Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Capital Markets Day of Rheinmetall. I hope you enjoyed yesterday, not only the evening but also the presentations. Today, we will walk through our technologies. Later, my colleague René Gansauge will give you an overview about the operations, and on the financial side, Klaus takes care. At the end of the presentations, I will give you an outlook about that, what we want to do. During the lunch, I think we can go through and give you an overview about the vehicles and technology, if you're interested, what we have here inside this facility. One thing which is very important for Rheinmetall is that we have dramatic spendings, and you know this exactly, especially on the German side. The beauty at the moment is that Germany really wants to invest. We see it. We see all the negotiations.
It is not only Germany; it is all Europe. Germany is the main driver. Germany has to be the main driver because Germany has the money. The net target that we have, 3.5% or in total 5% spendings, up to 2035, this is really reality on the German side. What you see is on the budget side what happens, and the German budget will grow up to EUR 180 billion. A lot of that will be investments in materials because, for sure, the personnel has to grow up, but at the end of the day, the personnel costs are not as high as the spendings are going north. There is a clear message from the German Chancellor, and the Chancellor says Germany wants or has to become the largest European fighting force. It will be reality.
I really trust in that because of all the investment programs that you see later, especially which is coming from Germany. Another point is that Germany is a lead nation now in Europe. A lead nation means that they really try to make a pooling on the ammunition side, on the vehicle side. A pooling means that, for example, if we sign the Chacal, which is here also, the vehicle that you can see, and the Germans said, "Okay, Netherlands should come and should join the club to have bigger contracts, to have a pooling," which is also very important. Rheinmetall is expanding now into space, into air, into naval, and into the army. We always were very strong on the army side, but this is a new message now because of the decision to step into NVL.
If I speak about NVL, I speak about our company, but as you know, at the beginning, still closing is not done. We believe that in Christmas time or latest in January, it will be done. That we have an expansion across the whole portfolio, and you see some of the products that we hear, really some of the products Rheinmetall in between has 2,000 different products that we can give to defense forces. We will not speak about civilian business today, and the reason is very clear. We will take it from the top line. Klaus will give you information about that. From January on, it is not longer on the top line, our civilian business, and I think we are able to set it in Q1 or Q2 next year. In the circle is we had 30 years of understanding.
Rheinmetall is building up the capabilities not only on the land domain but also on other areas. What's the scenario now? The scenario, and that's very clear, the aggressor at the moment is coming from Russia, no doubt about it. If I speak with the prime ministers of the eastern flank that we have, if you go to the Baltics, if you go to Poland, if you go to other areas, they said on the eastern part, we are really afraid about that. They must be afraid because they see nearly daily attacks. Attacks from the Russian Navy, attacks from drones, which are coming up, and we have to prepare ourselves. There is no doubt at the moment, absolutely no doubt, that especially the eastern flank countries are very, very convinced that they have to invest more, and Germany is part of them.
It's not the same in Spain, and this is also very easy. If you see Europe, it's far away from the area where we have problems. It's, at the end of the day, for sure, also a political decision. Also, Spain wants to grow up to 2% of the GDP to do something because they are part of NATO, and part of NATO, and this is a differentiator that we had five years ago. NATO at the moment is driving. Mark Rutte is the driver at the moment to give the different countries really clear tasks, what they have to do, how many brigades they have to send into NATO, what kind of equipment they need. That is very helpful for us because we know exactly how many vehicles they need.
We know exactly how much ammunition they need, but in all other areas also, so we are very near to NATO. That's a differentiator to five years ago where NATO nearly played no role. NATO states in Europe are playing a big role. Five years ago, it was the United States of America. They were the driver. They drove everything. Now Europe wants to be a real partner of the United States of America. We have a strong conflict in the Baltic Sea. You see not a lot in the newspapers about that, but if you speak with the German Navy, and the German Navy is the main protector of the Baltic Sea, they see every day attacks from Russians, from submarines, not really attacks to fight against frigates or whatever, but to have, yeah, let me say, a little bit of a cold war in that area.
That is the reason that Germany will invest a lot into the Navy. The Navy investments, which are coming up over the next 10 years, is a level of more than EUR 80 billion only for the Navy. It's everything in. It's submarines, it's frigates, it's corvettes, etc., etc. We have a neighbor, and this neighbor is dangerous, and we have to prepare ourselves. A small overview about the budget. From the budget side, you see the German spending underpins the aspiration that we have, and it's going up to EUR 180 billion, as I said before. I really believe in that figures. If you speak at the moment with the politicians, if you speak with our finance minister, there is no discussion at the moment that we have to spend it in Germany. Absolutely no discussion.
I personally thought that these numbers are too high because in our simulation, we have not numbers which are as high, but if you combine that also with other European states, what they are spending, it's for sure growing up, and it's bigger. Coming back to a slide that we have shown you two years ago, that's also very important because a lot of people ask us, "Is it possible to hurry up, to grow up all that things?" This is, again, what we have shown you two years ago. We need for ammunition from order intake to production six to 12 months. We need for logistic vehicles 12 months, for medium-weight vehicles up to 18 months, for main battle tanks 24 months, and for soldier systems with all the electronics inside, we need also 12 months.
We are able to react in one year, mostly in one year. In very rare cases, we need two years. At the end of the day, we are very fast. You sit here at the moment in a factory where, two years ago, we had Bush here, two years ago. It is possible to build in 12 months such factories that you have seen. The only thing we need from the governmental side is, let me say, a safe base. The safe base is to have long-term contracts, and we discuss a lot with our governments about that to get these long-term contracts now, and I think we will get it. What are now the budgets that Germany wants to spend over the next years? This is what is in the planning.
Sometimes a little bit it changed, yeah. If ammunition is going from EUR 80 billion to EUR 60 billion and next year it again is going up, it does not matter. The figures are so big, yeah. I'm absolutely not afraid that something happens in this area. Germany wants to invest EUR 80 billion in ammunition, as I said before, a little bit more than EUR 80 billion in Navy, EUR 10 billion on air defense, EUR 10 billion on drones, more than EUR 50 billion on vehicles, EUR 35 billion in satellites, and also EUR 35 billion in digitization. The reason that we have shown you digitization yesterday is that we change at the moment really our company. Rheinmetall is changed, and we are getting more and more a digital company. The reason is not that we are not convinced that vehicles or platforms are not important.
We are convinced they are important, but we are convinced that the future is the connectivity. Without connectivity, you are not longer able to be a platform producer. The platform is the base. The platform is the base for that, so that is a basic know-how that you need. The digitization, what you have seen yesterday from satellites pictures to the drone pictures to the battle management system where the algorithms are coming from Rheinmetall. For your understanding, and I really take time today about that, the starting point from Rheinmetall was not to say, "Okay, we are the kings of battle management systems." The starting point was 20 years ago that we are the digitization guys from the soldiers. The soldier system, which is a big digital system, yeah, was the starting point of Rheinmetall, and we started 20 years ago together with the German government.
Now we have implemented in different countries our soldier system, but this is the starting point. From the soldier system, we go to the vehicles. It was impossible to communicate from the soldiers with the vehicle side digital because the vehicles were not digital. For your understanding, that is the reason that we have the DLBO program. The digitization, the land-based operations, from the army side, the digitization from the army is the second point. The soldier system is worthless, if you do not have also the digitization on the vehicle side. With the digitization in the vehicle side, you can communicate because 24,000 vehicles over the next two years will be digitized. This is the second big contract that we have. There is multi-billions for the soldier systems, multi-billions for the vehicles. Now the next step is coming.
If the vehicles are digitized, we have to go to Navy and to Air Force. On the Air Force side, we are on the way with F-35 because F-35 will be the backbone for digitization, for information flow from the Air Force to the army. The frigates and corvettes will be the backbone for the digitization from the Navy to the army. That is the reason that we stepped into the F-35 business because together with Lockheed and together with our digitization technology, we are able to be a good partner for the German Air Force or for the German forces in total. Now with the platform that we stepped in NVL, we are able to be a good partner for the whole German forces. That is the real thing behind NVL.
It's not that we say, "Super, we are able now to build a ship." The ship by themself is 25%-30% of the value, but the equipment on the ship, this is really what is important. Missile system, missile launcher, the combat management system on ships, etc., etc. We do the same what we did on the army side. We make a vertical integration on the naval side. Nobody at the moment is doing that. That's a big differentiator. What happens now in Ukraine and how important is Ukraine? Is Ukraine a game changer if the war stops? A lot of people always ask him, "Yeah, but what happens if tomorrow the war stops?" The Ukrainian business, yes, it's EUR 1.3 billion. We want to grow up to be a company of EUR 50 billion in this area.
It's a small piece, the whole arena that we have, and the backlog is EUR 1.7 billion. We deliver a lot, and we could deliver much more, but it's a money issue. At the moment, the Ukrainians have no money about that. The Americans stopped spending, the Europeans not stopped spending. Today, there is another meeting, as you know, between the chancellor and the prime ministers from the U.K. and France in Berlin. This evening, they have a dinner there, and they discuss how much spendings are coming. We see at the moment their spendings are going down. We give them something, we give them always ammunitions, but it's absolutely not enough really to fight the Russians back.
What we want to show you, we have from vehicle services to the Lynx localization, everything in place, but at the moment, it's a small business if you compare it to the rest of the Rheinmetall business. What's the situation that we have at the moment? We have significant progress on our cross path. You see it, first of all, on the backlog, as you know, expectation is around EUR 80 billion end of 2025. I told you also during all the conferences that we had that we have a potential to grow up to EUR 120 billion mid of next year because of all the big contracts which you will see later. The sales on the defense side, we have a growth rate of 35%-40% on the sales side.
I think there are not a lot of companies also in defense who have a growth rate between 35% and 40%. We stay on that level. The reason that we are able to do this is that we really reorganized our operation systems. René will give you an overview about that, what we did. You have seen some of that, for example, yesterday, if you go here behind that wall, it is a fully automatized production line. As I said, here, 40 people per shift are able to produce up to 500,000 shells and 350,000 full shots of ammunition. That is also a differentiator. You cannot see a production line like that in a second place in the world at the moment, not one.
I think a lot of your people had also a look into our partners or competitors, however you want to call them, to go in. The operational margin, the operational margin will grow. If you see, and we gave a lot of information, I think there is one information missing here, the operating margin that we have on the defense side is going nearly to the 20%, which is our target, because here is also the civilian business, which is a flat business and which makes no profit inside. Next year, the figures will for sure change if we take the civilian business from our top line. What we are also doing is we believe in partnerships. We believe in partnerships and joint ventures. We discussed it yesterday. Three years ago, Rheinmetall has no clue about satellites.
In a strategic meeting, we, the board of Rheinmetall, yes, we asked our people, "What the hell is the reason that we are not going into space?" People told us, "Yes, because we have no clue about that." I said, "Can we find a way?" He said, "Okay, I want to have in the next two weeks statistics about all the satellite producers." We found that ICEYE is a 100% good partner for us because it's a small company. They want to grow. They have good technologies. They have the best SAR technology at the moment in Europe, maybe worldwide in this area. We contacted them. We made this joint venture, and the production start will be now in Q2 2026 in Neuss.
Maybe the next capital markets day will be in Neuss because then you see a production line which is similar to that, what you have here, but also on the electronic side, on the turret side. With that joint venture with Auterion, where we bought shares now, yeah, last week or two weeks ago, we had it's still not in the I think we have to give the press release now about that. We bought shares of that. Underhill, a good partner. You have seen it yesterday. On the Underhill side, we tried to implement American technologies here to Europe, and we use everything also on Lockheed on joint venture base. We are the door opener. We open the door for US companies, for technology companies. We cooperate, and we create a win-win situation.
The win-win situation is that we said, "I want to have 60% of the profit. I have everything, let me say, on the top line, but you have 40% from the profitability from a market where you usually are not able to come in." That is what the Americans love. The American President Trump loves that. He said, "Hey, you make America great if you do it in that way because you open market for us in different areas." We are a German cross-domain system house, and you see it in these areas. We speak about ecosystem. What we build up is to build up an ecosystem for our governments. This ecosystem is going from sea to air and space. The center of all that for sure has to be digitization. This is what we tried to show you yesterday also.
I'm coming always back to that point because a lot of people always telling us, "Rheinmetall, yeah, it's a gun producer and whatever." It's wrong. We are a gun producer, but we make 1.5% of our sales with guns. It's nearly nothing, and it's an important thing because with guns, you can sell ammunition because you have the combination between that. At the end of the day, it's much more, much, much more behind. Maybe that's boring for you, but it's important. Again, we have a worldwide ecosystem, and we created especially a European ecosystem. If you see from Germany to Italy, from Italy to Great Britain, now Poland is one of our new partners because they want to make the support vehicles together with us. You know that Poland is a very hard market to conquer.
I think we are on a good way now also. With nearly every European country, we have in every European country, we have nearly production lines. With every European country, we cooperate. We have contracts. We get year-by-year contracts from more than 120 different nations in the world. A very, very international business. From January on, we will have a new organization. I think this is also a very important point for us. As you know, last year, we implemented centralized operations. The divisions are still for sure responsible for the P&L, yeah? René is taking care about that they have the same operation processes. He takes care about automation. He takes care about that we do not have five different strategies of our automation processes and our internal digitization processes. That is also very important.
To have a transparent IT system, etc., etc. Otherwise, it's impossible to have this growth rate. Now we said, "Okay, we have vehicle systems." The biggest job of automation over the next one and a half years is in vehicle systems. Weapon and ammunition is done. You see it. Yeah. More from the same. That's easy, yeah? You don't need experts about that to copy things what we have. On the vehicle system side, that's much more complicated. Welding chassis, welding turrets automatically to have some robots to implement stuff, cabling technologies, all that things. René is on the way together with his team and for sure the divisions to make it happen. We have a new division, Air Defense. We make it transparent to you also how successful Air Defense is.
