Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Lothar Kappich, and as the Chair of the Executive Board of Sartorius AG, I hereby declare this meeting open. I welcome you here in the name of the Supervisory and Executive Board. Even if I cannot welcome you in person today, I am glad you made it here and follow this meeting online. You can follow it in English and in German, since Sartorius first permits a transmission of this meeting in English. I also warmly welcome you, the shareholders, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press. Your reporting about our society helped us to keep our shareholders informed over the last year, so thank you very much for your work. Ladies and gentlemen, as you found out yourself, this is a, just like last year, a general meeting under difficult circumstances.
The Supervisory and Executive Board decided to hold this meeting in a virtual way without the representatives and shareholders themselves. We used the chance given to us by German law, for example, the law on associations, the Condominium Act, etc., and due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were granted. I am in Otto Brenner Straße 20 in Göttingen. Due to reasons of preventive health protection, we reduced the number to the people present here as much as possible. From the Executive Board, Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg is here, and I warmly welcome him, as well as Dr. Matthias Reichardt the Notary Public, who's going to guide and lead this meeting. Further members of the Executive Board and Supervisory Board are here with us online and in camera. Dr. Favoccia cannot be with us today for professional reasons. I ask you for your understanding.
The members present online will later have the option to communicate with us, the Executive Board, and the Supervisory Board. Furthermore, we also have the representatives of the shareholders online. Before we start on our agenda, I would like to inform you about changes in the Supervisory Board. During the past year, there were no changes in the Executive Board, but in the Supervisory Board. I had informed you about two changes in the past year. Since then, there was another change for the Employees Council. Mr. Uwe Bretthauer, who put his office down on February 28th, now joined or started a new phase in his life. He was a member of the Supervisory Board, contributed many ideas and ways of thinking. We thank him for his dedication and wish him all the best for his new part of life, as well as happiness.
The Local Court of Göttingen decided officially, which came in effect on March 1, 2021, a new member of the Employees Council. This comes officially into effect when the next general meeting is declared closed. Mr. Ritzau became a member of our company in 1989 and had been part of the Sartorius Group since 2020. He was responsible for logistics, disposition, and service. As a member of the Employees Council, he represents the interests of our employees and has been doing so since 2002. Further details about his position you can find on the pages 230 and the following of the business report. I also would like to inform about you an internet service, which I will call Shareholders Portal. You can find it on www.sartorius.de/hauptversammlung. You will find a live webcast. The transmission starts right after the speech of the Chair.
You can also find a recording of this meeting later on. Let us come to the formalities of today's meeting. We officially announced the appointment of this general meeting in the Federal Gazette. A public documentation of this announcement can be found online. Furthermore, I would like to inform you that since this announcement was published, further information was published on the website on www.sartorius.de/hauptversammlung. I hereby declare this meeting to be opened due in time and form. There are no amendments or any counter amendments. Ladies and gentlemen, now I would like to inform you about some special points on this agenda that come along with today's meeting. For the vote, for the postal vote, you can also find a password-protected portal. It can also be found on the link already mentioned. It will be available in English and in German.
The personal data had been referred to the following and sent to the shareholders. Instead of a physical presence, shareholders have the option there to use this portal to follow this meeting in camera. Even voting will be adapted to the conditions of this meeting. Participating shareholders and voters can still vote online on the mentioned link or authorize another person to vote in their name. This option to hand over the postal vote or do it online, as well as inform about any changes or amendments, can still be done until the actual voting today takes place. I will inform you in time when this voting will take place. After that, you cannot vote anymore. You also had the chance to ask questions in advance to this meeting via postal vote or authorize and instruct authorized personnel to do so.
Until March 25th this year, you could also send over your postal vote in order to be considered in the final result of today's meeting. Common stock shareholders can still, the list of the stockholders can be downloaded online. Other shareholders will not be able to vote. Furthermore, they also can ask questions later on during this meeting. In order to grant this right, shareholders or their representatives have the chance to hand over questions or votes in advance to this meeting. Answering the questions will take place later on today. The corporation has decided during this meeting and above legal regulations to also grant you the right to ask further questions as long as this meeting takes place. This should enable you to be up to date about the information within today's meeting or ask questions on shares.
