Lapeyre faced the storm, and at the end of the day, the promised profitability of the company remains the same because they took actions. They increased price. They looked in how can I source better. They looked into how can I make processes more efficient. But you have to handle this. You don't have to be afraid. You don't have to give up. If you face EUR 50 million more costs than you have thought in January, this is not that you wake up in the morning and say, "I have the solution." This is hard work. This is you need to face a hard, hard time to go through that storm. Last but not least, we have a company in India we acquired from Cooper Standard.
It's an automotive business, sealing and fluid parts. We acquired that in the middle of the first lockdown of COVID. Our business model, as you know, is we acquire a company, we send our troops, they fix the company, and then we try to sell. There was no chance to bring our people into India for more than one year. This company was just a loose end, and we didn't really had a grip on this company. However, we own this company, we keep this company, we are responsible for this company. After more than one year, we did manage somehow to send a team into India. The profitability of this company went from -20% - +20%. When they arrived in India, they found something to work, let's say, to be polite, right?
I remember Mark and I had the first call. The calls when they arrived, they said, "Guys, it's everywhere we look, it's a disaster." They faced the issue. They have been there for months in the beginning. They didn't come home as you know, we said you can come home after, you know, one. We had kind of a regime with them. Say, "No, we stay. We have to face that storm." I think this is important to understand. This is the people we bring in are entrepreneurs. We bring in commitment, and we face the storm. This is how we win turnarounds. Last but not least, how we win people, how we win people's commitment.
I think you can explain it very nicely on ESG, but you can also explain it very nicely, I think, in one sentence. This is you need to get trust if you walk the talk. What we do, we believe in doing. We don't do things for the paper or for the documentation. I would like to explain it very easy to you on our, on the ESG criteria, which we follow and which we do. On the one side, when it comes to energy, you can do a lot of things on energy, but at the end of the day, it needs to make sense for us, okay? We don't do it for the purpose of being, releasing press documents and saying we are the most cleanest country on Earth. We're doing it for a business reason.
We're doing it, for example, in Obertshausen automotive factory, where we try to get energy independence. We talk to the city. We want to set up a solar park next to us, which gives us an energy-free production in this facility, right? We do look in every factory we acquire. We have a partner, goes in, changing the lighting, changing the heating, changing the air condition to an energy-efficient thing. Why? Yes, it's clean, and we want to have a sustainable world. We all have kids, and I would like to see my daughter in 50 years living in a nice world. It also makes sense because the energy consumption you save with the new equipment is much, much higher than with the old equipment. When it comes to the social part, I think it's. Two things are important here for me, let's say.
I just want to get the points diversity and employee satisfaction on this slide here. Diversity, I believe if you have one problem and if you diversify the group to solve this problem, this is the most efficient way to do it. Now I'm saying it badly. If you put overweighted men in white shirts around the table and look on the same problem, you will not find the same creative solution on this if you put diversified people. With us, we believe when we have a problem, we don't look on hierarchy. We look on who are the best ones to solve the problem, who are the best ones to help us here and fix it. The second thing is satisfaction.
In the last three years in Mutares Holding, we have now roughly 200 employees. Our fluctuation was below 5% in the last three years. I think this is a great achievement. If you look at consulting companies, if you look at other funds, you are in the range of 15%-20%, and that's good for them, right? Below 5%. This is satisfaction of our people. We do something right. We do some social part. We do hard work. There is one or the other party. At the end of the day, it's about. I believe if you have happy people in the company, you have performing people in the company.
Then last but not least, on the governance side, I think it was important for us, when we did the capital increase and also today that we provide as much transparency as possible. I know our business is not always super easy to understand, but we have nothing to hide. We want to provide transparency as much as we can. That's why we got uplisted in Frankfurt, and we try to be fully fledged transparent as good as we can and as good as we can also transport the messages supported by facts and figures. With that, I would like to close the section of the company and business model. Important for me to take away for today is, this is a situation which is not the most pleasant one when you look at the macroeconomic situation.
However, I think we have proven that, companies like us like this situation. We are one of the beneficiaries of this situation for two reasons. The one is, I think our business model complies very, very nicely with crisis situations. I think secondly, we have quite bullish people to overcome the situation, face the storms, face the difficulties, and run in the storm and not run away. This is our two key success factors. We take the market, and we love the market at the moment, and we have the right people to overcome this crisis situation. Thanks very much for the moment. If there are questions now, you can shoot them. This is then the time for the questions on the Mutares part, and then there will be the company presentations later on with questions.
If there's anything you want to know and I can answer, I'm happy to do so in the next minutes. Thank you very much. It was super boring.
Thank you. Do you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. Question regarding the way you buy companies nowadays, how much you get, what is the share of their reason? What is the share of actual cash payment for the assets you're buying? I mean, is this changing? Are you putting more money than you're getting to fund the turnaround? Or what? Has anything changed significantly, like, since over the last two years in the type of deal structure you pursue?
Not really, I think is the honest answer. What we see is that the component of safeguarding that the company has a future and that there's a going concern becomes more and more important for the corporates, rather than telling them there is a purchase price. I give you an example. I don't tell you which transaction because it would be, you know, violating some non-disclosure agreements we signed. We had a transaction where actually the seller came to us and said, "Can you inject more money than we just said?" We have negotiated a certain amount, and he said, "Can you inject more money than we said?" I said, "Well, it's sufficient for my business plan." He said, "No, no.
I kind of want to... He literally said, excuse my French, "I want to cover my ass. For every euro you inject, I inject three." Obviously we injected something then. The sensitivity on the future, and a little bit of fear, actually, you can also say, the fear of the corporates by divesting this has increased in the last two to three years. No impact on the purchase price because purchase price is not even 20%, I guess, of what we capital commit. Ellie here.
What about your competitors? You must look, what they do. You know the competitors, yes?
Yes. We know them. Not in bad things because they do their thing as well, but I don't care about them. Firstly, as I said, if I speak about competitors, my biggest competitor is the seller not selling the business. It shouldn't sound arrogant, but I believe if we, as I said before, if we want to win a deal, if we want to win a turnaround, and if we want to win trust of people, we will. Yes, I know there are competitors in the market. We just received one of the biggest compliments since I'm a board member, since three years, where there was a transaction in France, and we were told by the advisor, "We can grant you exclusivity because all your competitors have asked.