We speak a lot about that things, but Air Defense was part of the electronic solution side. Air Defense and digital will be two different divisions. That divisions will be transparent for you how successful they are. In digital side, we invest at the moment more, but the profitability of Air Defense you will see is from the beginning on very, very high. We will have for sure after closing, and we hope that we have this in January, Naval. Rheinmetall Naval Systems is another new division that we have. That is a new organization that we start in 2026. The NATO is telling us what we have to do. The NATO says very clear where are the gaps.
If you see the gaps that we have at the moment in NATO, and including the United States of America, you see air and missile defense, artillery systems, ammunition, missiles, drones, and drone defense systems, military mobility, strategic trailblazers or protection and infrastructure, cyber and electronic warfare. What is missing? The beauty is if we got that from NATO, that we are all areas and we have business in all areas that we are here. In some areas, we are the number one in the world. In some areas, we want to grow in. Military mobility, super. Munitions, really good. On the missile side, we have to grow in. You are here in the place in one year's time. We will produce components here for missiles here in that factory. This is not the whole to make capital market days for sure, yeah?
We want to produce here something, yeah? Artillery systems, who is better? Air and missile defense, we are very strong on the cannon-based, but you see a lot of new products also all in these areas where we step in. This is the growth path in NATO. Here is where NATO creates growth. In all domains, in all seven domains, Rheinmetall is working and will expand the product portfolio. This is nothing for two or three years. This is a strategy for the next 10-15 years, which is perfect because of the contracts which will come up. What are our internal targets? What is where we what we want to reach? What is our management target? The whole management team wants to reach this target. In 2030, we want to be on a sales around EUR 50 billion. This is what we want.
The operating margin is, and as I said, here is still on 25 with 15.5% of civilian business inside. We will be maybe on a level of 18-19% this year on the defense side. We want to be bigger. We want to have better figures than 20% on the operational margin. The cash conversion rate and the investments are this year, next year, and also I think a little bit the year after next year, but then everything is done. The investments that we have to do on the vehicle side is much smaller than the investment on the ammunition side. It's by far the biggest investment. Power plants to produce this chemical industry factories. This is a huge investment that we have to do, but then it's done.
After having done that investments, the investment rate is going down so that the cash conversion rate has to grow up to more than 15%. A very important part is for sure the down payments. On the down payment side, we are working hard with our customers at the moment to get the money, and we are on a very good way. A lot of customers are very happy to give us 20% or 30% down payment. If the really, really big contracts are coming, which I go now inside the discussions, you will see that we will be also in good shape. Like last year in Rome, I want to go now into the segments and want to give you detailed information about that. We speak about 2030. We do not speak about the next year.
We speak about that, what's really going on, what we expect, and what is coming. Vehicle systems has a potential of EUR 13 billion-EUR 15 billion in 2030. What's the way to that EUR 15 billion? You see now the years 2025, 2026, 2027, etc. You see, and that's very important on the bottom line. The light blue to the dark blue, the dark blue, for example, here, if you see the Boxer, it's a contract between EUR 10 billion and EUR 20 billion, a single contract between EUR 10 billion and EUR 20 billion. The light blue is up to EUR 2 billion. These are the smaller ones. Sometimes I know this company very long, and sometimes it's for me, if I see all these figures, it's like a wonder world here because we spoke six, seven years ago about contracts, EUR 200 million, EUR 500 million, maximum about that.
Now, nobody of you, nobody of you takes care if we said there is a EUR 200 million contract that Rheinmetall is booking. I get a call, and then you say, "Hey, where are the billions?" Here are the billions. Here are the billions. This is what will come. If you see the whole product portfolio that we have on the vehicle side, the whole product portfolio is in a good range. The biggest driver will be the Boxer and the German business and also the international business because there are also a lot of international contracts which are coming in, like Italian Panther, also like the Romanian deal that will come. It's on the Lynx side. There is a huge contract coming up.
We signed it last week, the agreement, and we will sign when the SAFE money is coming, we will sign the real contract, hopefully in end of Q1 or Q2. It depends a little bit when the SAFE money will come from Brussels. Now, Europe, if you see all that things, it would be impossible to do all this international business without SAFE money. The SAFE money is the driver for that. And the EUR 150 billion that SAFE is giving the nations, the nations finance their programs. We are with all European nations at the moment on the way to take the SAFE money and to give them partnership because in SAFE money, you need two countries. The Lynx, for example, it's Hungary, it's Italy, it's Romania.
If you have one country, the second country, yeah, is looking how can we combine it with safe money because safe money is a huge advantage, as you know. Up to 2029, you have to pay no interest. After that, yes, you have to pay nearly nothing in this area. It is free lunch. It is free lunch to bring the investments in the European Union into the right level. This is exactly what happens now here. I do not go into the details, but you have a handout about that things. What you can see is that, and this is important, the Rheinmetall nomination potential, the potential of order index is more than EUR 65 billion. That is very near. It is not wishful thinking. It is real programs. It is programs where we are in negotiation, and that will come.
That is the reason that Germany is a driver, but internationally, it's a bigger driver in that area. It's not only Germany, especially up to 2030. After 2030, Germany, by the way, is a bigger driver because a lot more contracts are coming after 2030. The plan that Germany has at the moment is up to 2029, then from 2029 to 2035, and then from 2035 to 2040. These are the three areas inside the plan, rearmament program from Germany. You see that we think very, very long term. It's a 15-year period that we are thinking. Here you see, I think that's, I love that picture because in that picture, you can see really what happens. Driver number one is not the main battle tank. The main battle tank is here. Driver number one is the Boxer. It's the 8x8 vehicle.
As you know, it's not longer allowed to speak about numbers because the Minister of Defense doesn't like that, but it's easy to calculate. It's thousands of vehicles, thousands of vehicles that we have to produce. Our operations team has now a clear job to say, "Okay, we have to start next year with the automation program, and we have to grow up." We said at the end of the day, the Boxer fleet, together with our partners, we have to produce 1,000 Boxers. This is a clear target per year. If you see what happens at the moment, yes, we produce 50, maybe 100. We really have to accelerate this area, and we have to do this with automation. Boxer is number one. Medium wheeled is a small thing. This is other 4x4 vehicles, which is but tracked vehicles, infantry fighting vehicles.
The vehicles that you have seen here. Boxer, this Chacal is the number one or heavy weapon carrier. Next one is the Lynx and the Puma. Also, the Puma is a multi-billion business because Germany will have a second lot and a third lot of that. This business, and that's also not bad for us, I would say, is without competition. Why is it without competition? Nobody else has such a vehicle. If you have a qualified vehicle like the Chacal here, yeah, if you see here, this Chacal, we will produce thousands of them. Nobody's qualified because if you have it qualified in a country, you cannot qualify another vehicle. Usually, they do not do it because they said it's too expensive. It's not good for the logistics, etc., etc. This is for the next, as I said, 15 years.
This is a program for the next 15 years. If you see 2030, I do not speak about 2035 because it is, let me say, unrealistic to do it. This is not the end because we are still in the ramp-up curve, you see. If you see, if you studied mathematics, and if you see that, you see this curve is not going like that. This curve is usually, yeah, going into the right direction. It is going north. Is there an end? Yes. It will be an end, yeah? I see at the moment that the story will continue up to between 35 and 40 because otherwise, we are not able to deliver as much as I want. The other beauty on the vehicle side is that usually, and I see that on the truck side, yeah, Ich habe niemand die Zeit, die ich brauche.
Is this boring for you? Okay. It's not boring, so we have time, hopefully, yeah? The other thing is that the numbers which are here, they are huge. The Lynx, yeah, this vehicle that you see here, it will be a new star. If everything is running well, we have to produce 3,800 in the U.S., 209 in Hungary, 300 the Ukrainians are looking for, 298 in Romania. This is what we signed last week. Poland is looking for that. Greece is looking for that, etc., etc. 1,050 in Italy. This is a new star. We do not speak about small numbers. We speak about very, very high numbers. That is the reason that it is really going up. We want to make a successful transformation of the United States on this business side to be also a powerhouse in the States. Is that in our plan? No.
We have $2 billion per year in our plan in the U.S. If we win this contract, for sure, we have to grow. We are much bigger than in the U.S., but we do not have it in our plan for 2030. Weapon and ammunition, EUR 14 billion-EUR 16 billion. I tried to hurry up a little bit, otherwise Dirk is so nervous, yeah? This is in 2030, we have a sustainable demand from different countries in Europe, from everywhere. What is the driver? It is the same you can see later about in your documents. We have good operational margins. We have a good growth rate. The margin on the ammunition side will be really around 30%. We discussed several times the reason for that. It is the vertical integration, and it is a leverage effect that we have.
Here again, as I said, these pictures are really impressive. Artillery will be the driver number one. After artillery, on the rocket side, will be number two, then medium caliber. If you see, it is not so important. Tank ammunition is very small in comparison to the rest. Ten years ago, Rheinmetall was a tank ammunition producer. We changed everything also on the ammunition side. It is not that this is given. We were not a big artillery house years ago. Now we are. These are the numbers. Nothing changed here. We want to grow up to 1.5 million rounds on the artillery side, which is the biggest driver, and 4 million rounds on the medium caliber side. The expansion in that is also very clear. Rockets is what you see here, nearby, 200 m away. We build up that factory.
That factory will be the rocket motor production and the rocket assembly. It is part of Roman Kerner's business that he has to build up here, which has a huge potential, as you have seen. Air defense. On the air defense side, we have EUR 3 billion-EUR 4 billion. On the EUR 3 billion-EUR 4 billion side, again, and let's go to the real pictures. I think this is also a point which is not bad. Growth rate is 30%-35%. You have seen the growth on the ammunition. It is the same. We have still now in 2025, 16%-17% EBIT. Next year, you see it first. I think that we are able to reach next year nearly 20% EBITDA. Especially the drone attacks that we see is the driver for the business that we have.
The capability gap that all the nations have in Europe are huge, so that we have a massive business. For sure, we have lessons learned from the war in Ukraine. Exactly that is it. We have videos where you see several shutdowns of Shahid drones. What you see here is, and that is also, I think, a very interesting piece, up to 4 km protection radius. We have it gun-based because it is much cheaper, much, much cheaper than the missiles are. The turret is platform agnostic. We can use trucks. We can use every vehicle to implement that turret. We have different ammunitions, and these ammunitions are cheap in comparison to missiles. The price of one round is about $1,000. We shoot usually 3-5 rounds. If you want to be safe, shoot 7 rounds.
You have EUR 7,000 mission kill in comparison to EUR 100,000 on the missile side. If you see what is coming in on the Ukrainian side, 90% of the attacks are coming from class 1 and class 2 drones. Class 1 are the quadcopters, the small things. Class 2 are the Shahid drones. 90% of the attacks are coming from them. The hit probability that we have at the moment on these drones is more than 90%. We shoot down more than 90% of those drones. At the end of the day, if we shoot them down, they are much cheaper than the drones that are coming in economically. It is nonsense what they are doing. The only thing you see in the newspapers and in the television shows is the two drones that are coming through and hit, let me say, a building.
Yeah, sometimes, unfortunately, they hit the wrong target, and then people die. The ballistic missiles, yeah, and all the other things which are there and the cruise missiles, it's very rare. It's very small numbers. The reason is price. Price is too high. The system you see here, exactly that system, will be next week on the way to Ukraine. This is the first Leopard 1 chassis which is going to Ukraine. Now, a very interesting calculation. We did that calculation also with the Ministry of Economics about the critical infrastructure and how many facilities we have as a critical infrastructure, especially in Germany. The definition is we have nearly 2,000 critical infrastructure facilities. You see what is critical from finance system to Bundeswehr areas to information and telecommunications, etc., etc., but also transportation hubs and also medical on the health side.
If you see that, there is a concept at the moment. How can we protect it? Critical infrastructure because we have a range of 4 x 4 km to protect. Usually, you protect with two Sky Rangers an area with critical infrastructures which has what is easy, yeah, 8 km or 16 km because it's 4 and 4 in both directions. You need a second one. You can cover a small city with that stuff. Maybe you need a little bit more. We have a concept with the Sky Spotter. This is an acoustic system and a radar system. You detect all the drones who are coming in. By the way, the Sky Spotter, the acoustic system, is the biggest system at the moment in Ukraine also. On the borderline, on every house, yeah, they have noise detectors.
These noise detectors show if drones are coming and detect them. You have Sky Rangers and Sky Next system, so a mobile system and a station system on the Sky Next side. These systems, four of those systems which have four guns, are in Ukraine at the moment to protect the power plants in the western border in Ukraine. We calculated the cost of drone production of all the critical infrastructures would be a cost of EUR 81 billion. It's only a calculation, yeah? It's not that we said, "Okay, what is possible?" It's a calculation. You can implement drones. You can implement other things. This calculation has to be done and will be done also with the ministry. The second point is a lot of people speak about the drone wall to protect the border.
If you have an area of 100 km that you want to protect here, this is 100 km. The cost of securing 100 km is EUR 1.9 billion. In comparison, if the missiles are coming in and destroying infrastructure, it's nothing. This is a concept at the moment where we speak with the government. This is not only defense. This is the Ministry of Economics. This is a lot of other ministries. This is also for other countries. It is the first time that we said to secure the German eastern border, the eastern flank of Germany of 1,286 km will have a price of nearly EUR 24 billion. You are very safe. I think it's an interesting calculation what infrastructure at the end of the day brings. Digitization, EUR 8 billion-EUR 10 billion. I tried to hurry up a little bit.
