Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to today's annual shareholders meeting of Sartorius . My name is Lothar Kappich, and as Chairman of the Supervisory Board, I hereby open this year's regular annual shareholders meeting of our company.
I hereby welcome on behalf of the supervisory board and the executive board. I extend a particularly warm welcome to our shareholders and shareholder representatives. I would also like to welcome the media representatives. Your coverage of Sartorius has helped our shareholders to stay informed about the company also throughout the year. Thank you for your work.
Sartorius has again opted for this format based on the positive experiences of recent years with the virtual Annual General Meeting. In particular, it enables us to reach our international shareholders more effectively. As in previous years, we are providing an English screen in addition to the German one. I am currently at Sartorius, Anna Straße 29, 37075 Göttingen, which is the location of the annual shareholders meeting as defined by the German Stock Corporation Act. I would like to welcome the members of our supervisory board who are all here today.
The same applies to the executive board. I would like to welcome Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg, Dr. Alexandra Gatzemeyer, Dr. René Fáber, and Dr. Florian Funck. I would also like to welcome Dr. Matthias Reichardt, a notary based in Göttingen, who is keeping the minutes of today's meeting. In addition to that, the proxies of the company are present at the AGM. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to turn to a series of staff changes that either took place during the reporting year or are imminent.
Dr. Florian Funck took over the position of Chief Financial Officer on April 1, 2025, almost a year ago. Mr. Funck had already introduced himself to you in a video clip at our last Annual General Meeting. Today, he is also here present in person. We expect another significant change in the executive board around the middle of this year.
You will have gathered from our communications that Mr. Kreuzburg has decided, after 22 years as CEO, not to seek a further extension of his contract. During his tenure, Sartorius has developed into one of the world's leading life science companies. The value of the company has multiplied, and thousands of new jobs have been created. I would like to thank Mr. Kreuzburg personally and also on behalf of all the shareholders for his outstanding achievements.
At the same time, I look forward to another three months of constructive collaboration. I think you have also gathered from media reports that the supervisory board has succeeded in finding an experienced successor in Dr. Michael Grosse, who will take over the CEO position on July 1, 2025. Mr. Grosse has impressively demonstrated his abilities in a range of industries and business models, and we are convinced that he will be a strong addition to our successful management board team, which also includes Mr. Fáber, Ms. Gatzemeyer, and Mr. Funck.
Unlike the management board, the supervisory board has seen no changes since the last Annual General Meeting. However, a change is also pending in this body. Mr. Manfred Zaffke, as a representative of IG Metall, is my deputy chairman of this body, and he has announced that he will leave the supervisory board at the end of March of this year. Mr. Zafke would also like to take this opportunity to thank you most sincerely for the many years of constructive cooperation.
As usual, you can see the composition of the supervisory board and its committees in the reporting year in the annual report, and I would like to refer you to the pages 337 to 339. For all eligible shareholders, as well as for their proxies, the entire Annual G eneral Meeting today will be broadcast on our password-protected internet service, our AGM portal. All other participants can follow the first part of the event on the Sartorius website. The address is www.sartorius.com/hauptversammlung. As in previous years, the transmission via the website will end after the speech of the Chairman of the Executive Board. A recording will be available after the meeting. In the event of any technical problems arising during the transmission, we will provide you with information on how to proceed in the AGM portal. I will now turn to the formalities of this AGM.
The invitation was issued in due time with a publication in the Federal Gazette on February 17, 2025. A printout of the Federal Gazette is held by the officiating notary, and it will be attached to the minutes. The same applies to the proof of the euro wide distribution of the invitation. Since the invitation was published in the Federal Gazette, all other documents and information required for the Annual General Meeting have been available on the company's website. I therefore notice that today's Annual General Meeting has been convened in due time and form in accordance with the law and the articles of association. The company has not received any requests for additions to the agenda, nor any counter motions or proposals for election. I will now explain how you can exercise your rights as shareholders at today's virtual Annual General Meeting.