If you're in, they will not offer something. I believe if we want to win, we win. I think they are all in other needs. They're doing their deals. They're doing well. We know them. We sometimes speak to them. My competitor is the seller.
To the current situation, we see many industrial companies have a blow up in their working capital because of this interruption in the supply chain, because of inflation and being ahead of the curve and having more-
Mm-hmm.
Stocks here. What does it mean for you as a holding company and having industrial subsidiaries? Did they need more cash? Give you them the cash? What is about your cash situation? You was not able to launch a straight bond. How is things going here?
Speaking about the portfolio companies, yes, there is additional or there is extensive working capital need in some of the businesses. Not in all, but in some of the businesses. In the first instance, obviously, they try to cover it, right? You need to go to your customer, you need to go to supplier, et c, et c. If we do see a working capital swing which goes up and down, which we currently see, and we have Mathieu Perry here today, who is heading, for example, the automotive business, right? If you come from a June, July, August level in the automotive, and then we saw September. You have a peak of like 40%, 50% in some of our auto businesses.
In the first step, actually, I think LMS, which is the biggest one here, over 1,000, they finance it themselves. You have a high working capital need. However, you're gonna sell it off as well. 30 days later, you get it back. Basically, we do bridge finance some of them. But in the first instance, we ask them to do it themselves through their balance sheet, right? Cash situation at holding level, you mentioned the bond. We looked into a replacement of our existing EUR 80 million bond. We have an EUR 80 million bond outstanding, done in January 2020. Maturity until 2024. We looked into the potential replacement and larger bond.
However, the market conditions and the offers we received from potential investors, for us as a management, we decided at the end that it didn't make sense for us. There was no immediate cash need. There is no need to replace the bond when it's until 2024. We decided to not pursue that, to not open a book, and come with that potentially later into the market when conditions are changing and when basically the interest rates are not double-digit, but in a normal level again. At the moment, there is sufficient cash at holding level and in the group. Group level has around EUR 300 million of cash, in the different portfolios, sub-holdings and the Mutares holding. We are, I think, well prepared and set, for this.
Obviously, you're completely right, there is a lot of working capital pressure in the portfolio companies due to energy, raw material, et c, et c. I also believe that our operational guys are one of the best cash managers in the world. We are overcoming the situation quite nicely. Can give you a funny story. When we acquired a company, like half a year ago, they came on day one and say they need EUR 10 million of working capital financing. That was like the first or the second week. Until today, they didn't need any. I think the attitude in a corporate, what working capital means and the attitude, what we believe you can do with the working capital is a little bit different.
What's the-
We need to have the mic. Sorry.
What's the interest on the current bond?
6%.
When you show this inverted pyramid and the 83,
Yes.
Transactions where you are in a data room and it's roughly EUR 1 billion of sales. Basically, that's your kind of pipeline for next year. Let's put it this way. Is it wrong to understand it that way?
Yes, it's wrong.
It's wrong.
For this year.
You already added EUR 1 billion, so you would add a second EUR 1 billion before year-end or?
No, no. You know, the pipeline is like a funnel.
Yeah.
Obviously, okay? You have, and there is another layer. There's the layer where we just receive something and say, "Thank you, not for us.
Mm-hmm.
There's the layer which we look, which is this 83 projects, which I think it's EUR 8.8 billion at the moment. We have five projects, which is I think roughly EUR 700-800 million at the moment. Those five are the ones which can be materializing this year.
Mm-hmm.
If we want them, right? Obviously we are advanced in this. At the end, it's a question of price and question of risk and question of what the seller wants to give. Those five, they can all materialize, or we don't want to have any of them, or we want to have two or three or four or five.
Yeah.
If I hear this, regarding the revenue this year and that you can still maybe add some EUR 500 million, is it maybe time to rethink the forecast for 2025? Because EUR 7 billion seems to be a little bit conservative then.
We also want to sell. It's not the intention to grow the Mutares portfolio to 50, 60 companies. I think with around 30 where we are right now, that's a good portfolio number, right? We're not stuck to that. If we are 31, we are not obliged to sell one, or if we're 29, we are obliged to, you know, be crazy and buy one. I think 30 is a good number for us and also the way we are set up and the way we want to manage Mutares. The companies will be larger, which also means when we do an exit, it will be larger. For example, the one we just sold in the Nordics, EUR 240 million will go out now of the turnover.
There's more to come for this year, so we'll still divest a couple of hundred million EUR this year. That's net. I think net growth of EUR 1 billion. It's okay. Good. I think at least we here in the room have the opportunities to continue now in a coffee break and if there are more questions. Now I would think we see each other back, so we make a break now until 5:45 P.M. Good around 20 minutes of break, and then the stream will go online again. There will be now coffee, cake, whatever here in the room. Feel free. We will also try to put some oxygen in the room back again for the bullish buffaloes and not the cows to run away. Thank you very much. All right.
There will be more time later on for a few chats and more coffee, more food. Let's deep dive a little bit. I was talking about the spirit, and I was talking about you know, we are facing the storms and going through the storms, and I'm very happy to have two guys who are facing the storm every day from the operations team. We will kick off with La Rochette. La Rochette is a cardboard manufacturer which we acquired from Reno De Medici in a combination of the Italian and the French transaction team. It's in France, in a wonderful area, if you like skiing. If you're afraid of mountains, you shouldn't go there. I'm very happy to have Pierre-Yves here, Managing Director, and Pierre-Yves will present La Rochette.
We know each other since quite a long time. I think you were one of the first people I met when I joined Mutares, and somewhere at the end of the Netherlands. We will give you a quick introduction with a short clip on La Rochette, so you get an idea. I'm very happy to hand over to you, Pierre-Yves, to introduce La Rochette.
La Rochette Cartonboard is located in Savoie, in the mountains in the south part of France, and we create carton. I'm responsible now for La Rochette Cartonboard since May 2021. We have been working with the full management team on the development of the company in order to implement the different levers and to understand where we start from and where we can go. We are talking about a 150-year-old business, which is an iconic brand known in France, but not only, also in Europe, with a huge potential to develop and also to increase its profitability. I think success depends on two main topics. The first one is the strengths that you create inside the company, and the second one is the market. We are not able today to deliver all the demand of our clients.