Again, you see the different points where we are in. Simulation sensors like Leopard upgrade, simulation sensors like the F-35, IDZ, DLBO satellites. A wide bunch of digital components that we are producing. That is part of the ecosystem that we have. Together with that, we are able to grow up to EUR 8 billion-EUR 10 billion. At the moment, we are still on a level of, because of the investments, 15%. We invest a lot, as you know, in F-35. We invest a lot in the algorithms now for the new systems. That is important. We are still very profitable. We are not like a startup who says the next five years we make a loss. Inshallah, we will come. We have this 15% profitability. We have 40% growth rate.
With that growth rate in digitization, because software is easier to copy than hardware, it is easy at the end of the day for your understanding how the profitability will go on digitization. It goes north, 100%. We want to make nearly 20%, and I think maybe that is conservative about that thing. If more software is inside, we can be a little bit also a software house. As I said, on contracts like Taiwan, we are the defense telecom, Deutsche Telekom of Defense, because we give the net. In these areas on the digital side, we are a little bit the defense Microsoft for Germany because we give them the software. Here you see what are the big drivers. The big drivers are really the digital solutions here. The dark blue one, digital solution, is the one that.
We do also a lot on the sensor side. Aerospace services is coming very slowly. Space is also coming very slowly. Every billion counts. We want to grow in these areas. The growth rate in that area is coming later. It is coming after 2030. It is not possible to do it in 2030. There is a clear cradle from different NATO leaders in these areas. I only want to take one. Double the firepower within three years and triple it by end of the decade. To do this, it is not only to have warheads. You need warheads. Without warheads, you have no firepower. It is only possible with digitization, what you have seen yesterday. Otherwise, you do not bring it into the target. Otherwise, you miss the target. Otherwise, you cannot find the target. This is exactly what we have to do.
This is now, in a nutshell, what really happens. As I said, vehicle systems 13-15, weapon and ammunition 14-16, 3-4 air defense, 8-10 digitization, 5 is naval on the naval side. Later, I come more also to the naval side. For sure, we have a target to say, "Okay, we want to make M&A." We are able to invest about EUR 1 billion-EUR 2 billion per year in M&A in that area. That's the way forward. That's the way of Rheinmetall. Any questions? If not, yeah, I'm wrong. Let's meet in the middle to speed up things.
Thank you very much. Just a quick question. The only thing that really puzzled me was your statement about the 120 ml ammunition.
Because when I look at plans to grow the MBT fleet, you would think that as a knock-on effect, demand for that would also increase.
Yeah, but look, the main battle tank is a direct firing. On the direct firing, yes, you usually need it. That is the bad thing. The precision of our ammunition is very high. You usually do not need only one round to destroy the tanks. If you see that we are able to produce 240,000 rounds, it will not grow. It will not grow much more. It is fine to make EUR 1 billion or a little bit more than EUR 1 billion. At the end of the day, we are able to produce tank ammunition for the whole world. We need no second factory.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you for the presentation, Alessandro Pozzi, Mediobanca.
During your remarks, you talked about the safe money, the safe facility. How much of that is a driver of revenues into 2030? Do you think it's sufficient to get to the 3.5% target? Probably not. Do you expect the safe facility to be expanded? Do you expect new tools to be approved at the European level, such as defense Eurobonds? Second question is on 2026 guidance. Probably in terms of profile to 2030, your revenues, are they more back and loaded? Any indication of what could be the growth in 2026, if it's possible? Thank you.
Yeah, we want to stay in a good double-digit growth rate. Usually, I said to be conservative between 25%-40%. This is exactly now what we said. This year, let me say, is a very good growth rate.
I'll be conservative and say more than 25% per year growth is absolutely in. If you calculate that, if you grow 25%-30% per year, you come to this figure. This is what we have to grow. The backlog is there. I'm very optimistic because now the production lines are running. We have more production lines, so we can hurry up also on the sales side. On the vehicle side, we are at the beginning. I think the ramp-up curve is really starting in 2027. In 2028, we are fully loaded with the optimization that René will tell you later. The real trigger point is coming then in 2028 on the vehicle side. Digitization sometimes is going much faster. I see on the satellite side, I see the first sales this year.
Because if we sign the contract now, and I think we will sign it over the next weeks, we can immediately sell pictures. What we do is, on the satellite side, this is maybe also important. The satellites are our satellites. We only sell the pictures. We are the owner of the satellites. Yeah, it's a small Musk effect that we are doing. We get the contracts. With that contract, we are able to build the satellites, to bring the satellites into the orbit. We have a contract for three or four years. The satellites usually work for five, six, seven years. Every picture that we sell later, yeah, is pure profit. Because there is no maintenance in the space. This is, I think, a very also clever concept. Elon Musk did it. We do it in a small scale.
40 satellites are the first contract that we have to bring 40 satellites. Germany is planning to go up to 400. It is not the 6,000 that Musk has. It is a good starting point for us if we come into this area. Satellites can grow earlier. Digitization, at the moment, we have a lot of programs like Taiwan, DLBO, other systems to complete the social systems. This is a linear growth that is going up. Back and loaded is very strong. The vehicle side, ammunition is going linear, and digitization is going linear. As you have seen, the air defense is ramping up now. The air defense is really starting in 2027, 2028 also to go to higher values. Safe money. On the safe money, I believe that there are two initiatives from the European Union which are really helpful. This is the ASAP program.
This was the first program where they have a small amount of money, EUR 500 million. They want to have an ASAP 2 program, which is a direct investment to the industry. This is very positive. This is a very positive thing. The reason for that is because the industry is investing. You get a co-investment of 20%, sometimes more than 20% from the European as a donation. The European Union is giving you a donation. It's free lunch. The ASAP program, the safe program, without the safe program, countries like Bulgaria, like Romania, they would not be able to invest such a lot of money. Romania gets EUR 17 billion from safe. Yeah? They would not have the money. They need it. The terms and conditions that you have, and you know exactly as a banker in this area, yes, are great for the countries.
At the end of the day, it's debt, yes. Yes, they do not fill it. Are the EUR 150 billion enough? I think no, it's not enough. Because every country at the moment is looking for that. Even Italy is looking for that money now, yeah? To say, "Okay, we want to combine it." The Lince that we have, they want to finance via safe money. Also the Panther. I understand that. At the end of the day, if the European Union wants to give another package, a second package, there must be an agreement with governments who pay the bills. Who say, "Okay, okay, I protect the European Union." As you know, the European Union has no money by themselves. The countries have to give the money.
At the end of the day, it's a point if Germany says, "Okay, you can give more, and I protect it in the back." I don't know if that works.
Okay. Just a quick follow-up, if I may. You also said that 2030 is not the end of the road. Potentially, we could see further growth into beyond that, basically.
Yeah, absolutely. The point is that maybe the European Union has to do something in this area. In 2030, NATO will be not 100% ready with all the things that NATO wants. Especially on the European side, they are not ready. If I see the planning, especially from the German side, they are looking not for safe money. Germany is a little bit independent in this area. Germany's plan, the plan of Germany is going up to 2040.
The other European countries have this plan also. They only can communicate if they have money backing. The money backing at the moment is missing. Therefore, maybe safe two has to come.
I think our next thought, Sebastian here from BNP. Hi. Just quickly on M&A, because you have in your EUR 50 billion sales target by 2030, also about EUR 5 billion from M&A. If you could help us understand how well-filled the pipeline is. As you have also now said that you will put the power systems business as discontinued, can you just share the latest developments in terms of interest and what gives you the confidence to really put it as discontinued and to deconsolidate at the end of the day?
Of interest rate?
Not the interest rate, but the interest by parties that are looking into the business.
If you could just share the latest around power systems on the exit.
Yeah. We have seven investors who are interested to buy the business. We have three at the moment where we continue. The rest is out. We gave last week the information to the guys who are out who did not pay enough. That is very normal, yeah? What you do with the three, we want to go to have a solution up to Christmas, end of the year. If we have a solution, it is binding offers, yeah? If we have a real solution, then we will have the final negotiation in Q1. Hopefully in Q1 or Q2, we have a final solution. We can sell the business.
The pipeline?
The pipeline from M&A?
Because you put to targeted 500.
Yeah.
As you know, we always speak about M&A if we are very near to this area. This is always the same sentence that I'm telling you. I think that's a fair thing. What I can say is that we scan year by year 200 companies. I think we did over the last five, six years a really great job on the M&A side. We always found a target which really fits to Rheinmetall and which fits into the ecosystem. I cannot say more about that things. We will inform you if we are nearby. You see on the label side how it works. We started three months before signing that we are interested in some areas. We didn't tell the target. At the end of the day, out of the press, you can usually read it.
We are not so near at the moment with other M&A activities. Thank you very much because I have a second point and a second slot. I think René takes over and gives you an overview about all the operations. Thank you.
Good morning from my side, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much, Armin, for giving the outlook of what is ahead of us from a revenue point of view. I would like to start my presentation with the last sentence on your slide, unfold the next shadow of growth. To unfold the next chapter of growth, I think my goal for the next 30-35 minutes is to tell you where are we in executing that goal. I will not just focus on 2030. I would basically like to start to look shortly into the rear mirror.
If we look into the rear mirror, we can see that Rheinmetall over the last three years has already more than doubled its revenue. If we focus for the future on the defense revenue, we have been able just in two years to double already the revenue just on the defense side. I will go deeper into the different divisions to give you not just an outlook of what has been executed, but as Armin Papperger already mentioned, what we have been already in execution in terms of additional capacity increase so that we are able to deliver the products which ultimately are going to help us to generate the revenue. I will focus mainly on 2026 forward. I will try to give you in two steps the outlook. How do we reach the 2027 goals, which is again a two-year time span?
What are we already executing so that we reach the target of roughly EUR 50 billion in 2030? We are here in a brand new facility. I had the opportunity over yesterday to talk with some of you about what is actually possible in Germany and how we were able to pull it off. There were two attributes in Armin Papperger's presentation, which I will as well refer to various times in my presentation. That is an ecosystem and that is vertical integration. If you look at the pictures, in February, end of February last year, the groundbreaking took place here with the German Chancellor. I remember many discussions because the goal for us was to build up this facility where you walked through yesterday, the lab facility and the shell facility, in 15 months.
I think, Armin, it's fair to say many people said that's going to be impossible. That's something we are not able to achieve, particularly not in a country like Germany. Now, 15 months later, we had the opening ceremony of our location here. To give you some figures which are beyond revenue, we have established here two facilities with a size of 35,000 sq m production place. If we add the rocket artillery plant, which has roughly another 15,000 sq m, then we have been able to establish production space of 50,000 sq m here in Unterlüß. I think we can be proud that this is the most modern and largest artillery plant in the world.
We went a completely different route than what we have in other locations because you know that we produce already artillery in Spain. We produce artillery already in our location in South Africa. We decided here that we want to use the sheer size of the facility to follow different processes and different concepts. Optimization right from the beginning, particularly driven by the higher labor costs we have in Germany compared to South Africa, was the overall goal. I am glad that you had yesterday the possibility to walk through the facility and see that we have been in the process of executing this all. We are ramping up the production. For next year, we are already expecting a substantial impact on our bottom line and top line by the revenue we produce here out of this facility.
The good thing is the ecosystem we are having from a manufacturing point of view helps us to exchange with our existing production capabilities, as I mentioned in South Africa as well as in Spain, so that we implement a network, a global network, which is constantly in the exchange of what we can do better. I think this is as well unique. If you look at the competitor landscape, there are not too many other Western manufacturers for artillery ammunition which have a capacity globally which goes up to over 1 million rounds by 2027. With this facility, we have been able to establish a blueprint.
Not just with this facility, but if we look in Spain, if we look in South Africa, where we produce slightly different rounds than what we will produce here, we have now a blueprint which helps us to expand in Ukraine, in Lithuania, and in other countries where we have signed the contracts to establish capacity. Since we were able to do this here with the strong support, as Armin Papperger mentioned earlier, of the governments, I think this is one of the key drivers you need in order to be able to execute in that short period of time such a big industrialization project. You need the support of the governments. You need strong partners on the supplier side.
I will later elaborate what competence, what vertical integration we have as Rheinmetall, which helps us to really be able to pull something like that off in such a short period of time. One of the big growth drivers, as Armin Papperger said, is going to be the rocket motor plant. This is not completed yet. Yesterday during the tour, I think you saw already that we are in the process of building that facility up. As I mentioned, roughly 15,000 sq m of production space. We will have 27 curing chambers. We will have two big mixers with a size of 2,500 liters. If you imagine, they are double the size of what I am. We have here as well the benefit that we are in Spain in our location currently establishing as well a mixer which has the capacity of 1,000 liters.
We have in South Africa already the production of rocket motors. It is nothing which is completely new for us. It is nothing where we would not understand from a production and manufacturing point of view how to pull that off. Pretty much all machines are ordered. The real estate and the production hall build is on its way. We are on track that by next year we will have the equipment established and will then be able to start to mix the first rocket motors. The rocket motor itself is a very important part. In this lovely facility here, we will then be able, as you saw in the video, to introduce the additional manufacturing requirements to build up the complete rocket and be then able to sell up to 10,000 missiles per year. We had yesterday as well the opportunity to walk through our large caliber gun hall.
We have invested in the last 24 months substantially in new machines. You saw there are many machines which are brand new. In total, almost a dozen new machine centers, roughly EUR 15 million in investment was put into our capacity there. We have been able to reach already more than double the amount of weapons we are able to build. Weapons is one important thing, but particularly in Ukraine, we need to make sure that we are able to support with bbl. If a barrel will need to be exchanged, we are already at 280 bbl, roughly 300 bbl capacity as of today. The groundbreaking of a new large caliber gun hall took place at DSEI this year, where Armin Papperger, together with the Secretary of Defense, did the groundbreaking for our facility, which is in Telford. Why in Telford?