I would like to inform you that this voluntary right of additional asking additional questions does not represent a right to ask these questions. We decide upon the reasonable situation whether we answer this question or not. In advance of this meeting, you had the chance to send over your questions. Please note that questions about administrations are left to administration. In order to simplify answering the questions, we ask you to withdraw from additional questions and only refer to the questions mentioned in this meeting. Other questions cannot be answered or will not be answered, or if they are answered, it will happen in English or German. Please use your portal and use the field where it says "Hand in question" to ask your question. It takes a certain time to be able to respond to all your questions.
I will inform you about the exact time when this chance is over. According to the number of questions asked, we spontaneously decide to end this period of time where you can ask additional questions that had not been handed over in advance. Furthermore, use the Shareholders Portal to hand in withdrawals to resolutions. If you used that right, please use the respective field in this portal. Furthermore, I would like to introduce the agenda to you, but this is about the formalities. Ladies and gentlemen, now I have the list of present shareholders and participants. I will read it to you. The registered equity is divided into different shares and are represented respectively. These are 93. I'm very sorry. The interpreter does not have the figures and cannot see any representation, which is why it's hard to follow the figures.
Of the EUR 37 million preferred shares, the majority is present online. We also received a certain amount of postal votes of the preferred and common stock shareholders, and I can happily report that the majority of the shareholders are present online. You can also find a list online. You will find it in a moment on the Shareholders Portal. In order to find out how many participants we have, you will also find an additional list after this meeting or during the meeting. We will now come to the agenda. We start with the report by the Executive and the Supervisory Board. Top one is the presentation of the financial statement and group statement, as well as the executive summary, group executive summary by the Executive Board for the business year of 2020.
You can also find this document online on the shareholder, and I also declare this has been available online on www.sartorius.de/hauptversammlung. I also find that the respective group and general executive summary had been available on the internet and were approved. The yearly financial statements, which had ended on December 31, 2020, were all approved. Thus, if you used your chance to receive explanations on these reports, you received further detail, which is why I won't read the details out to you. Before I hand over to the Chairman of the Executive Board, I would like to inform you about the following. You will find official reports including the year 2018, 2019, and 2020. In the business year of 2020, we had altogether seven meetings of the Supervisory Board, during which they discussed in detail the economic situation of the corporation.
We paid attention to and considered all business matters, risk management, internal controlling management, accounting, as well as other aspects in time. Basic topics or important topics had been, among others, protective measures for employers and employees during the COVID pandemic, as well as their influences or the influence of COVID-19 on the supply chain, security, and safety of workforce. Furthermore, the French life science company NoaSep and Raine are part of gene therapies. Further details on this report can be found online, and I refer you to them. Now, I would like to ask the Chairman of the Board, Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg, to introduce more details on you. He will also give you a glimpse on the perspective for 2021. From now on, you will also have the chance to ask questions via the online portal for the shareholders. Thank you, Mr. Kappich.
Ladies and gentlemen, dear shareholders, welcome to the new virtual AGM of this year. I'm very pleased to present you the report of the board and to explain to you the different positions for the business year of 2020 and also to give you perspectives. The questions that have been handed in before and also the possibilities to take part in the AGM during this meeting show that this format will lead to a more international participation of more shareholders and is a contribution to the future development. Moreover, before I can report to you about the development of the last year of business by 25 charts, I would like to give you a piece of information so that the presentation will also contain statements on the future development of Sartorius Groups, which is based on some assumptions and estimates, and we don't take over any guarantee for such estimates.
This is important to know. I think the year 2020 was an intense and very successful year for Sartorius. I would like to seize this opportunity to thank all our staff and members for their excellent job they did, the high commitment, the successful work they made, they performed in such challenging times for all our companies worldwide. I think that we can take out several aspects and explain them before getting into more detail. I think that Sartorius makes a very big contribution for the fight against the pandemics, and I think that we will manage this in the months to come. Second thing is that we have a very profitable growth in all regions and throughout the whole product portfolio.
A third point is that in spite of these framework conditions, we could reinforce our activities by three acquisitions in all these two divisions, and we also have a very good perspective for the year 2021 and for the midterm goals. I said that Sartorius is part of the solution by contributing to solving the pandemic problems. Many of you know that many research institutions and other institutions work on vaccines against the coronavirus. They ramp up the production and carry out several and many activities, and Sartorius daily carries out and offers very relevant products to all these customers in order to allow them to carry out their work in the fight against the pandemic. We can say that there are two decades where we further developed our strategic position in this field, and this is also reflected by the results of the group.