It's because we are speaking about replacing plastic packaging with carton packaging, and that's the reason why our market is constantly increasing year after year. La Rochette Cartonboard is made of three different areas. The first one in what we call the pulp area. We create our own pulp, our mechanical pulp, because carton is made of mechanical pulp and chemical pulp on top. We create our own mechanical pulp, and we buy chemical pulp which go on top. After this pulp area, we arrive in the machine area. We have two machines, about which are each one about 150 meters long, and the goal is to create carton. At the end of the machine, you arrive with a big wheel, which is about four tons wheel. The third area is a transformation area.
You will use these wheels in order to cut them as a specific format which is requested by our clients. La Rochette Cartonboard creates about 150,000 tons a year of carton and that we sell through reels or format. This is a typical Mutares case here. We arrived here in May 2021. I had a full consulting team with me to support. We identified levers. We put in place action plan. As soon as this is all stabilized, we recruit someone which was not part of Mutares to take the lead and help the company entering in this new phase. We have been working on very important topics. I would say the first which come in mind is to create an identity. We created the name, La Rochette Cartonboard, the logo.
The goal for this is to help every single employee to understand that he entered in a new culture. In this phase, we need to explain where we wanna go and how we want to go there. Another very important thing is about communication, and we improved a lot our communication. We do regular meetings now with the employees in order to explain them where we are. I think another very important thing is about production sustainability. We decided to start a very aggressive investment plan, and we already see the very positive impacts now in 2022 of what we did already in 2021. We are all proud of the work which has been performed here in La Rochette Cartonboard.
I recruited my successor, and we will now help La Rochette Cartonboard entering in a new phase, the new development phase. We need to seize all the opportunities of these fantastic markets by developing customer intimacy, by transforming our product mix towards more high value-added products, and by also transforming the innovation. All these actions will transform La Rochette Cartonboard into the most preferred folding boxboard suppliers of the packaging industry.
Hello, everyone. I'm Pierre-Yves Guégan. First of all, I would like to say thank you to you, Johannes Laumann, to you, Mark Friedrich, to give me this opportunity to present you today La Rochette Cartonboard turnaround case.
I have to admit that I'm extremely happy, extremely proud to be here, because I think that what we did, as Mutares operations in La Rochette is a fantastic journey. Yeah, again, really happy to go into more details with you today and to explain you what we did and how we did this. I'm Pierre-Yves Guégan. I'm married. I live in, Paris area. I think it's quite clear based on the accent, of my accent. I work on it every day. I am married, I have two children, and I live, yes, in Paris area. I work, in Mutares since more than six years now, so in Mutares operations.
My role is to take the lead of the companies, depending on the acquisition, and I go wherever the people need me in order to develop the company. My role as a summary is starting day one to understand the challenges and to develop the opportunities. This is as simple as this is. Before going into more details, I would like to underline one thing. I'm the only voice you will hear today regarding La Rochette, but it's really important to understand that there are a lot of people in the back, and I would like to start my introduction with this. This is a teamwork. The first team, of course, is the one from La Rochette Cartonboard.
It means the board of directors, of course. I've been working these last 18 months with them on a daily basis. It's not only about the board of directors, it's also about the managers, it's also about the workforce, and it's also about the employees. The first idea, the first thing we have to do is, when Mutares operates, when we arrive in a company, how to create a team. That's the first part of the team, because there is also the Mutares team. Johannes, you mentioned earlier this team spirit that we have in Mutares. I heard a question about competitors. I would say based on my experience, because I did also consulting companies before joining Mutares, that makes a huge difference, and that's exactly what happened here in La Rochette.
Since day one, I had the support of a full team of consultants from Mutares, and you cannot imagine the pace that it brings to the company. We know each other since a very long time now, and the idea is that we can bring clearly another mindset in the company and bring improvement for the coming months, for the coming weeks, for the coming days. Let's go now into more details regarding La Rochette Cartonboard. As it was mentioned in the video, La Rochette is producing cartonboard for packaging. Two types of markets, pharmaceutical products on one side and food products on the other side. It's about 50-50 in terms of percentage.
Regarding the markets, we sell most of our products in Europe, most of them in France, in Italy, also in U.K. I bring some samples. For sure, I'm sure that based on the samples that I have here, you can imagine, clearly see that, I think most of you already had some of the carton from La Rochette Cartonboard, in your hands already. Today I would like to present you this turnaround case. I will go in three different segments. First, how we drove the change. I will start with the context, what we found in La Rochette Cartonboard starting day one. Then I will go into more details regarding the situation of the company now.
I would like to quickly show you what it means working in Mutares, what are the objectives that we are working on. A little bit of context, and I think that you will clearly understand with this slide all what has been mentioned earlier by Johannes regarding the context and why at the end of the day, us in Mutares operations, we are so happy to enter at day one because you cannot imagine the number of levers that we have in front of us. That's really good because the worst which could happen is to enter in a underperforming company without any levers. Coming back to the context of La Rochette Cartonboard, that was a group context. It was part of RDM.
I have nothing against RDM, but it means that La Rochette Cartonboard was included in a more than EUR 800 million turnover group. It means 13 plants overall. The core business of the RDM is recycled carton, and La Rochette is not producing recycled carton but virgin fiber. It was not core business anymore. The headquarters of RDM are located in Italy, and there was no specific sales team in this French plant. It can give you already an understanding on what we found. We found employees who like their job but without any motivation. They didn't have clear understanding on the future. Performance management. No cash forecast, no clear view on the margins. I love it.
Because how can you drive the future of a company if you are not able to anticipate the cash? If you are not able to understand where your margin come from. Immediately after the first week, we clearly understood that some clients were clearly unprofitable. The idea and by the way, I did several companies already in my professional experience, and again, you cannot imagine the number of companies that we have, that we acquire, where it's just exactly the same case. No view on the future, no tool to drive the strategy. Third part, breaks of production. It was not because of the CapEx, but I would say in our case, it was mainly because of the organization. The maintenance, they had no preventive maintenance, so they were more in the fire mode.
As soon as there is a break, yeah, everyone is ready to run. That's not the way you have to work, because then you have problems, and you cannot deliver all what is requested by your clients. Last but not least, is communication. I mentioned it also in the video. Maybe it's something quite common to say, we have to increase or to improve the communication, but it's so obvious. I was the CEO for 15 months of this company, but obviously I cannot do everything alone. I need the people. The best way to have people with you is to explain them where we are, what is the status of the company, and where we want to go. We can discuss all together on how we will go in this direction. That was key.
