Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am Lothar Kappich, and as the Chairman of the Supervisory Board, I am opening this year's Annual Shareholders Meeting of our company. On behalf of the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to you all. I am pleased that, wherever you are right now, you are following this event via the internet and sound and vision. I would like to extend a particularly warm welcome to our shareholders and our shareholders' representatives, and the ladies and gentlemen of the press. Your coverage of our company has helped keep our shareholders informed of the progress of our business during the current year, and I would like to thank you for your contribution.
Based on the positive experiences that we've had with the virtual Annual General Meeting in previous years, we have again opted for this format. It suits our larger shareholder base, which is clearly international in character, very well. This is why the AGM does not only begin at 12 here, and there is a German stream and an English stream. Against this background, we are pleased that the legislator continues to allow virtual shareholder meetings to be held without the physical presence of shareholders or their proxies at the meeting venue. The decision of the Executive Board and Supervisory Board on the format of this year's AGM was made on the basis of the new Section 118a of the German Stock Corporation Act, in conjunction with Section 26n of the Introductory Act to the German Stock Corporation Act.
I am at the premises of Sartorius at Otto-Brenner-Strasse 29 in 37075 Goettingen, Germany, as the venue for the AGM, 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 Executive Board is also present, and I would like to welcome Dr. Joachim Kreuzburg as Chairman, Dr. René Fáber, and Gerry Mackay. I'd also like to welcome Dr. Matthias Reichart, Notary Public, whose office is in Goettingen, and he's taking the minutes of today's meeting. In addition, the company's proxies are present at the venue of the AGM. Ladies and gentlemen, before we move on to our agenda, I would like to inform you that there have been no changes in the composition of either the Supervisory Board nor the Executive Board since the date of our last AGM.
The composition of the Supervisory Board and its committees in 2022 can be found in detail on the pages 248, 250 of the Annual Report. For eligible shareholders and their proxies, the entire Annual General Meeting will be broadcast today on the password-protected internet service, which I will refer to hereafter as the AGM portal. For all other participants, part of this event will be broadcast live in the freely accessible area of the company's website at www.sartorius.com/agm. As in previous years, this broadcast will end after the speech by the Chairman of the Executive Board. A recording of this part of the AGM can also be viewed afterwards at the aforementioned internet address. Now to the formalities of this Annual General Meeting. This meeting was convened in due form and time by publication in the Federal Gazette on February 17th, 2023.
A printout of the Federal Gazette is in the hands of the officiating notary and will be attached to the minutes. The same applies to a file copy of the Europe-wide distribution of the convening notice. In addition, I would like to point out that since the date of the publication of the invitation in the Federal Gazette, all necessary further information on the AGM has been available on the company's website at www.sartorius.com/hauptversammlung. I thus confirm that today's Annual General Meeting has been convened in due form and time in accordance with the formal requirements of the law and the articles of association. The company has received neither motions for additions to the agenda, nor countermotions or election proposals to be made available. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to explain to you some special features relating to the holding of today's AGM as a virtual AGM.
Compared with the last virtual AGMs, this year's virtual AGM is being held on a new legal basis. This led to a number of changes in the process and in the structure of shareholder rights. The company has set up the aforementioned AGM portal for the electronic exercise of shareholder rights. It can be accessed via the internet at www.sartorius.com/hauptversammlung, and it's available in German and English. The personal access data was sent to the eligible shareholders or their proxies after they fulfilled the requirements for participation in the AGM. Shareholders who are entitled to attend and their proxies have the opportunity to connect to the Annual General Meeting electronically via the AGM portal and to follow the entire Annual General Meeting live in picture and sound, and they can also exercise their shareholder rights there.
Via the AGM portal, they can, among other things, exercise their voting rights and make use of their right to speak and to obtain information in accordance with the procedure provided for this purpose. Ordinary shareholders entitled to participate and their proxies may, even now during the AGM exercise their voting rights via the AGM portal by means of electronic postal voting or grant power of attorney and issue voting instructions to the proxies of the company. The possibility to vote by electronic absentee vote or to grant power of attorney and issue instructions to the proxies of the company, as well as to make corresponding changes or revocation, will still exist via the AGM portal until the end of the respective voting in today's AGM. I will inform you in good time about this point and time.
Voting during today's Annual General Meeting is no longer possible in any other way than via the AGM portal. In the run-up of the Annual General Meeting, ordinary shareholders also had the opportunity to exercise their voting rights by electronic absentee vote using the AGM portal, or to authorize and instruct the proxies appointed by the company to exercise their voting rights. In addition, until the 28th of March 2023 at 6:00 P.M., power of attorney and instructions to the proxies could also be submitted by letter or email to the company's address stated in the invitation to the Annual General Meeting. A corresponding form was sent to ordinary shareholders entitled to participate with the access data to the AGM portal, and was also available for download on the company's website from the time the AGM was convened.
Preference shareholders are not entitled to vote at today's Annual General Meeting. In accordance with the league provisions, shareholders who had duly registered for the AGM or their proxies, had the right to submit comments on items on the agenda in writing via the AGM portal prior to the AGM. This option was open until the 23rd of March 2023. Ordinary and preference shareholders or their proxies who are electronically connected to the Annual General Meeting have the right to speak at the meeting via video communication. Since the beginning of the Annual General Meeting, shareholders or their proxies have been able to register to speak and then subsequently exercise their right to speak via video communication in the AGM portal via the virtual speakers table. I will go into more detail on the procedure for requesting and giving the floor later.
