Good evening, everyone. My name is Dirk Winkels. I'm the head of IR from Rheinmetall. For those who don't know me, I welcome you to our quarterly recap call. I will not disclose any public information. This is just a pure recap of the information that we have already contributed over the last weeks, and we will just stick to the messages that we have released over the last weeks at the conferences. We are entering our quiet period on February 12, so this is the end of our communication, basically. Just to start with the full year 2024, we have communicated that we are basically in line with what we have said regarding top line and margin growth. We have seen that, especially operating free cash flow, was much better than expected due to incoming prepayments here associated to some of the orders that we have received.
Order backlog at the end of the year was below our expectation. We had expected to achieve EUR 60 billion. We only came in at EUR 54 billion because two of the important German digital contracts were on the agenda for the January meeting and have been approved in the meantime. So we are happy that all the contracts by now have been approved as expected. The German contracts for TaWAN and for Soldier Systems have been press released over the last 10 days.
We were not allowed to disclose the full figure for the frame contract on the TaWAN project, but both contracts combined were matching our expectation that we had communicated at the Q3 call and after that with order intake above EUR 11 billion. Regarding the other contracts, main contracts in the fourth quarter were related to D-LBO and for the Lithuanian plant here for the 155 millimeter production site.
The Lithuanian contract is including here a fixed contract for 155mm ammunition over the next 10 years and accounted for more than EUR 700 million. D-LBO was a contract which was around EUR 875 million. We had a second D-LBO contract for electronic solution, which accounted for EUR 600 million. So combined, D-LBO for Vehicle Systems and Electronic Solutions were in the area of EUR 1.5 billion. For the full year 2025, the defense growth was in line with our expectations. We had here 50% growth despite some delay due to an incident that we had in South Africa, which delayed around EUR 250 million into 2025. We have not confirmed here a quarter where this shipment will be released. So this is still up for discussion.
For 2025, we will provide a full guidance with the release of the 2024 figures, but we have already indicated that the growth, especially in the defense business, will continue. We are expecting that the defense business will grow 30% plus in 2024. Civil business is here an issue. We are currently observing that the public available figures for the production volumes in 2025 are further declining, and the business cannot here separate from the overall general trend. So slightly burdened civil business, but very strong civil defense business in 2025. The CEO has confirmed the 2027 figures that we have provided at the capital market day last year in Rome with EUR 20 billion sales, and we have given an indication where we are expecting the business to move by 2020 or 2030. 2030 is a vision that we have here.
This is not an official guidance, but it indicates that growth is continuing and that we are expecting to see growth moving to an area of EUR 30 billion with strong performance of the Weapon and Ammunition business around EUR 10 billion. The vehicle systems are expected to grow more than EUR 10 billion. Electronics solutions driven by the digitization and the Air Defense business moving to EUR 6-7 billion, and then the rest is expected to be covered by the civil business. We have reiterated that civil business is not expected to be core and that we would be willing to dispose of certain of the business, but nothing has been treated from an accounting perspective here, so it's just operating as normal.
There had been some discussions around potential acquisition of TKMS Marine business, and we have here communicated that we had submitted a non-binding offer to TK on that business.
By now, we have not received any official feedback from TK here on that business, but we know that TK is now moving into the spin-off of the TKMS business, so that seems to be the preferred way of the. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the month or at the end of January, we had an incident at our Murcia plant. So at the Expal business, we had two seriously injured people and four lighter injured people. We are currently supporting here the families of the injured employees and fully cooperating with the authorities to identify here the source of the incident. It has not been an act of sabotage here. That is already clear, but we do not know what the actual reason for the incident was. We are not expecting to see any major disruption from the incident at the plant in Murcia.
This would be my summary of the messages that we have submitted. We will have here Mr. Papperger, Mr. Neumann presenting at the full year's release on March 12 around 2:00 P.M. And now I would be open for your questions. If you have a question, please raise your hand, and Anika will open your line.
Mr. Weier, your line is open.
Yeah, good evening. Hi guys. Thanks for doing the call.
Hi, Sven.
Two questions from my side, please. I saw a slide from a press conference, I think from your Leonardo JV, that showed the ramp of the Lynx production and the MBT production. And I was just wondering if that was possible also to share the slide with us. I thought it was quite an interesting one, was I think available on Hartpunkt. You could see it. So I was wondering if you could share that one with us at the stage of the Q4 results.
We are currently verifying the information that was not supposed to be released. We will prepare a special slide deck here for the capital market and then share part of the information with you with the full year release.
We should not really take this info yet for the official line, so to speak.
The official line will be communicated with the full year release.
The second question I had was just on the ammo side and the incidents you had in Expal. I think there was already an incident a year ago. Then you had one in South Africa. I mean, it's quite a few incidents. I was just wondering, is it not likely that there could be a bit of a sabotage and what could you do to protect you more, right? Because it seems quite a few incidents in the last 12 or 18 months.
Yeah. I mean, clearly, operations has been flagged as the key risk for Rheinmetall. We are here handling explosives, and this is a dangerous production. We are trying to install safety measures around the globe here on a very high level and passing on best practice. We don't know yet what has been the background of the incident in Spain yet. We have had a different production site incident in South Africa. Here we only had equipment damages. So we are trying to improve here levels. Clearly, this is part of our ESG targeting lost time in incident rates. Incident rate is a topic that we are clearly focusing on, but we have always said that this is a topic which is very difficult. And we here see again in Spain that we cannot exclude here incidents.
What we can exclude at this point is that it has been a case of sabotage.
Understood. Thank you, Dirk.
You're welcome. Next question, please.
At the moment, there are no further questions.
Okay. So if there are no further questions at this point, I would start to get ready for my final remarks. Thank you for your interest. And close the call.
All right. And there's a next question from Mr. Growe. Mr. Growe, your line is now open.
Sebastian, I can't hear you.
Mr. Growe, your line is open.
Okay, Sebastian, unfortunately, we can't hear you here. Is there any other question in the room?
There are no further questions.
Okay, so thank you, Anika. Thank you for your interest, and yeah, have a lovely evening. Goodbye.