The pandemic changed the life of all of us during the last 12 months, and I think that also the work process operations changed, and we had to adapt them. I would like to give you some information about this. The first point, which was important for us and an absolute requirement, is to provide for a safe working environment. It means the safety of our staff. The protective concepts have been established in February last year, and we also carried out tests in different locations. The tests that are now under discussion have been done in our company for more than one year. We also had quite low infection numbers. It was not possible to keep the COVID-19 disease out of the company, but we had very good numbers. There are no lumbers.
Unfortunately, none of our staff had a heavy progression of the disease, and they were only lightly infected. Since we did not have such incidents, we could say that there was no infection that was transferred at the workplace. This was like a big shift from a direct personal cooperation to a more digital exchange. I do not want to read back all these different facts with regard to travel and meetings, but we can say that this is also limited. That means if we want, for instance, to employ new staff and to talk with them, this is not easy to talk with them without the presence of the people. It is not all the different sections of the production that home office is possible.
That means only where it is possible, home office can be done, but half of the staff of the teams works on-site in production, in logistics, and other fields of research and development. It is not possible to work at home. That is why the safety precautions on-site are very important. The pandemic is also most like a catalyzer with regard to the cooperation with our customers and also with regard to the work towards the customers. We have to remind you that Sartorius has highly complex products in their portfolio. That means there are very complicated interactions between customers, also customer advisory services. For instance, support for the ramp-up of new production facilities is indispensable, but what we can see here is that it moves towards a smooth intermeshing of presence and virtual formats, and also investments are made on this digital basis.
We can also see hybrid formats that play a role more and more. For instance, we currently support customers in the commissioning of their vaccine production. This is done by virtual means or by digital way from our company. Now I would like to explain the numbers. I would like to show you the results of the last year and also to make a comparison with the numbers of the last 10 years or for the year 2011 and for 2020. You can see that we have EUR 2.4 billion of turnover revenue. This is our original midterm planning was EUR 2 billion and 23% EBITDA. We have the target.
We increased the target for the EBITDA, but when looking back at the total period, we can say that the sales revenue could be increased by more than 17%, and 50% of the EBITDA, there was an increase in this field. That means we have grown by 15%, and also the margin can be improved by 10 percentage points. It was a good decade for Sartorius. Now let's have the business year 2020 in more detail. This is a very dynamic growth. We mentioned this number of 32%. This number is shown here in the second pair of bars in the chart. We have increased it to EUR 2.34 billion. We also have a contribution that is made by the corona pandemic. This corresponds to 18 percentage points.
There is also a repercussion from the acquisition, 7 percentage points, but this means that there is still 15% of organic growth or core organic growth that has been reached in addition because the pandemic is also part of such core growth because these are products that already existed but have been increased in their growth. With regard to the order intake on the left-hand side, you can see that we have the EUR 2.8 billion, and then we could increase our order intake by EUR 500,000. We started the new year with a good order backlog. The pandemic has an influence of approximately 14 percentage points. With regard to the growth in sales, the EBITDA could be increased more than proportionally to 29% was the margin. That means the yield per share was increased by plus 43% and 42% for the preference shares.
Moreover, we can say that we had a two-digit growth in all the regions, in all the geographic regions of our group. You can see in the United States, we have almost 33%, Europe and Middle Asia 28%, Asia-Pacific 29.6%, and this shows you a very good regional mixture of the different regions with regard to sales, and this did not change in this composition. With regard to the different divisions, we would like to say that there is a high demand for all the regions and all the product categories. We have had a very good dynamic start, but there was still an increase of the demand during the year. I would like to come back to this at the end of my presentation when talking about the perspectives for the next year because there are different scales that will be applied to this.
We start in the middle with 34% of sales revenue increased, and also the acquisition effects make up for 5%, and pandemic effects are attributable to 12 percentage points. I would like to say that in the basic business, we have an organic growth of approximately 17.5%. This is a very good growth apart from these special topics. Moreover, the order intake, we have here EUR 2.2 billion. That means that the order book could be improved by more than EUR 56 billion, and this is a very overproportional growth in this field. This can be seen that we have a good increase in the margin. This is like an increase of 3.2 percentage points. In this third page or in this third diagram, we can see the scaling effects that are inherent to this, and you already know them from the last years.
There is an additional effect that occurred that less than we did it in other cases. We employed people, although we employed new staff, but we reduced the number. Also, travel costs were reduced. There was also an additional logistics expenditure, but it was below the scale. Now let's have a look at the ABS division. We can say that this year started with big challenges. We had first the lockdown in China. In the second quarter, we had the lockdown in the United States, so many laboratories were closed there. We had a decrease in some segments. For instance, the weighing equipment in China, they had problems with their numbers. In the middle, you can see an increase of the sales revenue by 18% to EUR 553.