We had no communication channel in place, and, yeah, first of all, employees didn't know the result of the company. They didn't know that it was underperforming. I didn't mention here, but it was the same with works council. Works council have such an important role to play. Of course, this resulted in an average result over the last six years before acquisition, turnover about EUR 120 million and EBITDA positive of EUR 6.2 million. Believe me, in this type of business, this is what we can consider as underperforming company. What we did. That's a big summary because we did a lot, and then when I say we, again, I speak about the team. The first thing that we had to work on is identity.
The need, and when I say they, all of the employees of the company need to understand that we are a standalone company. If I come back to the cash topic that I mentioned before, what happened in the past is that at the end of the year, if they didn't have enough cash, then the group decided to put cash again and then let's say it was another kind to go for another year. That's not the way we want to make this thing in Mutares. We started with creating this logo. I'm really proud, by the way, of this logo and the name. We need to change as soon as possible all the signs from the previous group that we have everywhere in the company. It's so important.
Also some specific thing, but in the street, when you have the name of the company, written more or less everywhere, you need to change all of this. You need to change the clothes. People need to understand that they are working in a new company. This is a new mindset. Organization of the board of directors. I did several changes because obviously the strategy was not worked, didn't work really well. I did, yeah, several changes in order that they need to understand that they have to create their future. We don't depend anymore on a group which is located in Italy or anywhere else. This is not Mutares headquarters taking the decision for them. This is them who drive their own future. That's the first thing that's really important that they have to understand.
We worked, of course, on communication. Internal communication first, with works council, with employees, and as I just mentioned before, works council are extremely important. We cannot meet on a daily basis all of the employees. Of course, you speak first with the works council, and then they have also to bring the message to all the employees in the mill. External communication, of course, it's important when you come from a big group, a large group like RDM to a standalone company. Some of your customers, some of your suppliers wonder about the future, what do you want to do. This is really important since day one that we have a clear communication with them, and we, for some of them, we need to reassure them, explaining where we want to go.
This is also the case in terms of external communication with politicians. One of my colleagues, André Calisi, told me a long time ago, "Pierre-Yves," it was my first experience as a CEO in Mutares. He told me, "Pierre-Yves, two things that you have to do as soon as possible. The first thing is speak with works council. They are to be the first having the information about what is going on. Second thing, as soon as possible," a bit later of course, "the politicians, the local politicians." In our case, it helped a lot. This is about identity creation. The second thing which we have been working on is the sales development.
We had to create a sales team because we had a TSA, which was proposed by the seller, but that was the idea. All of the decision that you take have to be taken into the company by the people who are really dedicated to this company. We created quite fast sales team. I'm happy that we were able also to recruit the sales administration team, which was already working for La Rochette. It helped a lot because they are the one having a daily communication with the customers. We worked on the margin tool creation. This is obvious. I think again, it was not existing in this company, which seems a bit strange.
Of course, if you go tomorrow to create a business, if you go to see the bank, the first thing they will ask you is, "What about the business model?" And for this, you need to understand where the money come from. We developed the client intimacy, and of course, we went into clients' negotiation, especially for the one which were at a low level of profit. The results of this, we came from EUR 121 million turnover in 2021 to the forecast. The last forecast, which has just been realized beginning of this week, EUR 185 million end of 2022. In term of gross margin, while everything is increasing, while energy is going like crazy, we have been able to maintain our margin at, from 60%-63%.
The third thing, I speak here about investment, but the topic is what we did in terms of manufacturing. Of course, we invested a lot, because you saw in the video, the machines which are, for some of them, quite old. It's important to have a large amount of CapEx in order to maintain this. We investigated, thanks to the Mutares expert in manufacturing. We investigated the plant in order to make an action plan and in order to prioritize what we have to do to make sure that it is running. Creation of a priority list, implementation of ROI methodology. Again, it seems really simple, but that's one of the reflexes that they didn't have. As soon as you speak about CapEx, I'm open.
As I mentioned to them, I'm open to every single CapEx. For every single CapEx that you present to me, I want to see the ROI. Then, of course, if you show me a very good ROI, you are more than welcome. All CapEx financed by banks. Coming back to your question earlier, I think that's also one of the strengths of Mutares, is that we have very strong expertise in finance. In our case, we have been able to finance all of our CapEx with the banks. Total CapEx of EUR 7.9 million in 2022. Of course, a big portion linked to energy, linked to what happened. Lean on quality, production, and of course, safety. La Rochette Cartonboard, as I mentioned here in the title, has been able to handle the energy crisis.
That was a very strong topic for us. Frankly speaking, in May 2021, when I arrived in La Rochette, I was absolutely not an energy expert. But I had to when I discovered that La Rochette is buying 130 giga per year. Linked to the increase that we faced on the market, this became one of our biggest level of cost. Oh, we speak about EUR 50 million, right? Depending on the level of energy price, EUR 50 million per year. I need to tell you in a few words, tell you more about the context. The thing is that, first of all, in 2021, I discovered while we had this energy crisis going up that we didn't have any forward contract. We were on spot.
Basically, it means that every day you don't know what will be the level of price of tomorrow. That's the first thing. It was too late, obviously, to implement a forecast contract because all of our suppliers were saying, "Guys, it's going crazy. Don't buy now, huh? Stay on spot, and we will wait for a better time." We are still waiting for this better time. The second thing, it's something typically French, you have to know, but I think that in Germany you are also thinking about the same type of process. There is a subvention which is given. I think it was implemented in 2010 in France. A subvention which is given to all companies who are buying electricity on the market.
It's a direct subvention, and every year they decide what will be the level of purchase you can make with a specific price. I will now go into more details what it means. If I take the assumption as of today, we speak about 60% of your cost, of your invoice, which is capped at EUR 50. So while we were buying on spot, EUR 350, depending on the day, EUR 400, even sometimes more than EUR 1,000, we could buy 60% of this at EUR 50. We speak here about a potential of more than EUR 20 million direct EBITDA effect. The thing, coming back to the context, is that the previous owner decided in 2020 to sell in advance this rights.