The company has set up the AGM portal in German and English for exercising rights, as already mentioned. The personal access data for this portal has been sent to all those entitled to participate. Registered shareholders can now follow the entire Annual General Meeting live via the portal. They can also exercise their right to speak and their right to information during the general debate. Provided they hold ordinary shares, they can also exercise their voting rights. I would also like to point out that it is still possible to vote via the portal even now during the meeting. You can exercise your voting rights by means of electronic absentee voting, issue power of attorney and instructions for exercising voting rights to the proxies or other authorized persons, as well as submit proof of authorization.
You can change or revoke votes and instructions already given, as well as revoke powers of attorney that have been granted. You can still exercise your voting rights until the end of the respective vote. I will draw your attention in good time to this point in time during our meeting. It is no longer possible to cast votes during today's Annual General Meeting by means other than the AGM portal. For the sake of good order, it should be mentioned that, of course, holders of ordinary shares or their proxies already had the opportunity prior to the Annual General Meeting to submit their voting rights either via the AGM portal or by letter or email.
The necessary forms were sent to eligible holders of ordinary shares together with the access data for the AGM portal, and they were also available for download on the company's website from the date of the invitation to the Annual General Meeting. Preference shareholders are not entitled to vote at today's Annual General Meeting. Furthermore, shareholders registered for the Annual General Meeting or their proxies had the right to submit written statements on items on the agenda via the AGM portal prior to the AGM. This option was available until March 21, 2025. I would like to inform you that no such statements were received. Let us now turn to your options for exercising the right to speak. Both ordinary and preference shareholders or their proxies have the right to speak via video communication.
In order to register your attention to speak, please use the virtual request-to-speak desk on the AGM portal, which has been open since 11:00 A.M. this morning. Requests, nominations, or requests for information may also be part of your speech. Information may be requested at today's Annual General Meeting regarding matters concerning the company, provided that it is necessary for the proper assessment of an item on the agenda, and there is no legal right to refuse to provide such information. As the Chairman of the Annual General Meeting, I hereby determine that the right to information at today's Annual General Meeting can only be exercised by means of video communication via the AGM portal, meaning within the scope of the right to speak as just explained. The company has also created an additional voluntary opportunity to ask questions.
Eligible shareholders or their proxies were able to submit questions on the agenda in writing via the AGM portal by March 22, 2025. Although this additional opportunity to ask questions does not establish a right to ask questions or receive information under the statutory provisions, the management board has decided to answer such questions submitted in writing in advance during today's Annual General Meeting. Requests in accordance with Section 131(4) of the German Stock Corporation Act can also be submitted via the AGM portal until the general debate is closed. It is also possible to use the portal to declare an objection to one or more resolutions of the AGM, and in the event of refusal to provide information, to submit a request for the question and the reason for the refusal to be recorded in the minutes.
You can submit such declarations or requests from the opening to the meeting until its conclusion, and these will then be forwarded to our notary. Now a few remarks about the participants at today's meeting. The list of participants includes the shareholders connected online or present by proxy, including those shareholders who have authorized the company's proxies and issued instructions on how they should exercise their voting rights, as well as the representatives of shareholders who are present online. At the latest, before the first vote, I will announce the following: the number of shares held by the shareholders who are connected or represented, the number of shares represented by the proxies, as well as the number of electronic postal votes. The list of participants and any amendments will be made available on the AGM portal.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to explain the procedure for requesting and granting the floor in a little more detail. If you would like to speak about the agenda after the executive board has presented it, please register your request to speak at the virtual request-to-speak desk on the AGM portal. To do so, please follow the instructions on the AGM portal. As soon as you have registered to speak, we will contact you to check the technology. You will essentially need a camera, as well as a microphone that can be accessed from the browser. If we are unable to ensure the functionality of the video communication, we reserve the right to reject the request to speak. I will call on those shareholders or proxies who have been authorized to speak in due course, and then they will be connected to the meeting.
Please note that when you are connected to the meeting, your speech will be transmitted live via video and audio. Of course, you can also register to speak during the debate. However, I would be grateful if you could register as early as possible so that I can estimate how many speakers we can expect. Even if you have declared your intention to submit a motion or election proposal when registering your contribution via our AGM portal, you must still present this verbally as part of your speech. I would also like to point out at this stage that we would like to hold the debate in the form of a general discussion, meaning we will cover all the items on the agenda. I would therefore ask you to address all the agenda items you would like to speak on in your speech.