Because we have there already a manufacturing facility for infantry fighting vehicles. Here again, we try to use the infrastructure, the production network of Rheinmetall, to make sure that experts are available and we do not have to start completely off scratch in a greenfield project. An additional topic I very often get asked is, how do you cope with the growth in terms of supplier? If I take just the steel we need in order to manufacture the large caliber guns here, then in the past, maybe five or six years ago, our supplier base was rather limited. It did not need to be that we have multi-suppliers because if you produce 20-30 guns per year, then you are fine with the capacity a single supplier is offering you. We have now already multi-suppliers just for our location here in Unterlüß.
As soon as we start in the U.K., we will expand here as well the supply base so that we have then there a direct link, a direct supply of steel and whatever we need in order to be able to manufacture on-site large caliber guns. The big driver of future growth are the infantry fighting vehicles. Armin mentioned that the 30, the 35 millimeter guns, but as well when we go into the Eurofighter, 27 millimeter guns, and even for the Marder, the 20 millimeter guns. This is something where we see a huge demand to make sure that we are not just producing the vehicles, but that we are able to equip these vehicles with the respective guns and the ammunition. Same as the large caliber, we have started already, and I think that's as well an important message to pass on.
We started to invest even before we had contracts. In many areas, we went ahead. We said we are going to invest in capacity because we believe that the customer is going to take the capacity from us. We started in 2022. By today, we have already capacity on the barrel side, which is more than double what we had two years ago. We have just kicked off further expansion program into our center in Oberndorf to come up to close to 1,000 bbl, which we are able to produce per year. Essentially, if you take a 30 millimeter gun, if you take a 35 millimeter gun, which you saw yesterday on the Sky Ranger, we have here again a network where we make sure that the different production locations are exchanging processes, that we continuously try to improve, reduce cycle times, put optimization in.
Some of the machines you saw in the large caliber gun hall, they are rather ancient if you want so. Everything we are going to put in new helps us to digitalize, to connect the machines with each other, and to apply continuous improvement to drive as well efficiency down. All the guns, all the ammunition I have shown you at the end are not really worth too much if you do not have the propellant to make sure that you are able to shoot, for example, the artillery round 30, 40, or even more km. We kicked off as well in 2022, 2023, our first capacity increase project. It was called Kappa 25 +. We have been able in our locations in Bavaria, Switzerland, in South Africa, as well as in Spain. Here again, the ecosystem of propellant and combustible cartridge cases.
We have established an additional capacity of 2,000 tons. We have now a capacity of 7,500 tons. We have just released an investment project to boost at this location the capacity even further to de-bottleneck so that by year-end of 2027, we have already 12,000 tons of capacity. Vertical integration, if I take again that topic, we not just went ahead and increased the capacity in our locations. We did as well execute strategic acquisitions. The company Hagedorn, which on the defense side might have not been a very prominent one, the company Hagedorn helps us to increase our nitrocellulose production significantly. Up till now, they have produced civil-grade nitrocellulose. We know what to do in order to bring it up to a military grade.
That military-grade nitrocellulose is going to be available for us by next year and helps us to eliminate a significant de-bottleneck. I would like here to just briefly address again supply. I had yesterday at my table significant discussions in terms of what are material threats to Rheinmetall. The example I used yesterday are linters. Linters are little cotton balls, if you want, which predominantly are currently produced in China. Here we took as well a strategic decision. We pumped up our inventory so that we have now for more than three years linter in our stock. On top of it, we went ahead from the development side and tried to find an alternative so that we are not just depending on cotton linters, but that we are going now as well to qualify wood linters.
We are going with different countries who are producing cotton so that we are actively managing that potential risk to boost up inventory and on top of it then find technical alternatives. I think you know Armin was quite busy over the last few weeks to sign additional contracts with Bulgaria, with Romania for additional capacity. If we now look towards 2030 and the continuation of growth, then these additional facilities, which again are blueprints of what we are executing already from a manufacturing point of view in Germany, in Switzerland, in Spain, as well as in South Africa, these locations are then closing the gap till 2030 for 20,000 tons of propellant and the respective modular charges for the future. How are we actually able to pull these things off?
Ecosystem is once again, from my point of view, the exact aspects where Rheinmetall has invested in the past, not just in an ecosystem from an engineering and a product point of view, but we have as well an ecosystem which helps us to pull off projects much faster than other companies might be able to do that. How are we executing this? We have a planned engineering team. And here you know as well that we have just recently acquired a company in South Africa, Resonant, which are the experts in chemical plants. So we have boosted up their resources and capabilities from a planned engineering side. From the industrial engineering side, I think here we can fairly say that the benefit of having an auto business in the Rheinmetall group has helped us to scale up production to something which is normal in the automotive side.
Here we were able to make sure that we get the colleagues with the expertise to support us on the industrial engineering and the optimization time. I do not know if that is something which is really present to you. We have a big department which is coping with real estate and not just real estate in its general terms. We have architects there. We have people who are calculating the statics. They are the ones who are having the blueprints of the plans we want to expand as well in the future. Vertical integration for us means not just on the product side, but as well on the expansion side. We are deeply integrated. We have blueprints for the different aspects, let it be a chemical plant, let it be a gun hall, let it be an artillery production plant.
I will show you later as well something about the vehicle side. The vertical integration on the engineering side in combination with the know-how we have as well on the product side, because as well on the product side, I think it's fair to say we are the most vertically integrated. If I use the example of artillery, I think the only thing we really purchase on the shell is the steel. The rest, we are forming it, we are machining it, we are painting it, we are heat-treating it. We are producing fuses, we are producing the explosives, and we are producing as well the whole value chain of the propellants.
The understanding of the product in combination with the vertical integration, plus governments giving us permissions, helps us to be able to pull such projects off, like you just know it, let's say out of China. We have proven that we are able to execute that and feel therefore confident that we will be able to execute that as well with the projects just acquired. That helps us as well on the vehicle side to execute our growth. Coming to the vehicle side, Armin mentioned as well earlier, boxers. What is the road we see to up to 1,000 boxers per year? Here again, going back maybe two years, two years ago, we did not produce a single Boxer in the U.K. We did not produce a Boxer in Australia. We did not produce a Lynx in Hungary.
Here as well, we established capacity. This year is the first year where we are getting serial quantities or serious quantities out of these locations. We are in the process of building up new locations. Armin just said the contract in Italy with over 1,000 Lynx. Here we know already how a blueprint, how a footprint for a manufacturing site would look like because we have just established the site in Hungary. Important is every time we do build up a new production capacity, the network makes sure that we apply afterwards a lessons learned. Because there are certain things at the end of a project where you in retrospective would say, "I would do it differently," and we want to use this know-how then for all future projects so that we do not make the one or the other mistake twice.
Our footprint today, I think I've mentioned that already. We have today in total roughly 170,000 sq m of production locations or production space for infantry fighting vehicles. If we want to grow up to the 1,000+ vehicles, and I think that's a very important message, all we need is roughly 20%-25% more in production space than what we have today. Why is that? Because what we do today, and I use the example of our biggest infantry fighting vehicle production in Kassel, what we do there today is we have a combination of different products we are building there. We have service business, we have a Büffel, we have a Panzerhaubitze, and we have as well the Boxer.
We are not at volumes which would allow us to switch to a manufacturing concept as we know it, for example, out of our plant in Vienna. You see at the little video there in Vienna, which is from the pure volume biggest manufacturing site with 2,400 vehicles we are producing there per year, we have established inline manufacturing process with lean aspects, which we are now implementing as well in Kassel. We are a little bit, compared to the ammunition side, a little bit more at the start of executing this. The general concept for Kassel will be focus on the Boxer, put there a manufacturing concept in place together with the colleagues out of the network where the blueprint in Vienna is there, apply optimization concepts.
Here for me, important to mention as well, we will not end up in something similar like you would see at Volkswagen because we are producing not millions of vehicles, we produce hundreds and thousands of vehicles. I will show you later as well some concrete processes which we are already executing to optimize. We are going from producing a whole bunch of different vehicles in one location to focus much, much more to get processes in line to have a production footprint which goes step by step, takt by takt. Therefore in Kassel, we will grow up to over 500 Boxer per year production capacity. Optimization. I think it is easy to understand when you just walk over into the other hall and you see what we do here on the artillery side.
How do we address the whole topic of increased volume and the opportunity to decrease our manufacturing cost on the vehicle side? You saw yesterday already the first robots at the cabin build, which we have already in production. We are optimizing the measurements. We will have a paint shop, which is partially optimized. We have logistic concepts where today people are moving much of the material from A to B, which afterwards we are going to have little robots driving from A to B. We are taking subcomponents out of the manufacturing, have them assembled in different stations where optimization can take place so that we just take modules and assemble them into the vehicle to become much more efficient.
One of the big topics we are addressing, and this is as well something on the naval side where we see already a crossover to what we need to do, is welding. You saw at the beginning, if you have low volume production, then you have an individual who is taking the bolts, who is fixing them, who is welding them. That was all good in the past. What we do now is we not just go into two-dimensional weldings, we go into three-dimensional weldings. We do this with all different materials. We do this with aluminum, we do this with armored steel, and we are executing this now in all the locations where we do welding. Shifting from the vehicle side now to the whole topic of air defense.
How are we managing to ensure that the growth of the air defense system is going to be executed? We have invested as well substantially in our air defense production centers in Switzerland as well as in Italy. The air defense systems, you need for sure a gun. We have now put a substantial increase of machine centers similar to what I've showed you already in Oberndorf into Zurich as well as Rome where our production locations are. We have established there a lean manufacturing concept where we assemble turrets. We have the capacity in Switzerland for 140 turrets to assemble by the beginning of next year. We have already as well the same assembly line. It's the same concept. It's again a blueprint. It's a network which we have put in Italy.
As Armin mentioned earlier, we are in the process in our today civil plant in Neuss to put there as well again a blueprint, the exact same processes for air defense turret production into Germany so that we come up by 2027 already to have a capacity of over 400 units per year. How long would it take if we want to increase the capacity here? We would need additional machining capacity, which we could. Today it's not that many machining companies are fully utilized, which we could get partially as well externally. The assembly and the manufacturing process is something where we will be able to establish additional capacity in a time horizon of six to nine months. I think the air defense, the turret production itself is a perfect example of how quick we can be able to establish capacity here.
Going into Italy, going into Germany here again from a supplier point of view, we are talking all of a sudden about volumes which are much, much higher than what we ever had. We are diversifying our supply base. We are categorizing our suppliers into A, B, and C suppliers based on technical criticality. Some of the very critical stuff we are doing basically as well in-house. Here again, vertical integration rather high. That is the strategy we are executing to ensure that we will not struggle with the ramp-up on the supplier side. We saw yesterday the demonstration of the radar as well of the Hero. Both of these products you see here on the slide. We have already a production line in Italy ready. If I look again at the vertical integration of a radar, Rheinmetall knows how to produce explosives.
We know how to produce a warhead. We have that already in-house. We know how to produce electric motors because we have already a plant which is producing over 10 million electric motors per year. We have the capability to design and to manufacture a flight vehicle like you have seen here already in our location in Italy. Capacity today, as you can see there, over or almost 40 per day. If we want to increase that, we will be able to do that again in a time span of six to nine months by copying what we do in Italy, using the blueprint, using the vertical integration to execute that in different locations. I have mentioned already quite a lot about the resilience of our supply chain.
The growth clearly allows us now to diversify much, much more than we were able to do that five, six years ago. The interest of the supply base to work together with Rheinmetall to participate in the growth is huge. We get a lot, a lot of interest. We get as well a lot of interest from companies who were in the past working in the automotive industry. We are, if you want, so benefiting from the downturn there. These companies are in general used to produce mass production. They understand quality systems much, much different than it was maybe common in the defense industries. That helps us to have a resilient and a strong supply base.
It helps us as well to be competitive in terms of pricing because it is always much more fun to have alternatives when you go out and negotiate prices than to just depend on a single source. The question I got asked the most, particularly after Armin Papperger is presenting the numbers, the revenue numbers, and that was yesterday as well the discussion, it was the question I got asked was, "Do you feel that you will be able with your team to manage that growth? Do you feel confident?" I have to say, yes, I feel totally confident because I do not see any real struggle we would have that we are not able to manage that growth. Does that mean that everything goes without any setback, everything goes perfect? No. In no industry that is the case.
With the blueprint we have in place, with the network we have in place, with the experience we have in place, I am absolutely confident that we are able to manage the growth and that we are able, and I hope I was able to give you already in all the different divisions the measures we are executing and we have executed. Therefore I feel confident that we will be able to manage that. That brings me to the end of my presentation. What are the key takeaways I want to leave you with? I hope I was able to demonstrate to you that the major capacity increases in all different areas are either executed or they are in execution so that the 2027 as well as the 2030 growth is not just fantasy, but backed up already with the required capacities.
We have the opportunity, and that's something we are executing now. More of the same was what Armin Papperger said earlier. More of the same allows them to go into completely different manufacturing concepts compared to having hundreds of different varieties. That allows us to drive optimization and supplier diversification. The deep vertical integration and the know-how of the product, of the processes allows us together with the network, together with having on the industrialization time this experience to execute projects in record time, which we need to ensure that the growth is becoming reality. We are as well executing on our risk product diversification, which ultimately then with the right supply base ensures that the growth becomes reality. That brings me to the end of my presentation. Thank you very much.
The coffee is now a little bit colder that we can speed up the process. Here we have coffee and some snacks in the back. Oh, I'm really sorry. Yeah. Any questions?
Thank you. Saïma Hussain from AlphaValue. You seem very confident and I would say prepared. As you nearly aim to quintuple revenue by 2030, scaling ammunition, air defense, naval simultaneously, what do you see as the most critical execution challenges? Quickly on automatization, to what extent will automatization come from retrofitting legacy facility versus new production facilities? How should we think about the impact on CapEx, timing, and margins of this automatization process?