That was obviously not a good idea. It was then too late for us to come back to these rights, and we had to wait for the end for the next year. That's what we faced in 2021, and it was also the case in 2022. What does it mean? It means that for all this period of time, La Rochette Cartonboard has been buying its electricity on spot market. Regarding the increase that we had on the market, we had to take a decision because clearly we came to an unprofitable situation. And we cannot decide to continue with an unprofitable situation. In this case, I prefer to ask the workers to stay home because at least they don't create negative value for the company.
The decision that we took, us, as a board of directors, La Rochette Cartonboard, is to go for a viable surcharge. For the one who knows the process, it's more or less like a fuel for transport, okay? That's the way it works. You have it at the bottom of your invoice. That's what we implemented with our customers. Basically what we did is we did a formula. We did an average of the cost of electricity over the last 15 days that we re-impact as a surcharge to our customers 15 days later. It's a good thing with such a decision is that it's extremely transparent. The bad thing is that the customer doesn't know what will be the price of the coming days. We have been able to implement this.
Of course, in the second step, we had to negotiate with clients. That was not the funniest part, but it worked well. We did letters, we did calls, and of course, we did meetings with some of them. The argument that we gave, I'm not here to create losses to my company, and that's obviously what you don't want also. We should never forget that the customer doesn't want to work with an unprofitable supplier. Never. I explained to them that it was possible to cancel the orders and that we would be back to a normal situation in 2023. Time for us to go back to our ARENH rights.
Coming back to politics that I mentioned earlier, it was important in this case that I already had a connection with the local politics because when energy crisis arrived, I was able to then contact them again, and it helped a lot. Regarding the results of what we did is, you can see here the cost of energy, EUR per ton, what we faced since January 2021 until September 2022. This is a very nice increase, of course. What we did on the selling price. We've been able, in December 2021, we already increased our price by 18%. In September 2022, we speak about 65% increase in comparison to January 2021.
Of course, as I mentioned here in the title, it is really important to benefit from your position in the market. You need to understand really fast what is your position, what are your strengths, and what you can do, and then you can decide on strategy. What is the main objective of Mutares? As I mentioned in the introduction, the main objective is to understand, since day one, what are the challenges and what are the opportunities, and then you drive your strategy. How we work in Mutares? We always start with a 100-day plan. We make analysis, we change the mindset, and obviously, we also implement quick wins. As I mentioned, we had a full mixed team to support the development since day one, and it resulted in new market development, productivity improvement, and financing potentials.
We have the development phase. The goal is to implement the action plan that you have been working on in the 100-days plan and to get, obviously, the results. I'm extremely proud to show you the results that we have been able to get in La Rochette Cartonboard. We have been able to come from EUR 121 million turnover to EUR 185 million, which mean an increase of 53%. In terms of EBITDA, we have been increasing by 106%. I would like to say a few words as a conclusion. I received on Wednesday last week a text message from the head of the work council of La Rochette Cartonboard while I'm not over there since July.
He was saying, "Pierre-Yves, as soon as you come back in our area, it would be a pleasure for me to have a coffee with you and, yes, just to get in touch." It shows me that I think we succeeded in the turn around of La Rochette Cartonboard. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Pierre-Yves. I think you see a little bit of spirit when your energy costs rose from EUR 126 to EUR 440 and you had peak days with more than EUR 1,000. This is a storm. I think in that period of time to double to 13 million, the EBITDA is quite an achievement. I think it shows a little bit also the spirit on the operation side. I think maybe one war story on the transaction. I think this was one of the most exhausting transactions we had because I think we had 21 days to acquire the company. The Italian team is here, Fabio and Constantin. They received
A call and said it needs to be signed before Christmas. I literally the Italian team was working in the office, and I was in the Munich office in the legal office with our in-house lawyer, Angelique, who's also here today. I literally fell asleep on the floor in this office. We were like, I don't know, two and a half days without being home in the same clothes. It was horrible. We were horribly smelling. We ate all unhealthy food you can imagine. We made a deal. This was a spirit. With the teamwork, the Italians were in Milan in the office. Fabio was talking for half an hour about environment at 4:00 A.M. This was a real team spirit in action.
Obviously, also then for the deal team, who is very close to the operations team in the holding period, it's super nice to see, even in a storm, the development of the operations team managed. Very great achievement. Thanks a lot, please. Any questions on La Rochette?
Okay, Danke schön. Yes, so your packaging products in the pharma, for the pharma or your pharmaceutical clients and your food, in the food industry, where are the better margins? I think in the pharma. Just, like the second question is what is really the main driver for your profitability and sales revenues?
Does it work? Yeah. Regarding your first question, regarding margin, you were right. At the beginning, pharma was clearly driving the margin. Coming back to the context that I mentioned, don't forget that in 2021, as you can imagine, the pharma has been declining like hell. Why? Because of COVID, nobody was sick anymore. The good thing in terms of sales is that it was pushing on the food side, but coming back to this margin topic, the problem is that it was the wrong side in terms of margin. Now it's not the case anymore. We have the same level of margin for both of these two markets. Food and pharmacy are bringing the same level of margin. How we drive, where does the margin come from?
I would say, clearly, we have been increasing a lot our price, as simple as it is. That's a, that's the first big thing that we have been changing. The second thing is that we have been working a lot on our productivity. I did not mention it that much, but in 2021, just an example, we had six weeks of break in production. Thanks to what we did, until the end of 2021, in 2022, there was, okay, one break, but only one week. The volume, which are produced by La Rochette Cartonboard are above the budget, which was done for 2022.
Merci.
Any other question? You did well. Oh.
Yeah.
In English, please.
Yes.
She's French.
French. Yeah.
Two questions. First, apart from the increase, the control of the energy cost, increase in selling prices, what happened on the other side of the operating cost that you were able to double your margins? Is it just the operating leverage? Most importantly, did you have to fire people, which is impossible in France? I mean, how did you achieve this kind of profitability? The second question is, you know, once the world goes back to normal in a way where, you know, extraordinarily high energy prices are no longer as high, they will stay high, but, you know, we should be normalizing, if we have peace at some point, do you think that you will reduce prices again or are your high prices gonna be sticky?
I mean, therefore you will have higher margins that way.
Okay.
Seems a bit naive, but I mean.