After our general discussion, we will then take all the votes and all the agenda items together. In this context, I would like to point out that you still have time until the end of the voting to cast your postal votes or to grant, change, or revoke authorization and instructions to the proxies appointed by the company via the AGM portal. I will announce the end of the voting again beforehand. After the voting results have been determined, I will note and announce them. In doing so, I intend to make use of the statutory option of only determining and announcing the approval rate for each resolution. The detailed voting results will be displayed as they are announced and would also be available for you to read on the website afterwards.
Please allow me, as chair of the meeting, to make the following comments.
The Annual General Meeting, especially the general debate, thrives on free speech. We have therefore dispensed with the preparation of stenographic minutes. Only the questions asked are recorded in shorthand in order to support the administration in answering them. In addition, only the freely accessible part of the Annual General Meeting up to and including the speech of the management board is recorded. Thereafter, no further recording is made. This also applies to the general debate. I ask for your understanding that you are also not permitted to make video or audio recordings of this Annual General Meeting. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have the list of participants. I would like to announce the attendance of our Annual General Meeting today as follows. By 12:01, the stockholders and the proxies were taking part with a total of 372,216 ordinary and preferred stock.
That is 0.42% of the registered capital of the corporation to this AGM. Of this capital, in EUR 74,883,000, divided into 74,880,000 initial stocks up to that point in time, there were 19,411,140 ordinary stock present. This is equivalent of 25.92% of the base capital. In addition, the electronic absentee ballot had been exercised for 30,264,800 ordinary stock with just as many votes. Together, by that point, 43.64% of the registered capital were represented by electronic absentee ballot or authorization with directions to the proxies of the corporation. The company itself currently holds 3,209,072 owned ordinary stock, as well as 2,632,732, excuse me, of owned preferred stocks. According to the German Stock Corporation Act, Section 71(b), there are no voting rights attached. The notary has also received a copy of the attendance data and the list of participants.
The list of participants is immediately available for inspection in the AGM portal. In order to determine the respective presence, supplementary lists will be prepared if necessary, about which I will duly inform you at our notary. In addition, the list of supplements will also be made available in the AGM portal. We now come to the agenda. To begin with, the Supervisory Board and Executive Board will present the reports and, in particular, explain the documents mentioned under agenda item one. Item one concerns the presentation of the annual financial statements and the consolidated financial statements, as well as the summarized management report and group management report of the company and the report of the Supervisory Board, each for the financial year 2024. On this, I announce that these documents have been available on the internet at the address www.sartorius.com/hauptversammlung.
Since the convening of this Annual General Meeting, it will also be available there during today's Annual General Meeting. I also state that the annual and consolidated financial statements as of 31 December 2024, prepared by the management board and the combined management and group management report, have been audited by the auditor elected at the last Annual General Meeting, PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH, Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft, located in Frankfurt am Main, and have been issued with an unqualified audit opinion. Following its own review at the supervisory board meeting on 7 February 2025, the supervisory board approved the financial statements of Sartorius AG and the group, prepared by the executive board, as well as the combined management and group management report.
In doing so, it followed the recommendation of the audit committee, which dealt in detail with the financial statement documents and the audit findings of the auditors on 6 February 2025. The annual financial statements of Sartorius AG are thus adopted in accordance with Section 172 Stock Corporation Act. Accordingly, we do not require resolution on this matter. Ladies and gentlemen, before I give the floor to the executive board, I would like to briefly explain a few things about the 2024 financial year from the perspectives of the supervisory board. As always, you will find our detailed written report in the Sartorius annual report on pages 12 through 17. I would therefore like to concentrate on selected aspects in my explanations.
A total of eight meetings were held in the 2024 financial year, in which the board dealt in detail with the economic situation and strategic direction of Sartorius on the basis of the management board's presentations. In addition to business development and strategy, issues relating to the risk situation, risk management, internal control systems, and compliance played a particularly important role in the consultations. Other key topics were the delayed recovery in the entire life science sector after the pandemic and the corresponding impact on Sartorius. The capital measures implemented by Sartorius AG and Sartorius Stedim Biotech SA at the beginning of the year, the selection and appointment of the new Chairman of the Executive Board, and the drafting of the corresponding executive board contract, various topics in connection with the remuneration of the executive board and the company's progress in the area of sustainability and sustainability reporting.