The composition is shown here that the pandemic effects are slightly negative, so there was an effect of catch-up in the second six months of this year, but we could not see this here. Then 15% are to be attributed to acquisitions, but it means that in spite of the organic growth decrease, we could bring about a 4% plus growth for the overall growth rate in the year. I can say that this year was also a good year for this division. There was also an increase in order take-in plus 26% percentage, which was the increase. The operative EBITDA is a little lower than expected or is a little underproportional.
That means the margin was a little lower, and this is due to the fact that the production was not fully utilized in the first six months of the year, which could not be caught up in the second part of the year. I said sometimes before that we have made acquisitions, and I also explained their contribution to our financial results. Now I would like to explain more details about this. The most important acquisition or the most important thing is the acquisition that we could present you to in the last meeting, AGM meeting, and we already had completed this because at the end of April in 2020, it was already completed. This concerns a selection of life science businesses from Danaher, and this made a contribution to the laboratory division.
The analytics business comprises devices for the analysis of protein molecules, which is also part of our strategic core business. In the field of Bioprocess Solutions, we could increase our downstream processing capabilities due to quite a number of products, which is related to Chromatography Solutions. Resins are also in there. This is a very large portfolio. Mainly, it refers to solutions for chromatography. That is an increase of our capabilities for the downstream process. We said that we see ourselves as a leading company in the upstream processing, and we also have as a strategy the downstream processing improvement because this is also an important building block for this. We made investments here in this field in November. You can see it. We acquired Bioseparations. This is a Slovenian company.
They have a unique technology for the clarification and purification of large molecules, which is also connected with the water Bioseparations. Both companies aim at the purification of larger molecules because they produce such larger molecules in their productions. In spite of this intense acquisition operations, we also have very robust KPIs. You can see the equity share rate is approximately 30%, but the second number is the dynamic net debt, and this has increased to 2.6, but we are still in a good position, having further potential for financing both for organic and non-organic growth. Dear ladies and gentlemen, I would like to give you the proposal for the payout of dividends, which will also be part of the agenda point two. We also got a lot of questions about this.
This is, as we have expected, and I would like to say something about it later on. Now I would like to give you some explanations about this. We suggest to have EUR 0.70 for the ordinary shares and for the preferential shares. That means this is an increase of 100%. That means this is doubling the amount with regard to the numbers from the last year, but we can also see this. As we represented it on this picture here, the bars in the diagram show that in the last year, the planned payout was only half the amount as planned.
Now, with regard to the 16.1% of the payout rate, we are approximately a third below the rate that we had last year, but from our point of view, I think that this is reasonable because we are very much focused on growth and innovation. Also, in international comparison with other companies, this corresponds to a good level and is reasonable and also responsible. With regard to 2020, the Sartorius shares also developed overproportionally. That means you can see here the bars marked in yellow. That means that we have 97.1 and 80% for the preferential shares. You can see the MDX is + 8.8. We have to say that we also look forward that as soon as the pandemic has been overcome, we have to reckon with sector rotations as far as the vaccines have got the regulatory approval.
Perhaps this is the way that Sartorius will develop, which is very pleasant, is that we could still increase the number of people. That means now we could increase our staff to more than 10,600. Now we have a little more than 11,000 staff. On the left-hand side, you can see that we have created 900 additional jobs per year. This shows that the integration of new staff is also a daily work, a task that we have to carry out all the days. We also have to regard the gross number because there are also people leaving our company. We employed 2,500 new staff last year to our company, and approximately 482 from M&E and new recruitments, approximately 2,000. I think this leads to a new momentum with regard to a good mixture of experience and company long-term people.
We can say that more than 70% of the staff have more than 50 years' experience of the company. 17% have more than 15 years, 31% have between 5 and 15 years, and 42% are less than 5 years in the company. A result of this dynamic growth of staff and this good mixture of staff is the fact that we become more international, we become younger, and also we have more women in our staff. The first chart shows you that approximately a third of the staff is female staff. They are here. I think this is a normal thing here in Germany, also with regard to the headquarter situation. Moreover, 71% of our managers are non-German managers, so we have a good international mixture that you can see.