No, no, that's a very good question. Three questions, by the way. The first one is about the people. Did we fire people? Yes, I fired people, but only in the management team because people were underperforming. Regarding the business itself, no one left the company. Regarding the other increase in terms of purchases, everything has been increasing. The biggest cost for La Rochette Cartonboard is coming from this chemical pulp that we buy. This has been increasing constantly since May 2021. That's the same with starch, that's the same with everything. Obviously, with the salaries also. We don't mention the salaries, but salaries have been increasing.
We've been able to handle all of this so that, as I mentioned before, our margin, we have been able to maintain our margin. Yes, thanks to our position in the market, we have been able, coming back to the previous question, we have been able to re-impact most of our cost increase on our prices. Third question, sorry, was?
When the pricing normalizes.
Yeah.
On your-
Next year. Okay. I can already tell you, even if I'm not managing director of La Rochette Cartonboard, but I see already figures coming for budget 2023. It's more than EUR 20 million, which is expected in terms of EBITDA. Yes, you are totally right. We asked our customers during this period of time to take part of our cost. Of course, as soon as we get these ARENH rights back, we need to re-impact it on our clients. We have so many additional potentials.
I cannot say too much, disclose too much, but we have so many potentials that we know already that we should go above EUR 20 million in 2023.
Two questions, please. First, could you give us some details on the purchasing price? Have you to pay or did you got some money? And how is it now accounted to asset to the group and to the AG? What is the part of this EUR 272 million you mentioned in the beginning? Second, is La Rochette already in the situation to pay consultant fee to the mother company?
I can take this.
How much?
I think you can.
Is this included in the result you saw or is this, below this, like, EBITDA line?
As a sort of company was on average making I think EUR 6.2 million EBITDA in the last six years. Obviously, I cannot disclose the purchase price, but it was a little bit more than EUR 4 million and a little bit less than EUR 6 million. That's how it's in the books on the AG on purchase price because it's German GAAP. La Rochette was able to pay fees from day one. Part of the return of investment of La Rochette is already included in our holding results. The purchase price is obviously included in this EUR 207 million of the investment on acquisition side.
If there was a question. Thank you.
Thanks a lot. Now we go from more or less southern France to a couple of miles up north. Frigoscandia, we have Christian Klingler as Managing Director. We acquired from Posten Norge the Nordic team with the largest acquisition so far. The one in Denmark is not closed yet from the Nordic teams of Carl Kistenmacher, who is also there today. Look out for a typical Nordic guy, tall, blonde. You'll find him. This was acquired not even a year ago. We would like to give you also an insight on this one because I think it was a long, exciting, strange, crazy, but in the end, successful process. We really wanted to win this, and we did at the end of the day. Enjoy Frigo.
My name is Peter Haveneth , and I'm the CEO of Frigoscandia, a full service provider of temperature control logistics in the Nordics. Today, we mainly serve the Nordic food industry, where we are running the most comprehensive food logistics network. We have approximately 1,000 employees. We have subsidiaries in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. In total, we are active in more than 50 markets. With our superior infrastructure and by operating in all parts of the supply chain, we have a unique market position. My name is Christian Klingler. I'm a Managing Director at Mutares in the portfolio operations team, and currently I also serve as chairman of Frigoscandia. Mutares bought Frigoscandia in December 2021 from the Norwegian Postal Service, which belonged to the Norwegian state.
The company when we acquired it was loss-making, so you might want to ask, why would we acquire a company like that? We saw a huge opportunity in this acquisition. Frigoscandia has a fantastic USP. We have a very vast logistics and distribution network in the Nordic regions. It has warehouses. With this combination, you can offer a customer a one-stop shop, which basically means that you can reach an end customer at every angle of the Nordic market. On a daily basis in Sweden, we are operating more than 700 trucks linked to 23 terminals. We also have 12 warehouses, we have nine in Sweden and three in Norway, with a total capacity of 900,000 cubic meters or 230,000 pallet locations.
More than 75% of our customers buy a combination of services from warehousing as well as transportation.
Good afternoon or good evening, actually, everybody. It's nice to be here, and good to see so many familiar faces again at our event in Frankfurt. Frigoscandia is a very significant company in our portfolio. We purchased it end of last year. It has a great heritage. It has been founded in 1948, as you can see, at the time, under the name of Frigoscandia. When we bought it before, it was called Bring Frigo. We changed the name back, which was great because there was a huge market awareness or brand awareness of the company. That helped us a lot actually over the first year after our acquisition. It's been a privatization.
Not the first one, it's the third one after in the same industries even, after our last exit in the logistics sector, which was Nexive last year. The company generates about EUR 257 million of revenues when we acquired it and was slightly loss-making. A little bit different to what Pierre-Yves presented before. At Mutares, we acquire companies which are heavily distressed, but also some which need a transformation, but literally where you just don't lose EUR 1 million a month. It's been a good investment. The company stands for a slogan which is called, like, First in Mind for Temperature Controlled Logistics. That means we deal with food.
We wanna be the first address when it gets to logistics in the frozen, in the chilled, in the ambient sector. We wanna be the service leader. For our customers, it's important that you have somebody who can deliver stuff on time and in a cheap way. The third is we would like to be a Nordic player, developing from a Swedish into a more Nordic player where we can service the same or more customers cross-border, basically. In the video, it's been explained already a little bit that we have mainly two hubs. One is the transportation hub. The other one is the warehousing, and that is, in combination, a very powerful weapon because you can offer your customers a solution which others don't have currently. Just a little bit explained what transportation means.
For us it is like there is a full truckload or a less than full truckload. There is a groupage business, and there is a charter business. I think charter is easily explained. We deliver food from A - B, and you can hire us on an exclusive basis. Groupage is where we predominantly for retailers. Sort of like, you store your goods in our terminals, and you tell us where we need to deliver it. These are normal sizes of about six pallets, which we transport. FTL, LTL is something where, you know, you have us on a full truckload, and we deliver from A - B, but there is no consolidation of goods in between. We have a capacity, and that's very important.
You can see at the map that we have about 10 terminals in Sweden. We have 12 warehouses, nine of which in Sweden, three in Norway. We also have 12 partner terminals. With those, we cover the region just because of the bullets are rather in the lower end. That doesn't mean that we cover not all areas. The strength of Frigoscandia is that we can reach each angle within the regions. Also what we have is we have on the international side some satellite terminals in Helsinki and in Denmark.