As already mentioned, further individual topics discussed by the supervisory board are explained in the written report of the supervisory board. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to ask the Chairman of our Executive Board, Dr. Kreuzburg, to explain the 2024 annual financial statements. Mr. Kreuzburg will also discuss the company's development and outline the prospects for the future. Mr. Kreuzburg, I would now like to ask you for your presentation.
Dear Mr. Kappich, ladies and gentlemen, I also welcome you very cordially to today's Annual General Meetings, and I'm happy to present to you four sections in my presentations and report on the 2024 fiscal year. I am going to tell you a little bit about the decisive market factors and market drivers, then the business model of Sartorius, and finally, the decisive future perspectives of the group.
I think we can duly say that the last five years were very unusual, very volatile, very challenging, often very difficult. What they had in common was that in all these years, we grew better than the market in total, and also that we have reached a profitability in excess of the market. That means that Sartorius, also in a difficult industry environment, like so many years before, has been able to actually ascertain its strong market position and develop better than the competition.
I'd now like, first of all, to see what the revenue and the profit of 2024 was like, but I would also like to actually look at that over the past five or six years, even you see here in our graph the past six years, because this shows the entire pandemic effects, and you see that they've grown out of the pandemic special effects. Now, the start in 2024 was a little bit lagging, delayed. Our objectives that we had readjusted have been reached completely. We have reached sales of EUR 3.4 billion, just like the year before, and order intake has grown by 11%.
The reason for that was that the destocking on the side of our clients took a little bit longer than forecast, but now this has reached its end, and the consumables demand has picked up, which is, of course, especially pertinent to the BPS, because their consumables play a higher role. LPS is a little bit lower because all over the world, the global demand for new equipment is still lagging. If we take a look at the multi-year perspective, through 2019 and 2024, we've grown by 85%, which is an average annual growth of 13%. That's important to keep in mind because over the past two years, we were a little bit lower than 2022, but that was due to an extraordinarily high growth, and that was not sustainable, as we had already said at the time at several occasions.
The volatility was very large in the past two years, and that means that it was also very difficult to meet the forecast precisely because the inventory objectives of our customers were moving very strongly. Let's now take a look at the development of profitability. We can say that volatility is one main enemy of efficiency. That means with the above-average level of profitability makes us very happy. We've reached in 2024, 28% of operative EBITDA margin. If we take a look at the several-year perspective on the left-hand side, we can see that over five years, we've realized a growth of 91%, which means 14% per annum, and that actually is a result that's worth flaunting.
When we see both our divisions, we can see that they've basically hit the previous year's level in terms of sales revenue, but that has to do with the different situations in terms of consumable business and recurrent business on the one hand, and the business on investment equipment on the other hand. The situation in the bioprocess division has progressed a little bit further in a positive sense, and recovery has taken place to a larger degree compared to the LPS because the investment tendency is a little bit lower in our clientele. This is plus 13% versus plus 4% BPS versus LPS in order intake. In the first chart, I showed it quickly. It's a development throughout the year, especially throughout the fourth quarter of the past year, was really very positive in that sense.
A positive EBITDA margin of 29.3% for BPS and 22.9% for LPS. Volatility is also a buzzword, which is a big challenge in terms of staffing and employment. That always has large effects before and after because it is basically impossible to fine-tune and adjust employment precisely according to demand at a given moment in time. Together with the representatives of our employees in our group, we have managed to strike a good balance between the social and the corporate needs. We, again, are having a rise from 19 to 24. That is by 30%. Our staff has really gone more than once the extra mile during the pandemic in order to actually fulfill the challenging conditions.
At the same time, we all think back to the restricted conditions under which we had to work at the time, and we had to actually also master the challenges of the past pandemic time when de-staffing had to take place. Again, a big thank you here. We actually are very interested in staffing development. You see here how important it is. Equality of opportunity and developing new talents is really very important for us. Also, down there in the lower right-hand corner, we can see that actually we are above average when it comes to feedback in the employment platforms. Coming back to normal has taken longer than expected, and especially in the consumables, it is visible. Especially the consumables played a big role, first of all, putting them into inventory and then destocking them.