This shows which is the different proportion for the United States and China and all the others, so that we have all in all 96 nations that are represented here. Many of the people are less than 40 of age, and that means what is individually not possible could be managed well in the company here. Some years ago, we had approximately quite a large number above 40. Now it has developed in the other way. I think that I would like to point out that you can see it in the horizontal bar in the chart that you can see that we also employ people that are above 50, 50+ people. Moreover, the topic of proportion of women, we can say that we have 39% of women of the overall staff and the portion of 80, 38 on the level below the board.
Now I would like to go from the quantitative to the qualitative perspectives. When assessing the quality of a company, it is a matter, of course, that the aspects of the company purpose and sustainability aspects play an important role, not only in the public discussion, but also amongst the investors worldwide. In our company, the situation is that when we look at the mission of our company, which is represented on the right-hand side, we can say that we focus to assist people, engineers, to develop new therapeutics and to make it quicker, this process, and to give them all the assistance they need. We want to contribute that better health will be affordable for more people. This also has a connection with the third sustainability goal defined by UN. This is health and well-being for as much people as possible of this world.
That means that when we deal with sustainability, we deal with the goal of our company. Only the second point is to do repair, but we also deal with those things regarding our footprint, to our emissions, and how we can reduce our footprint when looking from the left to the right-hand side. First, we have to point the topic of product responsibility. That means that we have to define what we can reach by our products. Here, it is about to increase safety and also the efficiency in medicine production. Moreover, it is important also to reduce new plastic materials in the production of our one-way products. We increase the recycling rates, and we think that in the future, we will still have room for improvement. We also cooperate with partners and other companies.
In the middle of this chart, we can see the climate protection, which is also one of the most important topics with regard to sustainability. If we are a heavily growing company, we can't manage to do it in such a way as other companies do. That means to reduce absolute emissions. What you see here, this is our emission of the greenhouse gases, and this is to be translated into a 7% reduction with regard to the sales revenue. This is exactly the rate that you have to reach if you regard an increase of the overall economy of 3% to have to meet this goal of 4% that is defined by international organizations. We still have some initiatives that we have prepared. The supply chain is also important that relates to social aspects. We intensely scan and analyze our suppliers.
We do it in cooperation with expert companies. You can see on the left-hand side that we only carry out a low part, or we only analyze a very small part of the suppliers, but these are the suppliers that provide for a high portion of product quantities. This is a good way for us that we go. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are interested.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you're interested in further details about our approaches in matters of sustainability, you will find a documentation of our progress in the GRI report. This is a first-time publication of an independent sustainability report, which contains all the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative. You will find it on our website on the above-mentioned link. Let us come to the outlook for 2021.
I would like to start in the middle of this table, Bioprocess Solutions, with a growth of 40%. We considered the effects of the pandemic, or here we called it the COVID demand, and saw a growth of around 18%. This is a bit higher than we had maximum expected. Altogether, we expected our expectations are 12% lower. We think thanks to acquisitions, around 6% are to be seen. Thanks to the acquisitions I had just mentioned and had been completed by 2020. We also have an expected growth of 20% for Lab Products & Services. Even due to pandemic impacts, we expect positive developments, for example, proportion of investments and membranes that play a role in these processes. You can see we expect a growth of 5%.
Altogether, this sums up to 35%, from which 15% are due to the pandemic effect and the others from acquisition, which is 5.5%. On the right side, the EBITDA margin is expected to be about or around 32%. That means 1% for each line on top or more. For example, we have an expected 24% for Lab Products & Services. At the beginning, we had said that we would like to invest a higher ratio. We said about 14%, and in 2020, we expected it to be 10.3%. We corrected this proportion of investments a little. I will give you more detail about this in a minute. The dynamic development of debt should be at 2.0 at the end of the year. We have transparent points that we refer to. Of course, we will make further acquisitions during this business year.
I had also mentioned two further points. We had quite low sales revenues compared to the further quarters of last year. There were lower figures compared to the growth we will see in 2021 for each quarter. Surely, especially for quarter one, we will see higher figures in both columns than you will see for the year altogether. Don't misunderstand us, so please don't expect the same figures because of what I had explained to you. We are still in a time of high risk. Of course, the numbers look strong, but this also depends on stable supply chains that they stay stable and are not affected in different countries anymore. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to inform you about the most important topics and initiatives of the future development. During our strategic focus of life science and biopharmacies, nothing has changed.