On the warehousing, as you can see, 75% is chilled, is frozen, sorry. Then we have got 15%, which is chilled, and 10% which is ambient. From a temperature perspective, that means we can go from -25 and more to even +20. There is a huge range in there, and we can cover that all reliably. The services in warehousing, it's typical warehousing business, so we store goods as long as customers want. We also do their handling. Handling means that we do the thawing, we do the customs, anything that our customer really requires from an administrative perspective. Also we do the picking. Typical commissioning, we do for one large customer.
We also stick some labels on the, on the products, just because they wanna transport it abroad, and the ingredients need to be written on a specific language on there, and we do that. On the warehousing side, we are a huge player in the Nordics. We have 12 warehouses, 230 pallet positions, or 859,000 square meters. A substantial player in the region. Here, there are some examples on what kind of customers we service. It's a huge range. Our advantage and how we present us to the customer is that we can be a one-stop shop for them, and we can provide solutions in various ways.
For example, we have got one, which is Scan, for example, which is a meat producer, where we are literally sort of their supply chain. You know, they don't have any warehouses or space to cool their products, so this is what we can do. You also see this for Findus, for example, which is a microwave food producer. Otherwise, also for some smaller ones, you see that at Italpizza or Larsa. Pizza is clear. Larsa is a yogurt manufacturer. They are very small. If they wanna come to the Nordic region, they can store the stuff in our warehouse, and we deliver it for them.
They are so small that they wouldn't have this sort of cost on their own, and we can help them there. Otherwise, we have also, as you can see, IKEA there, ICA. ICA is a huge grocery store. What we do there is we sort of like deliver them with the food products which they require in their shops. Store replenishment, so also there for restaurants particularly, we drive around the regions, we deliver them as they need. Also on the last one, we have online supermarkets where we do the end-to-end distribution to the store or to the individual consumer.
One thing is also now having explained what Frigoscandia is and stands for, the question is, why did you acquire that? I think five points on each of those. Number one, of course, is that, I mean, we do understand the industry. We find that the industry in the past has given us some great upsides, and currently also there is a huge boom in the industry, so with high multiples, we think it's a great investment again.
Clearly what we have seen is that there is the operational transformation potential, which we have seen so many times when we acquired something from the state where they have completely different, like objectives to what a company should achieve and. For us, it is of course the profitability, which is our focus, and we are seeing a huge potential to improve that. What we are seeing is also that this company has a clear USP, which is the network, which I explained before. It's one which you can build on. What we are seeing is that, because of this company being around for so long, everybody knows Frigoscandia, so there's a huge brand awareness and there is a very loyal customer base.
Really good fundamentals to do an acquisition. Why did the seller sell it to us? I think there again, it's as in previous transactions, we have done privatizations before. We have shown them that we can do it, and I think this is also one factor there which made the difference. Another one is that on the complexity, we don't shy away from changing IT, implementing a finance function if there isn't one, or doing other things and stepping in as an interim function if required. The more complex, the more we like it really, and the better it is for us. We could demonstrate that to a seller, and I think this is why we get chosen most of the time.
We can also provide or could show that we can guarantee a seller some deal security. You know, very reputable firms, they don't want to sell to anybody. They want to sell to somebody who they can trust and who doesn't run away in the middle of the transaction or doesn't have the capital strength or, ultimately they find out, well, it's not so good as we initially thought. There we could clearly convince them that we are the one to go for. Certainly what also plays a huge role for a seller is that you need to tell them, actually, these are the guys who afterwards, once they get given the job, that they can do it.
With our ops team, which is now at a considerable size, we can deliver services and help to the companies which they require. We have all sorts of people from IT to finance to supply chain to sales. We've got people who are definitely the ones multicultural. They understand the differences and that makes a huge difference. Of course when you acquire the company, you turn up on day one and you face some challenges. We have seen this multiple times that you know the world changes and then you're faced with some issues. Here in this instance, when we acquired it, we already knew that the energy prices would soar.
Who would have expected that there is a war in Ukraine and with all of these consequences that ultimately it had on the energy prices. We were suddenly confronted with prices, you know, three times and more as much as in the previous years. If you run a warehouse where you need to cool down to 25 degrees minus, then these are huge costs. Also on the diesel, you know, increases by up to 40%, it's a huge cost factor. The transportation industry is a low margin business, so anything there is critical. What do you do?
When I was asked once by a lawyer, you know, when we talked about crisis managers, you know, how they differentiate them from others, then I think my answer was that basically you need to find solutions to problems, and you need to turn them into upsides. That is something that is an accelerator really sometimes. Because when we acquire something, we always need to go to the customer and ask for more money, price increases. We always need to go to a supplier and try to pay them less.
In this case, we even have something where we can tell them, "Well, not only we go to you because we haven't performed last year." Usually the counterpart tells us, "Well, first you get your house in order, and then you get more from us." In this case, the discussion is a completely different one because suddenly, of course, you come here and want the price increase, because the energy situation has changed. We need to make these into upsides, so we have implemented surcharges. We have on the diesel also passed on these costs. We have actually used the situation as an upside for us and have been very successful in it.
Going forward, I think the economy will be difficult, yeah, with possibly a recession looming. Nevertheless, we have been well prepared. We have increased our service offerings. Customers are happy and which will result in or has resulted in low churn and we are very strong with our contacts, so I'm very confident that actually we will master this crisis as well. Just a few numbers, here we can see that when we acquired it was EUR 700,000 positive, which is a good thing.
This year already we will be at EUR 4.8 million, so resulting from all of the price increases predominantly which we have made, also some margin improvements and of course in our business always some fixed cost reductions which we also see. The outlook looks very promising as I said in our video. I think it's a fantastic company. We see by 2025 a nearly EUR 25 million EBITA. Even with the energy situation, we believe that it will go down, but that's based on the forecast or on the budget which was presented in April or approved in April this year. Just a little bit on the how we're going to achieve the improvements.
It is a mixture, as I said, between operationally changing and improving the margin, reducing the fixed costs and also, you know, making sure that there is the growth base maintained at that level. As an example on the operational side, with all of the diesel price increases, we have looked at the route optimization. Don't have your trucks drive around in the country for nothing. Make sure that you plan that properly. Eliminate some of the stops in between. That was a huge driver. On the overhead side, sure there was some staff rightsizing, but not as heavy as you see this in our other portfolio companies, which we have. I mean, you can clearly see that the EBITDA hasn't been so bad.