We see that here we have a correlation with what we see on the right-hand side. We see that China has a weak market, so it is not getting any weaker, but there is also no visible strong recovery tendencies. The biotech financing environment is a good indicator of where things are moving, and that shows a positive tendency. I also say that geopolitics and global business and global economy is right now connected with a whole lot of uncertainty. Please let me mention this as well. Again, profitability also means that we have fine-tuned in all possibilities that we had at our disposal to adjust, for example, our own inventory levels, our purchasing, our staffing capacities, and our capacity expansion. We realized a total of more than EUR 1 million of cost reduction.
In the background of the positive growth outlook that I will come back to in a second, we also invested a lot in growth, resilience, and these you see here on the left-hand side, customer proximity, for example. Closeness to customers means, for example, also production sites, meaning also redundancies in a global production network. That has to do with more and more bi-local initiatives are asked for. That means for us that not so much global exports are possible, but we need to strike a balance between sales levels, between exporting and manufacturing on site.
What have you already closed in 2024 and were able to open? You see Ann Arbor Competence Center for Bioanalytics, strategic growth field of our lab section.
We have a new competence center there that plays a really important role for technology and also for the manufacturing of these products in the U.S. As well in the U.S., close to the biotech hotspot in Boston, we have in Marlborough, we opened an innovation center for bioprocesses where we interact strongly with customers, work on new processes. In the same site, we also have one activity of our group research and production sites. This is a really important footprint in one of the central spots of our sector. Ongoing investments, you can see on the right-hand side in Göttingen, as well as in Freiburg, filters and cell culture reagents, quite far advanced, even further advanced in Aubagne. Fluid management products will open in the summer. A bit not as far ahead in the timeline is Suzhou, bags, filters, and media.
If you do not know, Suzhou is the site worldwide where the biggest upstream monoclonal antibody production is worldwide. We are here in the middle of this epicenter, building up an important production site for the whole South Asian market. Lots of investments going on across the entire portfolio and geographical bandwidth of the company. Short look, because resilience, flexibility plays such a big role now. How are we set up? I, of course, cannot talk about all of our locations. Here you see the ones where we actually have production, some are highlighted, most important. Of course, they are all important. I think this gives you a good overview of how well we are striking a balance between being present in different geographical regions and also reflecting our sales quotas that you can see in the donut chart on the right-hand side.
Shareholders, I would now like to talk towards the end of the first part of my presentation about the dividend proposal of the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board. We would like to keep the dividend at the same level as last year. Ordinary shares, EUR 0.73, preference shares, EUR 0.74. I think that reflects the positive business outlook of Sartorius group despite the temporarily lower net results. In the second part now, I would like to very briefly and concisely talk about the most important fundamental drivers and factors of the market that we focus on. Our mission is to participate in giving better health to more people. That is the sustainability goal number three of the UN Sustainability Goals. I would like to point out again that the reason for doing business Sartorius addresses is sustainability goal.
Often, sustainability is reflected in emission reduction goals. Those are very important goals indeed. I think health, as everybody knows from personal experience, is just as important. We are addressing this sustainability goal directly and to the full extent across all of our business purposes. What drives this market? What are the fundamental factors? First of all, for many of us, it's natural now. Most blockbusters now are biologics, but in the last three to four decades, they revolutionized the treatment of severe diseases or even made it possible in the first place. For example, the survival rates in cancer now and the quality of life of people suffering from autoimmune diseases, they are now manageable in a way that was not the case in the past or the completely new revolutionary treatment of gene defects that was not even conceivable in the recent past.
All of that can be done and can only be done through biologics. There are no other treatment options here. At the same time, one also needs to state that the market volume could be five times as high if all patients worldwide would be treated in the same way that we are used to being treated in North America, Europe, and other industrially developed nations. The trend does go in the right direction. These numbers would look even differently if we look back 15, 20 years. South East Asia, South America would have an even lower share in the market than is the case today. There is a really high potential. Why is that the case that these treatments are not available everywhere?