Okay. Maybe I start with the CapEx. I think Armin Papperger mentioned it already. The huge amount of CapEx comes with the chemical plants, and it is much, much less when we go towards the vehicle side. Legacy, you saw yesterday that we are able to mix legacy equipment with brand new equipment because when you walk through the large-caliber gun hall, we still have a lot of equipment which might be 10, 15, or even 20 years old, but it still does the job. We are not just going ahead and trying to scrap it. We are continuing to use it because it does a great job. That ultimately means as well that we are very cautious with the investments we are basically doing. What are the biggest challenges we are having? I try to point that out.
I think we are working actively in making sure that we have the workforce in place, that we have as well the material which we see today critical that we have them in place. We did acquisitions. The capabilities are going to be something which are available to us. Resonant is one of the examples. Hagedorn with the nitrocellulose is another one. I think we have many things addressed. We will see if there are any other challenges are going to be thrown at us in the upcoming years. That is how we are addressing all these things.
Christopher Starke from Deutsche Bank. One question just on you elaborated on finding alternatives to linters. You highlighted rare earth as well, working to find alternatives or even exclude them from the products. At what point can you be 100% European product? Or is that impossible with all the input factors? Is that a three- to five-year time horizon or?
I think that at the end depends as well on what product we are talking about. If I take the linters, so the goal is really in a time span of three to five years because we have the inventory for three years to A, have alternatives ramped up. We are in discussions, for example, with Turkey because they are producing cotton with the United States. We have already alternatives which we are starting to mix in. On top of it, I mentioned yesterday evening already that we take now the wood linters to mix that as well in. That is the process we are executing it.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Micheal Raab Kepler Cheuvreux. Considering your ammunition production capacities, what stocking level by NATO does it take into account? 30 days or 60 days at a current level?
Our capacity?
Yeah. Are you prepared for 30 or 60 days stockkeeping by NATO forces?
It's 30 days as of now. We know if NATO with the non-U.S. gun systems wants to stock up to 30 days, then roughly 10 million-12 million rounds are required to basically put into stock.
Does that mean on the reverse, if the new requirement was 60 days, you would have to invest additional CapEx?
I think if we would get the orders, then we would invest into the additional capacity. I think the capacity we have right now, let's get it ramped up and then we see what NATO is going to decide in order to increase the stock levels.
All right. Thank you.
Sure.
It's Sven from UBS. Thanks for taking my question. It's just on how you prepare yourself for redundancy and making maybe the factories more autonomous against asymmetric threats like power failure, sabotage. I mean, we all have to take these things into account that they could happen. Do you plan to make the plants more autonomous? Because I think here you're connected to the power grid, the usual power grid. I mean, do you plan this also for the coming years?
Yes, for sure. We are very thoroughly assessing what threats would have an impact on our production locations. We prepare accordingly to backup solutions or for backup solutions. That is nothing we would share in public because then we would have to immediately think about the next backup solution. That is something we do location by location. Yeah.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. [Claudia Mary] from Jefferies. I have first a clarification on slide 47. When you put your 2X revenue from 2025 to 2027, is that on the base of 2025 including the civil business or is that excluding the civil business? My second question is actually on the defense electronics supply chain. We've seen obviously quite a lot of the peers having to move in-house some circuit printing capacity. Are you also doing this? Do you see any kind of potential risks to your sourcing in that area? How do you reply to that?
Okay. It is excluding the civil business. We have already capacity for PCBAs for the circuit printing. I would like to take the question as well because not too long ago, there was a lot of discussion in terms of what happens if there is a shortage. If you look at the biggest vehicle manufacturing plant we have, it is 2,400 vehicles. If I take now, for example, Volkswagen, they produce roughly 8 million-9 million vehicles per year. The 2,400 is roughly two hours of the production capacity of Volkswagen.
If we then need maybe a few hundred PCBAs from one of our suppliers, then due to the fact that what we produce maybe has a much higher national interest, then getting 200 or 300 more Volkswagen out is something where we get as well from the supply base preferred treatment to get maybe critical components.
Thanks for the question, Sam Burgess, Goldman Sachs. I think maybe the skeptics would say you're dealing with governments and things are never quick and there's always impediments. Maybe you could just talk to how you have managed to build a plant in such a small amount of time and the kind of special accommodation maybe you're getting at the moment and the support from government and some specifics around that so we can help to understand why in this instance government will be moving so quickly.
If I take the example of the plant here in Unterlüß, as a matter of fact, when the groundbreaking took place or when you saw the picture with the German chancellor, we had already an arrangement with the local body, with the regional body, with the state body, as well as with the chancellor. That allowed us, as a matter of fact, the next day to start already with our project. We had the full support from all of those different players on the legal side, on the governmental side. We got therefore in record time the required licenses, the required permits to move on. We had suppliers which were highly interested and highly motivated to make that a project of their highest interest. I gave you yesterday already an example. If we would call Deckel-Maho-Gildemeister, so the manufacturer of machine centers.
I have the number of Mr. Mori himself. If we say we need a machine, then he is ensuring that we get the machine before anybody else would get it. That combination of everything allows to move at that speed.
Thank you. Adrien from Bernstein. Can I follow up on your presentation about weapon and ammunition? Clearly, there's a lot going on with utilization rates and everything. You have a target to increase margins, EBIT margins by two percentage points by 2030 in the division. Does that include an assumption that prices are coming down? I guess my question is on a net cost basis, where do you think margins could go with higher utilization rates, vertical integration? Yeah.
Yeah. There is a pressure to reduce as well prices. We are the biggest, if you want to, artillery manufacturer in the world. That allows us as well to apply economy of scales. Economy of scales we have here in the manufacturing process, but as well in terms of the material costs. That is what we apply at the end of the day and is the roadmap for the profitability we have shown earlier on the chart.
If there are no further questions, I then would suggest that we move to the back of the plant and have a little snack and a coffee to refresh before we then go into the final presentation of the CFO and the closing remarks of Mr. Papperger. I would kindly ask everybody to take a seat. We are now getting ready for the second round of presentations. We will start with some outlook on the financials by the CFO, Klaus Neumann. Klaus?
Also a very warm welcome from my side to our Capital Markets Day 2025. In my presentation, I will not so much talk about operations and basically the capital, the development, but focus on some of the issues that are missing to get a full picture of our financial situation.
Let me start with a brief look at our Q3 numbers for the nine months up to September 2025. Those numbers, as of today, still include the civil business. As Armin mentioned, towards the end of this year, when we decide on the future of the civil business, we will take the civil business out of the top line and also out of the operating result numbers. As of today, those are the numbers for the whole group. We increased sales by 20% to EUR 7.5 billion in 2025. We reached an operating margin of 11.1%, so almost the level of 2024. We increased our earnings per share to EUR 8.34 per share. We talked about the development in the different divisions, and we explained how this will develop in some words on the non-divisional side and how this impacts the overall picture.
We know that we will have a more integrated work together as part of the downward integration and the supply chains that we have in-house. The consolidation line will also grow over time to roughly 6% of total sales, but that will be 6% of roughly EUR 50 billion in 2030. We will also have an opposite effect on the operating result consolidation impact. At the moment, the operating result and the consolidation of other businesses is impacted strongly by our IT transformation, as we mentioned on several occasions. We have some impact from group-wide R&D. Those impacts will diminish over time. We expect that the impact from consolidation on operating result will be roughly 1% of operating result in 2030. As of the moment, in significant impact on other profitability, we expect it to be a really small effect going forward.
In those numbers, and as you know, in our operating result, it's EBIT adjusted for PPA impacts and other special impacts. Just to give you an idea where we are at the moment with our PPA. All those numbers are mainly driven by our acquisition of Expal in 2023 and of the acquisition of Locked Performance last year. Those numbers are driving these numbers. They will diminish going forward and will have an impact in 2026 again through the acquisition of the naval business. As of today, we don't really know how much it will be. We have a rough estimate, but it will increase again in the coming years. We will update you about these numbers once we have completed the acquisition. As Armin mentioned, we expect to do so early in 2026. Some words on the minority impact.
As you know, we have a significant impact on EBIT, on the profitability for our investors, on the minorities. We expect that in the short term, the profitability of our wholly owned subsidiaries will outperform the profitability of our joint ventures. As we are setting up new joint ventures, Armin mentioned several in terms of satellites, in terms of services, in digitization, but also in terms of the joint ventures for the production of powder and propellants. We will expect that minorities, again, will have an impact and gross impact going forward towards 2030. At the moment, it is very difficult to predict exactly how this will turn out, but roughly it will be in line with our profitability growth. Armin mentioned that we have a cash conversion rate target of 50% or above 50% for 2030.
One of the key drivers is basically what are we doing with the cash and how we are managing our liquidity. One big focus, and we'll talk a bit more later on, is CapEx. We need to invest in the increase of our capacities, and we need to invest also in new facilities also to increase our potential and make the growth on the sales side possible. One other factor, and that's also something we talked about several times, is our working capital at the moment is binding lots of additional cash, basically to ensure that going forward we can increase sales, we increase production. One factor that Danny mentioned is that we're in a transition, especially in the vehicle business, from a more kind of local manufacturing concept to a more production line concept.
Once we have converted to this new concept, we expect that working capital levels for the vehicle business will go down in the ratio of sales. In order to finance this whole transition, we need advance payments. That is the key driver to make sure that we have enough funds available to make all of this possible. The other thing that we need to manage going forward is basically the demand of some of our suppliers to also increase their capacity. We have suppliers that have enough capacity that do not need additional investment, but for some specialized or some production, we need also to support our suppliers to make growth happen. In addition, another area where we want to invest is M&A. We have invested strongly in the last two years. We are in the process of acquiring the naval business.
All these businesses contribute in the short term roughly EUR 1 billion of sales per year. This is also what we anticipate going forward. This is what we're aiming for. On a more or less annual basis, to add about EUR 1 billion of sales through acquisition. If you look at the target of EUR 50 billion in 2030, that is some contribution, but it's not the driver for our growth. With dividends, another source where we want to basically spend our money, we want to stay with a level of payout ratio that we have had for over the last years, a stable 35%-40% of our net income before PPA. It's basically looking at the operating result as a kind of the benchmark for the determination of our payout.
Based on EUR 8.10 per share for 2024, we expect to continue to increase dividends going forward in line with our profitability growth. As mentioned on other occasions, share buybacks would be the last option if basically based on our liquidity profile, we have additional funds available that we cannot use for focus investment or M&A and would be available in excess of dividends that we have to pay. CapEx, as I mentioned, will be a major area of investment in the coming years in addition to what we have already done in 2024 and what we are currently doing in 2025. As mentioned, the investment, especially in energetics plants, requires significant amounts of cash. We mentioned in our press statement that the facility in Bulgaria will cost about EUR 1 billion. The facility in Romania, about EUR 500 million. We need to invest in a higher degree of optimization.
Going forward for 2026 and 2027, we anticipate a significant level or increase of CapEx on absolute terms. We are making sure that we are not the only people investing it. We ask our joint venture partners, especially on the investment for the propulsion and energetics plants, to support the investment in our facilities. We anticipate, based on the increments that we have made, that we'll make up about 5%-4% of the total sales will go into CapEx from funds coming from our partners. Overall, if you deduct this from the CapEx numbers, we anticipate roughly 10% of sales of CapEx in the years 2026 and 2027. After that, we anticipate a decrease in investment and target a CapEx level of around 5% as an ongoing basis of sales.
Especially the next two, three years are strongly driven by growth and additional CapEx in addition to our capacities. Working capital, another area where we really bind a lot of funds. As you have seen in our numbers, we increased working capital or inventory around almost EUR 1 billion in the first nine months this year. That is always driven by the need to make sure that we have enough inventory available to support the growth and also to hedge against risk of disruption in the supply chain. René already mentioned that we have stock for cotton and linters for three years on stock. We have some additional stock in the area of electronics, especially where there are rare earths involved. We are looking at other areas to just make sure that we have enough stock available to grow.
Going forward, at the moment, the production will also turn into a more industrialized concept. In ammunition, we already have it, but in terms of the vehicles, we are in kind of a transition. Inventory levels in relation to sales will decrease and then support basically the cash flow target that we have for 2030 of above 50%. One important part where the money will come from is the area of down payments. We're aiming at 20%-30% for large contracts of prepayments, and we are working hard and negotiating hard with our customers to make this possible. It is very difficult to predict going forward because it really depends on the timing, on the signature of the contracts and the award of the contracts.
As we explained at the conference for the Q3 results, there is some delay at the moment, but we expect that the award of contracts will strongly increase and accelerate in the coming months towards the end of the years in the first half of 2026. One other factor in the working capital management area is suppliers. As mentioned, we need to manage this carefully with our suppliers. We need to make sure that they are stable and are adequately financed to support us in our growth story. For M&A, I mentioned that we want to invest in additional companies that are anticipated to contribute about EUR 1 billion of sales on an annual basis.
We are looking at entities that complement the portfolio that we already have and diversify also our regional presentation and access us to new technologies and enable us to grow in some certain kind of faster or access new markets. One area, just in part of financial housekeeping, is hedging strategy. As we are strongly based in Europe, a lot of the growth at the moment is in Europe and also the production is strongly based in Europe. Currency hedging is not such a big issue for us at the moment. We hedge the resulting trajectory risk that you have, and we are moving to looking a little bit more closely at translational risks. We use FX contracts that are relatively straightforward, so we are relatively stable.
It is at the moment not a big area of concern at Rheinmetall because of the way our currency flows are arranged. Commodity hedging is also under control. We have pricing escalations for those areas where hedging is possible. We are matching basically purchase price of some raw materials with our selling price. With the disposal of our anticipated disposal of our power systems business, we anticipate that hedging for commodities will decrease. That is at the moment not a big area of concern. We talked a lot about growth, and I want to give you a little bit of a context of where Rheinmetall is standing at the moment in comparison to our peers in the industry.