We have changed some positions and currently have also streamlined processes which also ultimately resulted in some savings. On the top side, for us, with our one-stop solution, the warehouses and the transport business, we can do some cross-selling. Get the warehousing customers onto the road and the people who are on the road in our warehouses. That's a great strategy and will ultimately result in an EBITDA to nearly EUR 25 million. Last slide, which is the one that is very important also. We not only do restructuring, we also have some other focus points. This is also something which is driven by our customers.
Our customers want us to be greener, otherwise, it would be difficult to be successful in the tendering. Here, we have given us some objectives, some already implemented, some are to be implemented. An important one is that we source fully green energy now. We have implemented some operational changes, such as, like, we try to manage to keep the consumption of energy to a low level minimum. We cool very heavily at night and in the expensive time in the morning it is, you know, not so heavily cooled.
We have solar panels on the top of our warehouse, and we also instruct our external partners to meet our targets when it gets to diesel consumption and the mix in fuel to become greener. We aspire to be more efficient. One huge upside which we will see is that currently we have some very old warehouses. Old warehouses consume a lot of energy, and we will move out of those and go into newer warehouses, and they are much more energy-friendly. That's about it to the energy to the Frigoscandia. I think it's been a great investment for us.
As I said, it will be very successful and happy to take any questions if you have.
Thank you, Christian. Any question on cooling logistics?
Hello. Yeah.
Yeah. Hi.
Does this former owner has any earn-out possibilities when he sold?
No.
Why?
Well, I can tell you a lot more, but the answer is no. Yeah, we generally don't have so many earn-outs when we buy, so. Okay, any other? Easy ones first. Good. Okay. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
Okay. Last but not least, I would like to give you a little bit of an outlook, and what's going on, what's happening. Then, also would like to invite and remind you at a later stage. When we look at an outlook, and here it says in the subtotal, we deliver the promise. Deliver what we promised. I think on the first slide, transaction, we have delivered 12 transactions this year. You will have a hard time to find somewhere in the private equity market in Europe, someone who has delivered more than we did. We're telling for three years we will make one transaction per month, and we accomplished that for three years. We deliver what we promised. On the buy side, we don't only buy and then hold and enjoy life, we also want to sell.
The buy side in super difficult situation. Predominant business in Finland, which has, I think, a 2,300 kilometers border to Russia. We sold a business, which was the second-largest exit in Mutares history in Finland in these difficult times. Also there we are looking for big exits, and we made a big exit. We promised and we delivered. The board is fully committed also to the portfolio development. In the portfolio development, you have seen two companies today. We will focus overall on the development of profitability. I can name so many things, but there's one big thing we are planning to do.
We have acquired a EUR 500 million business of MANN+HUMMEL recently, which is actually an add-on to the EUR 400 million business which we acquired from Magna and which fits perfectly to the business where we also have this Indian facility of Gemini. In total, this will be a rockstar plastic automotive company with more than EUR 1 billion in turnover, which we will create in the next months and years to come here. This is a development of the portfolio. This is the buy and build strategy we make. We'll hold a EUR 1 billion player in the automotive sector. We'll hold a EUR 1 billion player in the plastic sector of the automotive business with all relevant OEMs all over the globe, with production facilities in India, in China, in South America, in America, in Europe, in Africa. This will be a player in the market.
Last but not least on shareholder value. Even though situations are abnormal, and together with some external partners, we have made studies on what is the market. Generally speaking, after crisis situation, that is the best time to invest in private equities. After the crisis 2001, after the crisis 2008, these were the moments where private equity returns compared to investments in other infrastructure, healthcare, whatever, those are the biggest returns. We, as a management, and I also want to speak for Robin and Mark, obviously, we are committed to create this and push and improve the shareholder value. We are committed to be dividend friendly, and like we were in the last years, where we dividend in €1.50.
We are committed to hold our promises. We are committed to increase the shareholder value. We are committed also to do everything that is in this abnormal market to be successful and raise the value of the firm. We are committed to be part and lead this winning organization. Today, we spoke about the power of winning, and I believe we have shown the power of winning. We have shown how we improve in difficult situations. Energy crisis. We have shown in the Frigoscandia on this example how we did it. We have told about the Lapeyre story. We have shown the winning of a turnaround. With 12 transactions and a transaction exit in a difficult market, we have shown that we win on the deal side.
Here on the table before you leave, and you can still stay here because there's a lot to talk and there will be a little bit of drinks and finger food coming. You're very welcome to grab one of these. Because at the end of the day, I believe whoever is connected to us is a winner, and we try to spread this winning DNA to our shareholders, to our stakeholders, to our employees. This is the power of winning. As I said, you will remember the winner. You have no clue who was second and third. This is the spirit of Mutares, which I also wanted to transport here. You're welcome to grab later on one of these winning trophies.
If you put it on your desk and show it to your colleagues and whatever, they will love it, and I will love it as well. I think the winning today, it's not only the deals and the turning round. I would like to end and tell you the secret of winning, our biggest weapon of winning we have. A little bit also what I believe is the differentiation in the market, why we win. Those are the people we have. The people we employ in the deal teams, the people we employ in the operations, the people we employ in the admin support. We are very grateful to have this crowd behind us on each and every operation we conduct and each and every decision we take. This is the reason for this. We are growing heavily. We're employing, we're growing this team.
I think when I started 2016, it was 20% of what you see here on the picture. Employee satisfaction and growing together with the employees, this firm, this is something I think in the name of the management, we are very proud to have this. Last but not least, I want to invite you as shareholders, stakeholders, to take part of this winning group. I want to invite you to check out if I deliver or if we deliver what I have promised. At the end of the day, I also want to remind you, and I told you when I'm with my family in Texas on the farm, and they always, when they gave birth to a cattle, they always wanted to have a male one because they resist the storm.
They always have to build stables for the cows because they go back and run away. I want to remind you, if a group of bulls facing the storm and keep on running, you have only one choice. You can join. If you don't join, I wish you all the best. I'm inviting you to join our bullish people, our bullish firm, and because we are taking off. Thank you very much. Thanks for being our guest at the Capital Markets Day 2022.