One reason, not the only one, but an important reason is that biotech medications are highly effective, but also very cost-intense, very expensive for many cases. For example, rheumatism, EUR 12,000 for one annual cost of treatment. Blood cancer, single treatment, EUR 240,000. And metabolic disease here, an example of gene therapy, about $4 million for one-time treatment. This is not available for all patients who would need them, not even in the Western world. Why is that the case? This chart, I think we've already shown in previous Annual General Meetings. Since it is so foundational, so important, I want to show it again. The development times are long, and the production is rather complex. The development times are about 10 years. Actually, moving more towards 12 years now. Development costs on average EUR 2 billion.
The likelihood that a molecule that you start work with in the beginning will actually be successful is 1% of 1%. One out of 10,000 molecules makes it all the way through. Even if you manage to go through stage one, phase one, nine out of ten still do not pass. This is where we need to have a lever. One important factor needs to be improved: timeline and costs. Now I would like to come to the third part of my presentation, our business model. With technologies, we want to use to do our part. Our promise to our customers is simplifying progress. We want to help our customers to have a faster development of new drugs and have a higher efficiency in production. This is how we address very directly these foundational drivers that I just mentioned.
Now I would like to give you four examples. You see here on the bottom, that's a number for our products, actually just a fraction of our product portfolio. There are many more on our website. For all of these products, we could now look in detail how they do simplifying progress, cost reduction in production, and shortening of development times. Doing that or helping in that from left to right in the yellow boxes, these are the four examples I would like to talk about. First of all, AI-supported data analytics. That is a topic for development processes, process identification, addressing production costs, and ADS platform. That is a production platform to make new therapeutic new treatments more quickly. Single-use materials is a production topic because this is a parallel goal we have.
This is about decreasing the resources that are necessary for the production or development of pharmaceuticals. Very important in this context, and this is why it's in the headline. All of that requires innovations. The key to achieve these goals, to give these processes to our customers is innovation. We do that with our own means, with partners, and also through complementary acquisitions. First example, complex AI-supported data analytics. Why complex? Well, biologics are complex, and this is why AI methods need to be able to reflect that. Often, complexity sounds like it is something negative, but you can also be way too little complexity and therefore not achieve your goals. Here you see three-dimensional structured cell models, then the reagents that are necessary for the respective experiments, instruments, especially for image cell analytics and high-performance data analytics to analyze the data and get valuable information.
You see on the right-hand side examples from our product portfolio. You can also see that we're working here with partners because there are a lot of complementary technologies that we include in our solution. Second example, this is also in partnership to intensify processes, long-term and probably continuous processes. You can see that here in the yellow box. In the future, it will probably be continuous production. What's the background here? Here we're talking about the production of monoclonal antibodies. It's basically the workhorse of the biopharmaceutical industry. Three decades ago, it wasn't, or four decades ago, it was not clear at all whether this class of medication of treatment would be able to play the role that it is playing today. Without that, the revolution that I talked about in the beginning would not have been possible. Why? Why were there doubts?
Because the production costs were very high, and the productivity, therefore, was rather low. Even though significant progress has been made, we think that we can go much further. We are therefore pointing towards another halving of the costs and a tripling of the productivity. The footprint, so how big does the factory need to be to produce a certain number of doses? I think we can actually reduce that again, and that would also drive down CO2 emissions. You can see on the right-hand side the platform that we are launching on the market with fantastic customer feedback. Control also plays a big role here. I said AI-supported data analytics, and the control of these processes plays a role to allow for these increases in efficiency. AI-based algorithms play a big role here to realize that. Here we're cooperating with Sanofi, as you can see.
I think that also shows at what level we're operating here in the generation of innovation. Third example, that's our portfolio, a very strong, clearly defined portfolio for efficient production of advanced therapies. Here what is true for monoclonal antibodies four decades ago is true for this now. High costs. You might remember gene therapy as an example. There are no established manufacturing platforms yet and base technologies. Small yield. The processes are often not robust yet. A really high need for innovation. On the right-hand side in the white box, you see our product portfolio. Essential reagents. Here we have undertaken many acquisitions over the last years and have extensively reported on that in previous AGMs and other tools and technologies. Part of them were developed by us. Some were acquired, for example, purification technologies on the downstream side.