When you look at our carrier for operating profit in relation to our sales carrier from 2025 to 2030, we strongly outperform all our peers, with the exception of one technology company in the U.S. That just demonstrates that we are really well positioned and are really working hard to increase our sales line while also increasing strongly our operating profit with a strong growth also on margins. Now, we looked at all the different segments, and just to summarize again the situation for the group, our target for 2030 is about EUR 50 billion in sales at an operating margin of above 20%. We are at the moment in the defense business around 18% already. Given all the different drivers in the different industries on the market, on the cost side, we anticipate that we will be able to increase sales beyond 20% in 2030.
Our cash conversion rate target is 50% over a running three-year average. Below, you see the contributions of the different divisions. With a very strong margin in weapons and ammunition, all the other divisions as well will contribute more than 13% gross margin to our overall profitability, which is a very strong performance given where we currently are for some of the businesses, but also in comparison to our peers or other competitors in the industry. That is also a result of our strategy to downward integrate and basically to create an ecosystem in the way we produce our products and access the market. From my point, just to summarize, our new guidance targets confirm our commitment to long-term value creation. We have industry-leading sales and profitability growth.
Importantly as well, our strong balance sheet at the moment allows us to basically finance this growth and also leaves room for additional complementary M&A going forward to reach that target of EUR 50 billion by 2030. These are my final comments, and thank you very much. If there are any questions, I'm happy to answer them.
Thank you for the question, Sam Burgess, Goldman Sachs. Just focusing in on the EUR 50 billion and the contribution from M&A, when I take the upper end of the individual segment guides, I get to EUR 50 billion irrespective. You talked about a EUR 1 billion annual contribution from M&A. Is this outside of the MVR acquisition, and is there upside to the EUR 50 billion if I take the top end, or are you baking those in?
No, if you add all the divisions, you're right, but there is a consolidation.
Basically, there is some reduction when you put all the divisions together through the integration and the collaboration between the divisions. The additional revenue is not fully complementary to the EUR 50 billion. It is part of this estimate or target for 2030. We do not know whether it will be EUR 1 billion exactly every year or will be EUR 3 billion in total for the next four to five years.
Okay, thank you.
Hello, thank you. It is Afonso Osorio from Barclays. Just going back to slide 78 on your margin summary and delving deep into that weapon and ammunition margin for 2030, is that 29%-31%? Is that the new normal? How do you see the margin profile of this division going beyond 2030? Thank you.
Yeah, we are already almost at 30% at the moment in that business.
Yeah, as René explained earlier, all the different aspects together, the pressure to some extent on pricing, but also the cost-benefit through optimization and basically increased scale will contribute to achieving overall a profitability of 29%-31%. In a way, you could say that based on the current pricing levels, we share some of the benefit from optimization and cost optimization with our customers.
You feel comfortable protecting that margin beyond 2030?
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thanks very much for your transparent presentation and for all of the numbers that you gave us. In terms of integrating or swallowing and integrating larger acquisitions, we all know that they do not come in slices of EUR 1 billion-EUR 2 billion year-over-year.
Would you then be, or would you consider to give us milestones to integrate a bigger acquisition in terms of, let's say, return on invested capital going forward? That's question number one. Question number two, if I may, what's your stance on potentially financing suppliers? Thank you.
Yeah, on M&A, yeah, you're absolutely right. There are a limited number of EUR 1 billion companies that we could acquire. It's meant to be a guide of the size and the scope that we are aiming for. It's roughly in line with what basically the contribution was or is from EExpal. And as you know, Naval would be somewhat higher, so it's an average number. In terms of the return on investment, I think our past performance on acquisition shows that we achieve very good return on investment.
That is not just by expanding the business that we acquire, but the benefit comes from the integration and the interaction with the business we already have. That is question number one. The second question, sorry.
What's your stance on purchasing your suppliers? Thanks.
Yeah, we do not like giving suppliers money. First of all, we want to keep it for ourselves and invest it in where we need it and not use it for prepayment. In terms of making sure to have a stable supply chain and to ensure that they also can grow as quickly as possible and to the extent that we need, we are prepared to do so.
We are also looking at options where basically the supplier might be financed externally, but the agreement that the supplier may have with us is basically the additional guarantee for the financing party to support the supplier. We are looking at all the different options, but we are looking carefully at prepayments. We are not just giving it away because we have managed to negotiate prepaymen t with our customer.
Morning, George McWhirter from Berenberg. Two questions, please. Firstly, on revenue, can you just give us an idea of what share of revenue you expect Germany and Ukraine to account for in 2030? The second question is on digitalization. Can you just give us an idea of some of the big ticket orders you expect between now and 2030 to get to the EUR 8 billion-EUR 10 billion? Thank you.
In terms of sales in 2030, Germany will be a big contributor to our sales line given the numbers that Germany is able to expand. I'm not entirely sure, yeah, but I would, because for 2030, we have not planned exactly. We have big tickets, so we're substantiated by planning. Yeah, not all of the things from Germany might come. Some others might come from other countries or vice versa. It's roughly, I would say, 50% in 2030. In terms of the big tickets for digitalization, we already have big contracts in place with Taiwan, which has already fixed order of roughly EUR 1 billion, but a commitment for up to EUR 10 billion. There were other areas to substitute it. For what exactly it is, I think Armin is a much better place to elaborate it for 2030 than I am.
I think we explained quite in detail what the strategy is in the digital division.
Hi there, Joe Orchard from Rothschild & Co. Redburn. What needs to happen for you to change your stance regarding share buybacks? What sort of timeline might those be a more appealing way of returning capital to shareholders?
Two elements. The first thing would be I would need a much more stable situation than at the moment because at the moment it's extremely dynamic and it's driven by large order intakes and the need to finance growth. In the near term, I don't see it as an option that we will look into closely. It might going forward change. That would be beyond 2030 from my current assessment.
Yeah, it's Sven again from UBS. I just had a follow-up question on 2026 because Mr.
Papperger said that the 25% growth also applies to 2026, but now next year you have almost 20% contribution from NVL. I was just wondering if you also feel confident to grow 25% organically.
Definitely. Yeah, I joined Rheinmetall 13 years ago, so in 2012. At that time, Rheinmetall was doing EUR 2 billion in defense business. We have a track record of growth in the defense business that gives us the confidence that we can grow somewhat faster going forward. As René showed, we have accelerated our growth path in recent years and we are prepared to further grow even faster in the coming years.
Specifically also in 2026.
Yes.
Okay, thank you.
Hi, Mr. Neumann. Sebastian again from BNP sitting here to your left. Away from my head.
Just quickly on the EBIT margin trajectory and especially when squaring that with the CapEx step up, the EUR 8 billion or more than EUR 8 billion that you mentioned over the next five years. How should we think about the D&A phasing? So how should we think then with that also about the EBIT margin? Should we expect really every year an increase or might there even be a year like 2026 where this is a bit more front-loaded? If you could just help us on that front. The other question I have is around free cash flow. I appreciate that the uncertainty to time the down payment received is difficult at this juncture, but you are apparently forecasting more than a 50% cash conversion by 2030.
My question is simply, do you have also a guide for us what the sort of average cash conversion might be through 2030?
Yeah, in terms of CapEx and the impact on amortization and depreciation, yeah, the large part of this investment will go into energetic plants and chemical plants. They will take two to three years to set up. Amortization and depreciation will only start towards the end of 2027 or in 2028. Also, these are long-term assets that we are setting up. The impact will not be like a PPA that you have a very strong increase and jump once you started. It will be a more gradual increase towards the end from 2027 onwards. The other, in terms of margin, can you just repeat the question? Sorry.
The question on the margin was just if we really have sort of a step-by-step every year improvement, but from your earlier answer, I would take the answer is yes because of this back-and-forth pattern of the D&A. The other question was on the free cash flow conversion from operating profit as a sort of average eventually over the five-year period.
Yeah, we have given the 50% cash conversion rate on average for the target in 2030. Last year, we had a very strong—sorry, in 2024, we had a very strong cash conversion rate. As you know, the first nine months this year were not yet as—not that strong. We're working on getting achieving 40% for 2025, primarily through prepayments. The next two years will really depend on the pattern of what kind of prepayments we can negotiate.
I do not want to give a specific guidance for 2026 because that we will do in March next year. We are working hard so that it is not—yeah, that we still will be positive in the next years, but not necessarily at the same level as + 50% given the investment. It might be better. It really depends on the timing and on lots of factors that we are at the moment not fully in control of.
Yes, Marie-Thérèse Grübner from Cantor Fitzgerald. Thank you for taking my question. It has to do with M&A. When you are entering bidding processes for your targets, are you oftentimes the only game in town? Do you compete against any other European players or is Germany a chasse gardée for you in a way that would be the most likely winner?
It is a different acquisition.
Some of the acquisitions were done in a very close contest or negotiation with our targets. It is also the case with some other negotiations. As you know, for—and overall, we presented the best prospect for the business and also from an overall German industry strategy perspective. It is not a given that we will get everything that we would like to acquire.
Thanks very much. [Conor Duarte from Citibank. Very quick question on the CapEx ramp-up. It is quite helpful over the next few years, but I think it excludes IFRS 16. I am just wondering basically on that, how substantial basically Rider Use Asset Financing will be in that period.
Yeah, we looked at the cash impact of it. There is an IFRS 16 impact, but that will not be substantial.
Wonderful. Thank you very much.
Yeah, hi. It is [Stefan from Hofer Advert Anlagen Fund].
You have quantified your 2030 operating margin target as a group level and then these individual ones. What makes you confident that your one customer will allow you to make such solid margins? Can you quantify a little bit what's in it for them? How is it advantageous for them as you scale? How will their prices go down?
Yeah, for some of the products, and especially the vehicle business, and I mean, René mentioned that Boxer will be one of the big products going forward. We do get the same price as our competitor. Yeah, it goes through Joint Venture with K&S. It is not that we are getting different prices than our competitors. That is also the case for some of the other products. Yeah, especially on ammunition, we are getting similar prices to other producers of similar products. Sometimes we are even cheaper.
Because of our scale and also vertical integration, we are able to basically attract higher margins. That is also what is important for the customer. He is looking not at margins. In pricing, I know that there are some rules on margins, but their key focus is that they get good value for money. Based on our product portfolio and our pricing, we are convinced that we are doing exactly that. We give our customer good value for money. That is not going to change to 2030.
Saïma Hussain from AlphaValue. I have two questions. On CapEx, NATO-driven demand is expected to run through 2035. Is 2027 genuinely the last CapEx peak or simply the last year where you have this visibility?
Since most of your growth relies on GEM and programs and on prepayments, how confident are you that this prepayment will materialize on time in terms of cash and in terms of revenue as well?
Yeah, in terms of 2037, the CapEx target in the profile, yes, it's true that the programs will run longer. We are now building the capacity to be able to produce the quantities that are required to 2035 or, as Armin mentioned, to 2040. This is basically an initial push to get basically the whole system to a totally new level. As of today, we don't anticipate that beyond 2027, there will be another peak or anything. We really see it as now kind of a push to bring the whole industry, in our case, Rheinmetall, to a new level.
Then the revenues and the production will come and increase to 2030. You had the second question.
Yes, I was wondering, since most of the growth relies on government programs like GEM and programs, and we've already seen some timing slippage, how much timing risk is implicitly embedded in your guidance in terms of revenues, but also in terms of cash conversion on prepayments?
Our sales targets are independent of the profile of our prepayments. As we have shown, we need basically mid funds to basically invest in the growth and to make sure that the growth is going to happen. We're working hard with the customer to negotiate appropriate and adequate payments terms so that the customer is helping us to fund this growth.
From our discussions, we know that the customer is fully aware of the situation and has also shown in the past that he is willing to support us. The examples for the facilities in Bulgaria and Romania show that is also done on a large scale, not necessarily through prepayments, but also through capital injections. We are very confident that we'll manage, but to get the timing of large payments coming from inflows from prepayments fully synchronized with large outpayments for investments, that will be the challenge. That is what we also say we get an average over time because we think it will balance out over time. Yeah.
One final question on cash conversion, if I may.
At some point in the mid-2030s or towards late 2030s when growth is slowing potentially below the 20% level, what do you think the cash conversion this business can generate would look like? Closer to 70% or any estimation you could give?
Oh, yeah. 70% is what you can achieve in a stable mode if there are no big additional investments. We anticipate that once growth and basically investment into growth will reduce, that we will get to that number. We plan to grow quite fast until 2030 at least. It will be a challenge to achieve it earlier on a consistent basis. We achieved it more than 70% in 2024, but it will be a challenge to get there consistently in a strong growth phase. Okay. Thank you very much. I give hand over to Armin for some closing comments.
Thank you, Klaus.
First of all, I want to say thank you very much. We are very grateful that all of you are here, that you take your time and this big audience of 75 investors and analysts. It is a great honor for us to have you here. Thank you very much to all of you. The second point is I want to say thank you very much also to the marketing team. All of what we are doing here is an internal thing, and the people prepare it. They want to show you that Rheinmetall is innovative, that we have a huge product portfolio, and that we are able to reach the targets. Another thing, and I want to comment on this also, I am very happy to have colleagues who are really focused on what they are doing. Maybe you have seen this today.
Klaus is very deep inside the figures. He's taking care about that. René is unbelievable at the moment, what he's doing on the operation side. Without these colleagues, and Vera is missing here because she's responsible for HR. She's making the housekeeping in Düsseldorf at the moment, but she takes care about that, and we have a great team about that. I'm very grateful also about that. Last and not least, I think it's very rare that also the Chief of the Supervisory Board is here, Ulrich Griller. Ulrich takes most days about that because he said it's very important also to have contact with investors and to analysts. Therefore, thank you very much to my colleagues and to the Chief of the Supervisory Board. As discussed before, and to bring everything into a nutshell, we were traditionally a player of land systems.