We strongly focus on life science and biopharmacy. As I had just mentioned, you can see our progresses, which relate to tools that help to further development molecules in the industry thereof. It also relates to cell line and process development. The Bioprocess Solutions is where it starts. The majority of this section had already been mentioned to you beforehand. The markets we address show strong trends, for example, sensible and trackable markets. One trend is the development of the global population as well as the aging of world population, for example, in China, but also in Europe. This means that medication will be required more and more because population grows older. Furthermore, we have a growing biosimilars market, which contributes to the fact that more medication is available for the population. We have contributed a relevant growth of 30% per year on average.
In the geographical perspective, you can see that the U.S. and China play an important role. I know it's nothing new, but I would highlight that these are the markets where most of the new therapies are developed and that China simply presents the most, is the strongest market growing when it comes to growth. Furthermore, important and also an important impact on our sector is the dynamic of innovation in the sector, which is very high. I must say, currently, the pandemic basically made people aware of how much performance these countries can present and how strongly they had been able to develop over the last few years or what they are able to do to achieve. I would like to highlight three dimensions. For example, established biopharmaceuticals like proteins or peptides, for example, plasma or vaccines. The next generation, for example, advanced therapies.
We are talking about vectors, different vaccines. Everyone knows already who got a little into this topic that mRNA and pDNA play a more and more important role. Had been registered and approved on the market. CRISPR-Cas is a new development, which is used to affect DNA, and it's a multidimensional gene pool. When you come to product yields and scalability, you also see and you can also see growth, for example, production, industrial production of one product, which is later used in different patients, or there are individual medications and drugs which also enable a different use of them and application and administration. That makes us think about cost efficiency and reasonable relevant product profits or a robust method of production to further develop these products. The joint fact is acceleration and growth inefficiency.
You can see that an increasing digitalization in the value-added chain is more and more an important topic for all three divisions columns. We have modern instruments for real-time analysis in drug discovery that can generate data within a very short time. How do I generate data without a real-time analysis? This will not be possible to generate these data without a live generation. You can imagine incubators for real-time imaging and cell analysis. Bioprocess data is about leading software for process data. How do I improve process control and robustness, deeper process understanding of complex data sets? This is also a question of artificial intelligence. We found out that this artificial intelligence is used more and more to generate data to process problems, solutions.
We are a member of an association, the Extension of Joint Sartorius Lab, CSIL, which is also a scientific institution in Germany that we have become a member of, and we closely cooperate with them. I had also mentioned that we would like to expand our production capacities. You can see a growth in our absolute figures compared to the average we had experienced during the last few years. It shows our investments and shows the perspective of our investment program. On the right side, you can also see that we are represented in all geographic regions and work on projects. Perhaps you would like to have more information per region. I would like to start in Europe. We will extend our capacities when it comes to manufacturing, new building for 10 casting machines. We already started the constructions of these buildings.
In Cuxhaven, we started a massive extension of our capacities, but also in Finland and Kajaani. We would like to finish it this year. This comes to the extension of our existing buildings by more than 1,000 sq m. The keyword is customer interaction center. I will go into more detail later on. That means that we have to travel far often and can be more efficient. That's why we plan this site in Cuxhaven. Significant expansion of key sites in Asia, for example, in China, Beijing, new production floor space, 1.9 sq m of clean room for back production, new customer interaction centers. This means that the space for these centers will be finished by the first quarter of 2021. Furthermore, there is growth in South Korea. There will be a new site.
This is a good location because we specifically produce products there according to the conditions that are given on site. We will have labs, application centers, but it will take about two years until we are able to inaugurate the buildings. Finally, we're talking about North America. In North America, we have a vast extension in Yauco, in Puerto Rico. It is about setting up cell culture media manufacturing, which is scheduled to start in 2022. This comes along with an acquisition we made in 2019 because we wanted to generate more capacities as well as also provide additional clean room spaces there. Let us have a look back. The customer interaction center at the East Coast near Boston in Massachusetts. Ladies and gentlemen, now in the end, I would like to give you more detail about the shortly published goals for 2021.
I would like to start on the right. We experienced a growth to EUR 5 billion and an EBITDA margin of 32%. This is contributed or is contents of EUR 3.8 billion. This is very important to the group. It's more than before. And the margin of 31%. I know there is no change, but still we are ambitious with a 25% growth in the margin. Our strategy is still based on the known columns. We still want to continue growing organic and non-organically. We still make complementary acquisitions, as you know, from us. We want to be above average. We want to grow above average in the U.S. and China and create more and more workplaces. Ladies and gentlemen, so far, thank you for your interest and your attention.