On the right-hand side, you see very simplified, but a realistic example, the advances that are possible here, 15 times higher yields between a today's reference process and an optimized process based on our technologies. I think that shows that if such progress can be made, we can address what I mentioned earlier, that more patients can be treated than is the case today. I am now moving on to a cross-sectional topic, which is my fourth example. New materials, more sustainable materials as a platform for single-use technologies. Important in this context is, first of all, to point out again that the ecological footprint of single-use technologies in most fields of application is better than all other available technologies. We still want to get better. You see very impressive numbers on the right-hand side.
How we moved away from fossil plastics to other more sustainable plastics.
Another important field is the topic of PFAS, the so-called never-ending chemicals. We have been able to prepare and launch on the market a PFAS-free filter. Nobody else has been able to do that. That is very important for Sartorius. Ladies and gentlemen, now to conclude, I'd like to give you an outlook for the goals and objectives of Sartorius on the basis of very strong market trends that we are addressing. I've just addressed the market trends, and I'd like to give you a quantitative approach there. Health is and will remain sustainably one of the most relevant global topics for everybody as an individual, but also globally for the global population. We are a growing global population. We are an aging global population.
The number of people above 65 will be twice as large as it is today in only a very few years. We need a whole lot of medication in order to meet the growing demand of that aging society. The history started 30 or 40 years ago, biological medication, and it's still running. We see an average global growth for the market of biopharmaceuticals by a little bit about around 10%. We also see an increasing diversity of modalities, cell therapies, gene therapies, not only monoclonal antibodies. You see it on the left-hand side in this donor chart that the novel therapies by now make up 30% of the pipeline.
Something that might have become out of focus over the past two years because the short-term topics dominated communication, we have seen record approvals of bio-medications and a clearly positive trend in cell and gene therapeutics. What I just said, that the underlying trends are now coming more and more to the fore, is actually based on quantitative numbers and is becoming more and more visible for the investors. A stronger diversity in the modality also means that we will have to take an even closer look in which areas we want to become active in and we want to get a strong position. On the right-hand side, there are a few numbers. Pharmaceutical market in total is in the low to mid single-digit growth, lab equipment and consumables also roughly. We see that there are some segments that grow much stronger, biopharmaceuticals, 10%. Yeah.
Single-use, different category, 15%. These are the areas that Sartorius addresses in particular. Despite these very positive future outlooks, we have consciously started the year 2025 with a cautious outlook. We said that until we actually present the numbers for the first quarter, which will be the case about three weeks down the road, we will start with a qualitative forecast. The forecast is phrased as it is. In three weeks, we will get you an outlook by numbers. Starting from the top, we are expecting a lifestyle market that is expected to grow, but in 2025, probably yet below the long-term average. We expect for Sartorius development of sales revenue above the market level in both divisions. We say it is a moderate and profitable sales growth driven by consumables, the above-average growth in consumables.
That means that it is above-average driven by the BPS division. When it comes to leverage and CapEx, we expect further organic reduction of the debt leverage and an investment ratio about like the previous year. We will finish capacity extensions, like I just showed, but still in 2025, that will continue to play a role there. To sum it up, Sartorius will continue to consolidate and expand its good and strong market position in these very lucrative markets and expanded markets. Dear ladies and gentlemen, to conclude, you can say that Sartorius is in a very good position in a per se very attractive market and that we actually are aiming at further sustainable, profitable growth in order to realize an increase in the value for you, my dear stockholders. We are following a consistent strategy that we have been addressing for several years now.
We are addressing strong fundamental growth drivers. We have built up a competitive and differentiated product portfolio with a high degree of recurring orders, invalidated processes. That means it is a very high stability. As I also said, we have a high-performance, resilient production and R&D infrastructure around the entire world, as shown. Last but not least, we have an extraordinary, competent, and ambitious team with a strong customer focus. Let me add, with a high acceptance on the part of our customers. Thank you very much for your attention.
Thank you very much, Dr. Kreuzburg, for your presentation and the detailed explanations on the respective points. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the general broadcast over and your general meeting on the internet. Thank you very much for your interest in our company.