Maybe you have seen yesterday, and you see also today that we changed the company. We changed the company absolutely in a space, air, sea, and land systems house. It is driven at the moment still from the land side. It is the biggest part. Over the next five or six years, we will bring Rheinmetall to be a digital system house. The digital system house, what you see here, the digitalization at the end of the day, this is the key where we want to go in. If you see what happens on NVL, and this is a discussion also that we had yesterday, there are rumors also about what happens about the F126. Is there a stop now? What is going on? Et cetera, et cetera. I am absolutely not afraid. It is a need. This frigate is a need for the German Navy.
The point what the government is doing at the moment is to have an interim solution, maybe to buy more frigates. They speak about the Miko class if there is a delay, if there is a longer delay. I see no risk in this area. As we said before, there is an investment on the naval side of more than EUR 80 billion in Germany over the next 10 years. If we are able to pick up only 30%, it's nearly EUR 25 billion of that. At the end of the day, I think it's possible to pick up more. On the air side, what we have here, there are huge opportunities because if you see the unmanned planes that are coming up, we have the factory. Wetzlar is the factory where we handle at the moment US data.
We have terabytes of secret data from the U.S. government on the F-35. We are the only one who handles these data about that because we are the only producer of fuselage outside the United States of America. Therefore, we see a huge opportunity. In space, you will see the growth immediately. You will see the growth which will come and the order intake which will come this year. Again, huge opportunities from our side. Segment Naval, and this segment of Naval which will come, still not the closing is there, as you know, this EUR 5 billion, what is behind that? These are the programs that Germany is investing in these areas.
We are, I think, conservative because the minesweepers, the FOSS patrol boats which are coming up, we are, or if I say we, I think Rheinmetall Naval, if everything works, yeah, we are the producer of that things. Nearly single source also in this area. We will produce corvettes and we will produce frigates for sure. Nobody knows at the end of the day, is it six, is it eight, is it 10, or whatever. It does not matter. It is a huge program. The company this year makes EUR 1.3 billion. It will grow up. These are the official programs of the German Navy. Huge opportunity. Rheinmetall offers drones. You have seen it yesterday. The summary that I want to see is the new businesses where we are going in. If you see, yesterday, you have seen what we are able to do on automation.
You have seen on the land system side, and you will see it maybe next year. We are on the way at the moment to automize main battle tanks, to automize Chacal, unmanned driving. Next year, you see it. The same what you have seen on the small toys yesterday which are driving around, we want to do with the big boys. This is a point which is very important because that is the next generation of digitization. We speak about unmanned boats. This is the next point. The technology that we have on the vehicle side, we want to implement also in the digitization of the naval side. If we do that, we have a big advantage to other shipbuilders because other shipbuilders usually have not a huge department which is doing digitization in that area. The same on the air.
This is what I said before, unmanned planes. The wing commanders to the F-35. You have to communicate with the F-35. Not everyone is able to communicate with the F-35. You need the linkage to them, and you must be in the inner circle of F-35 to make that happen. The only thing we want to show you is the opportunities that we have and the advantages that we have. There is in some areas not so big competition. There is always competition in life, yes, but it is not so huge in different areas because of the technology gap others have in this area. You see, this is the family that we offer at the moment of UAVs that we offer to our customers. We never spoke in details about that things.
As I said before, we will make this year EUR 120 million-EUR 130 million in UAVs. I think there is nobody in Germany at the moment who makes EUR 130 million sales on the drone side. Nobody takes care about that because it is too small. The other thing is what I told is, is the UAV business a good business? Yes, but it will grow. I think it can grow up to maybe EUR 1 billion if everything is positive, EUR 1.5 billion. It is not a business like the artillery ammunition which can grow up to EUR 6 billion-EUR 8 billion in this area. The reason for that is that the numbers they want at the moment is much, much smaller than on the artillery side because this is usually a precision strike. Yesterday, you have seen the Rider. The Rider is that plane, so number four from the top.
This is what you have seen live yesterday. We are on the way, and we are producing at the moment these drones. This is with a 10 kg, 4.5 kg warhead. This is a loitering ammunition Hero. This is what we are producing in Italy at the moment. Only numbers of the 0.5 warhead. These are different warheads. What is the differentiator that we have? René told it before, we are a warhead producer. We are an ammunition producer. An electronic company is not able to produce a warhead. They are not allowed to produce a warhead because they need an ammunition plant like you see here. Without an ammunition plant, without a warhead, you have no fighting drone. You have a plane which can fly, but you have no fighting drone. The second point is that we are producing the engines.
This is the second point which is very important for us because we want to be independent. Most of the drone producers use Chinese engines. Germany will not allow that. They said, "Okay, we want to be independent in this area." If you see the engines, the electric engines that we have, we produce that in our factory in Saxony. There we said between 10 million and 11 million electric engines that we are producing. This is another USP that we are doing. The USP number three is the connectivities, electronics that we are doing. We do that together with Auterion, but also with Rheinmetall. We implement this electronics into our battle management system, into the whole algorithm for what you have seen yesterday for war. Where are the competitors in this area? It's hard to compete if you can deliver all that things.
We are not interested, let me say, to be a single product producer. This is the reason that we have all this family here in this point. Look at this ammunition, for example. Here, there is a small warhead, a very small warhead. This is where we fight. This is implemented in vehicles like that vehicle or like that vehicle that we have. There is a launcher on the top where we kick out 10 or 12 of these small fighting drones. These are very small ones. The only thing that we produce is the electronics and the warhead. The rest we buy in. We are not interested to be a producer of quadcopters. That's not our job. There are other companies who can work for us and do it. To implement that into the battle management system, into the digitization concept, that is great.
The interceptor, the same thing what we are doing, yes? We do that together also with others. Only the warhead is ours. The interceptor is the drone that is fighting against drones. What we want to do is we want to make a combination. The interceptor is part of our drone wall, and it is another part like the Sky Ranger you see here to say, "Okay, we combine that and we bring them together." If the Sky Ranger can fight, but the Sky Ranger gives information to the interceptor and on the battle management field if we need him also to fight against that. There are different ways to fight against drones.
The only thing what I want to reach now is to tell you, and if the cruise missile, and this is the point that we want to qualify in this, the Barracuda, and the Barracuda is the Anduril technology that we have. If we are able to qualify that in Germany, the European market is open. If this Barracuda is qualified, then you have a cruise missile with a price that is 20% of the price of the cruise missiles that we have at the moment in the market. But the profitability is still fine because it's another technology. We want to do the warhead. We want to do also on these areas something here on the jet drive and other things which are coming up. I hope we could give you a small overview about that. What is our philosophy also in that business?
This business is able to grow. As I said, this is another piece of EUR 1 billion-EUR 1.5 billion that we can implement. Other drones, and a lot of people said drone is a game changer. We don't need tanks. We need nothing. I say this is totally wrong. This is exactly what I see in the discussions with all the governments about that. Without protection of people, it is impossible to make war. Protection of people is coming with such vehicles. Germany will spend EUR 35 billion on satellites. That's a very clear message. It's not only satellites. It's also the intelligence that you get with satellites. It's the service. The German government said, "What we want is that we have a German satellite production. Do you want to be independent?" Also in Europe.
Germany is spending most of the money, so we want to be also independent. They came also to us, and we spoke with them and said, "Okay, hey guys, it's a good idea what you guys are doing, especially on the SAR satellites, but also on others. We are on the way to cooperate also with other satellite producers, not only on the electro-optical side, but also on the communication side." Companies like Deutsche Telekom are interested to work with us now. I said, "Okay, you are able to handle the customer. You are able to handle the Ministry of Defense." This is an investment only from the Ministry of Defense. There is much more in because there are other investments from the Ministry of Economy, etc., etc.
We have cooperations with satellite launchings because at the end of the day, we think that satellite launching is also an important thing. This is Andøya, what we are doing. We have data processing, and this is at the end of the day, the real business. Then we give the data as a service to the customer. What we do is we sell pictures. We sell pictures to the customer. We sell informations to the customer. As you have seen yesterday, when Timo made his presentation at the beginning, there are terabytes of data coming down, and no human being is able to bring these terabytes into the right direction. Therefore, you need this data as a service. You need artificial intelligence to do it. We have different partnerships in these areas, and we have our own technology that we bring in.
We always try to have USPs that Rheinmetall, at the end of the day, is able to be in the driver's seat. There are two things which are important. One thing is the really, really good relationship that we have to governments in Europe and around the world. The other thing are USPs on the technology side. These are the two drivers of the business to come inside that business. Intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, but also communication. Communication is the next step where we are going in. We need communication satellites also on defense because without communication, it will not work. We build up with our programs like Tavan, a terrestrial communication system, and we build up a communication system with satellites. What about people? People are the driver of success.
We are very grateful that this year again, we will have 300,000 people who send a CV to Rheinmetall and want to join the Rheinmetall company. We are very attractive at the moment. I think this is the biggest advantage that we have. We can pick out of 300,000, 10,000, even also 12,000 per year to find the best people. That's a driver of success. If we build up at the program management in the divisions, if we build up operations, guys, a lot of people, like René said, from the automotive business, which are really, really good in automation, want to come to us now because automotive is suffering around all Germany. We have a huge opportunity also to implement these well-educated people into the Rheinmetall family. The risk level is very small. This is what we always discuss.
What are the risks of all the businesses? It's a very small one because we get the people. If you see the risks, we try to make it very simple. Over the next five years, the risk level of market is very small. It's a very small one because the demand is so big that nothing happens. On the labor side, also, we get all the people that we have. It's always a risk in R&D, but the beauty that we have is we produce at the moment more from the same. We have no new developments. I must not develop, let me say, self-propelled howitzer. I must not develop Chacal. It's developed. It's now qualified. We produce thousands from the same thing. Are there different solutions on the software? Yes.
At the end of the day, we do it together with the customer, and the risk is relatively low. R&D side is also a point which we have relatively good under control. Supply chain and execution. These are the two things. We acted, not we reacted. We acted. The reason that we implemented René's area is exactly that because we have seen that operations is the biggest point. We need a big team, a huge team. I did not count it, but at the end of the day, he has thousands of people who work in the operations side who take care about that. He is focusing really on that point. The second point is that we implement also into René's area, the supply chain. Because supply chain and operations have to work together. We separated that, and we have a centralized supply chain management.
There's Markus Gerlach, who is also the General Director of the Rheinmetall Group. He is reporting to René. René has the supply chain and the operations under control. For me, it's easier because I have the easy job. I bring only the contracts. As Ulrich always says, you bring the contracts. René has to make the work. Thank you. Not joking longer about that things, but I think we have it under control. I hope you got an impression about that, how precise he is going into the details, how precise he is doing the automation at the moment. From the financial side, with all the contingencies and all the other things that Klaus is doing, he prepares every project. I think we are on a really, really good way. Vera takes care about the labors.
We have a centralized system where we have the recruiting. There are more than 100 young ladies and also young men who take care about that by day and by night. We have good digitization systems also about that to handle up to 300,000 people who want to come into Rheinmetall. The information we want to give you is we are prepared. We are really prepared ourselves. We are usually riding; we are in front of the wave. We are not behind the wave in these areas. We invest before the customer is really pressing us. We take the money. Is it always good for cash management? No, it is not. Absolutely not. Is it important? You cannot grow if you do not do it. If you do not invest, you cannot grow. We are also entrepRenéurs. It is not bureaucracy what we are doing.
We say, "Okay, give me a contract. After one year, I start to invest something, and after five years, I start to deliver something." This is not the motto that we have today. Europe is in danger, and the governments are very happy with what we are doing. The governments are very happy, and most of the ministers said, "Armin, Rheinmetall is one of the companies, one of the few companies who is really doing what you are doing to go into investments, to be forced in these different areas and make it happen." We think it is the right thing to protect our democracy, to protect freedom, and to protect the people and also let my kids and if you have grandchildren in different areas.
On the order intake, and this is also a very important thing in Q4 2025 and Q2 2026 up to Q2 2026, you see what happens. The green tags are done. Jekyll, Sky Rangers, and different things are inside. These are smaller than EUR 2.5 billion, EUR 2.5 billion-EUR 5 billion, and EUR 5 billion in this area. What you discussed about before, the down payments, if you see, and this is an opportunity, if we sign EUR 10 billion-EUR 15 billion only for the Boxer or the Jekyll side, and because the first contract, the EUR 3.2 billion, was a small contract. Now the big contract is coming. What Klaus said, and that's a real digital thing, but the government wants to do it. If we sign EUR 10 billion-EUR 15 billion, and if you get EUR 20 billion-EUR 30 billion down payment, we have no cash problem.
If we get for all of them, and at the moment, cash is not an issue for Germany. The Minister of Finance said, "Okay, you have cash. Whatever you want, you get in this point. It's not an issue. Signing means you get down payments." A little bit, let me say, we have to guide it also because I discussed that. I think it was in one of the conferences in London where I said, "What do you think if we get EUR 5 billion or EUR 6 billion in one shot? And then the next year, we have to reduce it in these areas." Yes. That is the reason that we have this three-year period to say that I think more than fair in these areas. For all of them, we get down payments.
If you look to the big boys here, of more than EUR 5 billion, EUR 6 billion package of Puma, the same is here, Romania. The digitization is on the same level. Medium-caliber contract, a huge contract of 6 million rounds is also in EUR 6 billion-EUR 7 billion level. The biggest one will be the Boxer program and the armored vehicle from Italy where next year will be a big piece come. This year, we had a small piece, but next year, the big piece will come because they have to order. Otherwise, I cannot deliver Lynx and Panther what we want to bring over. This was for us the message we want to give you about that. Rheinmetall is well prepared. Rheinmetall is in the pool position to go with NATO.
NATO is giving us very clear, or it's not giving us, it's giving the nations a very clear target, what they need, how many brigades, how many battalions they have to deliver to NATO to be prepared. The first target is 2029. In 2029, all the ministers, and there is a commitment from NATO, all the ministers have a clear target from NATO where they should go, how many vehicles they have to send to NATO if tomorrow we have a crisis and if tomorrow an aggressor is coming and wants to attack NATO areas. We will be ready in 2029, maybe earlier because the ramp-up curve that is coming now up on the vehicle side. We did it on the ammunition side. We come now on the vehicle side. We come now also on the digitization side. We are ready. We have the speed that NATO wants.
What's the reason that the margins from our side are much higher than the margins of our partners? Leverage, much stronger growth. You have seen it in one of the things. If we are growing between 25% and 35% and others are growing 15%, it's very clear that there is a leverage effect. There must be a leverage effect. The second point is the risk is relatively low because we are producing the same, always the same. There are R&D programs. We are investing in R&D, but this is not in the scope up to 2030. There are new technologies maybe in 2035 and others, like new drone technologies that you see here in that area, which you cannot see because we did not present it. Best in class in capacity ramp-up. We are able to make it in 12 or 14 months.
We have a very dynamic portfolio, as I said, 2,000 products from the Rheinmetall side, and we have the right people. That is my point, and I am really, really grateful the people are so motivated. It is unbelievable what you see. Maybe you have seen it yesterday if you go through the factories. The people have sparks in their eyes. They love to work for us. They love to do it, even if they have to work by day and by night, even if the pressure is high to make it ready. We are able to do it. People is everything what you need. It's people, people, people business, from program management to operation to finance to HR, and finally also to sales. If you have the right people, you create trust.
For me, in the governmental business, trust is the only thing what you need. If the prime ministers trust you, you make business. If you lose trust, you lose everything. I hope now that we are not losing trust from your side. Trust us. We make it happen. Thank you very much again. Stay safe, and God bless you. Bye.
Are there any questions left? Okay. Thank you. Who wants to go first?
Thank you, Alessandro Pozzi, Mediobanca. You seem quite comfortable about execution and supply chain. I think probably you've done quite a lot of work to see whether there is enough capacity in the supply chain given your strong growth. You talked about 25%-30% growth every year for the next few years. I was wondering what is your feeling about the supply chain and whether it can follow you into this growth trajectory, but also critical raw materials. You highlighted that in your slide and how critical materials are for you. I guess there are areas where there are more of a concern compared to others. Last question, a lot of orders coming through. If we fast forward a year by the end of next year, what do you think the backlog of Rheinmetall is going to be? Thank you.
I stay what I said before, middle of next year, and with all the programs you see, we see the potential that our backlog can grow up to EUR 120 billion. The critical materials, and this was something that René also told you, we have usually very small numbers. It's easy for us to buy in whatever we need. For example, we made a deal with the chip producers, with 10 chip producers, electronic producers for the next five years to say, "Okay, we pay," and we pay them also in front and said, "Okay, give us a safe harbor for the next five years for microchips." We gave them a better price because we don't need such a lot in this area. We are not automotive industry, yes, who needs millions of that pieces. They store it for us.
They have it in their stocks, and we can pick it out and take it. It works fantastic. In ammunition, there is only one thing that we need at the moment, but we also think at the moment to start our own linter production. We have linters for three to four years in our stocks. We are independent also from that. In South Africa, we had a linter production 20 years ago before we stepped in. They closed it. We reopened it now. To be fair enough, cotton, you can buy cotton everywhere. That is easy. This is the next point. Is it a huge investment? No, it is not a huge investment, but we want to be independent. Steel. We have frame contracts with steel. On the steel side, we have Europeanization, bring it back to Europe. We bought steel from India.
We bought steel from China. We will buy in the future the steel mostly in Germany or in Europe. There are steel producers who are very interested because they take our contracts as a ticket, as an investment ticket. You spoke about investments, and Klaus spoke also about that point. On the investment side, if we said, "We give this contract for five years to this supply chain," Bank of America, KKR, all the guys are here coming to us and say, "Okay, I want to finance them. I give them money." This is a business for bankers, a huge business to invest in these areas, and it's a safe investment. It's a very safe investment because they have our contracts, fixed contracts over five years, over seven years. These are totally different modules that we have at the moment. I believe that money is not an issue.
Absolutely not. I'm not happy to give the down payments for free also to them. It's much better if Bank of America, whoever, or you invest the supply chain in this area. It's a business for banks. I think we had the last two months, six, seven banks who were there said, "Can you give me the 100 biggest supplier of Rheinmetall to give them money to invest them, to make an investment about that?" There are huge opportunities at the moment. You must be flexible. You must be fast. This is for sure very, very clear. I think we are prepared about that. Is that fair enough?
Yeah.
Michael Raab, Kepler Cheuvreux. First of all, I tend to agree with your view on UAVs. They're important, but the importance has been overpronounced. I'm not going to bore you with military tactics and physics behind that. Out of the EUR 1 billion-EUR 1.5 billion sales potential you mentioned, rephrasing things, is that already included in your guidance, or would that be on top?
Something is in because you see we do this year EUR 120 million, EUR 130 million, but it's not an essential part of all that things. If it's growing faster, I'm fine. But you know better than me about that things. If you have a forecast for five years, always something happens. You have to compensate something, but at the end of the day, you have to hit the target. This is the most important thing for me. If I make EUR 300 million more there or less on the other side, for me, it doesn't matter.
Secondly, on the 6 million rounds, medium caliber for Germany, is this just for the IFVs, or does that also include ABM for Sky Rangers that are forthcoming?
It's a combination. The big pack at the moment is for the infantry fighting vehicles. You can use, as you said, this 30 ml and 35 ml solution. You can use it for both. You can fire the ABM ammunition on the Chacal, and you can use it also on the air defense.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. It's just a follow-up on 2027 because last year, obviously, you gave the guidance for 2027. Now today, you took us to the high end of the 40-50 you indicated previously for 2030. I was just wondering because the previous months you said 2027 could be 20-25. Based on all what you said today, would you think the opportunity is more on the upper end of that range, or?
We at the moment in the planning phase, what we do is what we have to implement, we have to implement the naval business. We are at the moment at the beginning of the analysis phase because, as you know, we still have not the closing. This is a big driver also in that business. As you know, at the end of the day, we have to deliver. This is the most important thing. If I'm standing here and say, "Yes, I want to make EUR 25 billion," and at the end of the day, it's EUR 22 billion, you said, "Okay, this guy said he made EUR 25 billion." Give me a range at the moment because we are in the planning phase. We do our utmost to be as good as possible because what we know, timing is the most important thing now.
Customers have one thing at the moment, which is the most important thing. It's not pricing. It's time. Deliver. Deliver. Deliver. If I go to the in one and a half hours, I will fly to Berlin again. The only thing that I get always from the ministers is, "Deliver. When are you able to deliver?" These are the hardest, let me say, speeches I have with my colleague here to say, "Okay, I need more Pumas. I need more Chacals and whatever in this area. We have to deliver." The people in Rheinmetall are really working hard on that area. Our business is not a business like a pretzel baker to say, "Okay, now I make 1 million, and next year, I make 2 million pretzels." This is easy only for machines. It's complex machines. Look at that machines.
If you compare that machines with a normal Mercedes or BMW 7, this is technology-wise, let me say, another totally in the space where the others are. This is a real technology-driven business, you always have risks. We want to compensate the risks. Therefore, I said, "I stay that we are between 20 and 25.
Thank you.
Saïma Hussain from AlphaValue. Thank you for taking my question. Just a last quick one on my side. I know visibility beyond 2030 is limited, and you're not guiding, but I will try my luck. Do you have a strategic view on where Rheinmetall could be heading by 2035?
Yes, but I don't tell it.
Thank you, Armin. Sam Burgess, just Goldman Sachs. Two quick ones, please. We have talked a bit about digitization, battlefield connectivity, and autonomy clearly go hand in hand with this area. You touched a little bit about how this could impact platform development going forward and some of the big boys, as you said. Given the pace of change in this area, could we see quite significant changes in the near term to how these platforms operate? What is the aftermarket opportunity here, perhaps in terms of software as a service for Rheinmetall?
Yeah.
That's question one. Question two, just with the new additions of naval, space, digital, air defense, should we expect a significant reconstitution of your current divisional structure at some stage?
Number one, this is the last generation of vehicles which are manned. The next generation will be manned and unmanned. I believe that, and this is the system that we develop at the moment, that you have one manned vehicle and maybe five or ten unmanned vehicles. The unmanned vehicles are fighting in the front line. The manned vehicle is, let me say, a relay station, a digital relay station where you take care about if something is going wrong. The impact you will see middle of next year, we want to have the first wheeled and tracked vehicles, which is going totally autonomous. Is it in a stage of serial production? No. We want to show the prototypes. We want to go to our customers. We have that at the moment on the truck side. We have fully automated trucks. The trucks are driving.
We load and unload the trucks at automatic load handling systems, full in the digital scenario. That is the reason that areas like Taiwan are so important because Taiwan is producing the network for us. You cannot hope if you're in the middle of nowhere that telecom is giving you a 5G or a 6G net. You have to do it by yourself as a point. That is the reason that Taiwan is coming inside. You see, it's a combination of all those things. Yes, the impact will be there. What always is coming forward, first of all, that vehicles up to 2035 will be produced long-term for the next 10 years. Then slowly, slowly, the next generation is coming in because governments are not changing the vehicles, yes, every day because it's too expensive. It's a billions programs that they do.
It is a very smooth process to bring it inside. Second point, second question, yes, you see that we change our organization, yeah? We focus and we want to be transparent to give you on the naval side, on the air defense side, and on the digital side a clear picture of what's going on. Maybe we have to change also something if we are growing faster and faster, but this is a story of tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. For example, if you have a division who makes EUR 20 billion or more, this is a DAX company, yeah, as a division in this area.
We have maybe to split them and to say, "Okay, because people, if the weapon and ammunition and Roman is sitting here, business is growing with missiles or whatever, fast and fast, maybe in three years or four years' time, we have a division missiles and we have a division ammunition." I do not know. For tomorrow, this is what you have seen. We will have this new organization.
Thank you for taking my question. [Marianne] from Morgan Stanley. I have actually one question on the German budget because apparently last week, we had a document from the Bundestag. We saw new allocation, I would say. First, can you come back to that and just tell us if you have any surprise for the 2026 budget? I will do one by one.
Yeah. No surprise for 2026 because in 2026, we are fully booked. In 2027, and on the ammunition side, we are very well booked also. What you have seen is, and this is always something, and believe me, you get every six months a new paper from them because if the budget in one project at the moment, yeah, if they need more budget, they change something, but they change nothing from the total number, as I said. The total number of EUR 180 billion is up to 2030, the right figure, and they do not change that. They change internally between procurement line one or two. If they change EUR 2 billion-EUR 3 billion for ammunition to vehicles, does not matter. Not for us because we deliver both. They changed something because of the new idea to have an interim program of frigates. Now we are also in that business.
For us, I think it doesn't hurt because for me, it doesn't matter if it goes from my left pocket to my right pocket.
Okay. Probably it's a good follow-up because my next question is on 2030 sales and what you have included actually. For naval, have you included any 126 frigate that can come or is anything that we will hear will be on top of that of the EUR 5 billion that you mentioned?
Yeah. We have in our plan F126, but the beauty in that plan is that we have POC because usually on the frigates, you make that via POC. The F126 is the following situation. The Lürssen Group, we have at the moment 70 people in the Netherlands who make a due diligence. I say we because, as I said, again, closing is still not done. Yeah. We are not operationally going inside, only after closing we can do it, but for sure, we get information from the market. Seventy people make a due diligence at the moment in the Netherlands. These people get from the government at the moment four months. After four months, the due diligence must be ready. We must see if there are technical risks, if there are economical risks, and if there are time risks.
We are relatively risk-averse, as you know, because we try to, and that is the reason that we have not super huge impacts. We also have impacts. Yeah. If we would do everything better, as I said, and only as said on procurement and operations, and this is the discussion that Reni and myself are doing, we have a potential of minimum 300 basis points to be better. Yeah. We lose for sure something. We will have an overview in four months. I think that in four months, the closing is done, and then we can make a decision what we do on the F126.
Just on M&A, you have included some M&A in your guidance. What's your level of confidence? Is it because you are already discussing with some companies and you know that probably it will come? Have you also included some JVs, like higher scope for your current JVs? Can you just go through?
Yeah. Know what we do, we always discuss over the whole year with companies if they fit for us. There are smaller acquisitions and there are bigger acquisitions. If you see our new nitrocellulose plant come nearly out of the blue, we had an opportunity. The owner came to us and said, "Okay, you know, yesterday we discussed that also. He was a strong producer for nitrocellulose for these finger colors." He said, "We are not interested in that, but we want to change that business into a defense business." This is exactly what we did. There are always opportunities. What I can say because now I always said to Roman because he's on the way to buy now the new ammunition storages in this area from a company.
I told him, "Inshallah," because he told me two times that it works, but I think we will have it in the next two weeks. I can tell it because we are really convinced to go forward. I do not speak about figures or names. Yes, we are sure that we are able to implement year by year one, two, three companies. There was one question before about the big shot. Yeah. Is it so that we want to go and invest into the big shot? Usually, this is not the philosophy of Rheinmetall to say, "Okay, now we want to invest EUR 10 billion in a company and let's see if it works." No, this is not what we want. At the end of the day, we want to have a safe business.
I think it's also very important for all because we also invest that also tomorrow our kids have still food.
Thank you very much. It was a real pleasure for us to have you here. Now, food is the key word. The buffet is open.