Motions and election proposals pursuant to Section 118a, paragraph 1, sentence 2, number 3 of the German Stock Corporation Act, as well as requests for information pursuant to Section 131 of the German Stock Corporation Act, statements and the right to speak. Statements may be part of the speech. Pursuant to Section 131 of the German Stock Corporation Act, shareholders or their proxies may request information from the Executive Board at today's Annual General Meeting on matters concerning the company, provided that the information is necessary for the proper assessment of an item on the agenda and there is no right to refuse to provide information.
Shareholders or their proxies have the right to ask follow-up questions on all answers given by the Executive Board at the virtual Annual General Meeting pursuant to paragraph 131 (1d) of the German Stock Corporation Act. As Chairman of the Annual General Meeting, I hereby determine, pursuant to Section 131 (1f) of the German Stock Corporation Act, that the right to information pursuant to Section 131 of the German Stock Corporation Act may be exercised at today's Annual General Meeting exclusively by the way of video communication via the AGM portal. Within the scope of the right to speak just mentioned, the company has also decided to set up an additional question option in the run-up to the AGM beyond the legal requirements on a voluntary basis by means of electronic communication.
Within the scope of this additional question option, shareholders entitled to participate or their proxies could submit the questions regarding the agenda in text form via the AGM portal until the 24th of March 2023. I would like to point out that this voluntary additional opportunity to ask question does not constitute a right to ask questions or to receive information. The Executive Board shall decide at its own dutiful discretion whether and how to answer such questions submitted prior to the AGM meeting. The Executive Board has decided to answer the question submitted in advance during today's general debate. Shareholders or their proxies who are electronically connected to the AGM can also submit a request pursuant to Section 131 (4) of the German Stock Corporation Act via the corresponding field in the AGM portal by means of electronic communication until the closing of the general debate.
Furthermore, from the opening of today's AGM until the end thereof, objections to one or more resolutions of the AGM may be declared via the corresponding fields in the AGM portal, and in the event of a refusal to provide information or request pursuant to Section 131, paragraph 5 of the German Stock Corporation Act for the question and the reason for the refusal to provide information to be recorded in the minutes may be submitted. The declaration or the request shall be transmitted to the notary public in each case. The list of participants will include the shareholders electronically connected or represented at the meeting, including those shareholders who have granted the company's proxies power of attorney and instructions to exercise their voting rights, as well as the shareholders' representatives electronically connected to the meeting.
At the latest, before the first vote, I will announce the number of shares held by shareholders connected or represented, some number of shares represented by the company's proxy, and the number of electronic postal votes. The list of participants and any supplements will be made available on the AGM portal. As much as that was the formalities. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to go into more detail about the procedure for requesting and speaking at today's AGM. If you would like to speak after the Executive Board's remarks on the agenda, I would ask you to register your speech in the AGM portal via the virtual request-to-speak table, so that you can then exercise your right to speak via video communication. Please follow the instructions in the AGM portal.
We will contact the persons who have registered for contribution via this virtual table, in order to check the technical functionality of the video communication. A camera and microphone that can be accessed from the browser must be available for speaking contributions. Shareholders or their proxies who have registered for contribution via the virtual registration table will then, after a successful verification of the functionality of the video communication, be activated for their contribution via the AGM portal. If the functionality of the video communication cannot be ensured, we reserve the right to reject the contribution. Those shareholders or proxies who have been cleared to speak will be called to speak in due course, and will then be connected to the meeting via video communication. Please note that your contribution will be transmitted live to the assembly via video and audio.
Of course, you can also register to speak in the course of the debate in the manner just described. I would be grateful if you could register as soon as possible, so that I can estimate how many speakers we can expect in order to organize the schedule. Even if you have declared your intention to make a motion or an election proposal when registering your contribution in the AGM portal, you must please present it again orally as part of your contribution. I would like to point out already now that we want to conduct the debate in the form of a general debate. That means we will immediately cover all items on the agenda. I would therefore ask you to address all the items on the agenda on which you wish to speak.
The votes on agenda items two to 10 will be taken collectively after the general debate. You have time until the end of the voting to cast postal votes via the AGM portal, or to issue a change of revoked proxies and instructions to the proxies of the company. I will announce the end of the voting procedure again beforehand. After the result of the voting has been determined, I will establish the result and announce it to you. For the sake of good order, please allow me, as Chairman of the Meeting, to make the following remark. The AGM, in particular the general debate, is based on free speech. We therefore refrain from preparing stenographic minutes. Only the questions asked are recorded stenographically to assist the management in answering them.
Only record the freely accessible part of the AGM up to and including the speech of the Executive Board. Apart from that, however, there is no video or audio recording. In particular, no film or audio recordings will be made of the general debate or of the answers given by the administration to the questions asked. I ask for understanding that you are also not permitted to make video or audio recordings of this AGM. Ladies and gentlemen, I now have the list of participants. The pre-- and where is the participants' scheme? Until 12:00, 343,543 were present, and that was 0.46% of the basic capital of the Annual General Meeting.
Of the EUR 74,880,000 for basic guarantee of that is divided in as many ordinary shares. There were present 32, 209, 987. That was 43.02% of the registered capital. The electronic votes cast fell for 372, 276 ordinary shares. In total, we had 43.51% of the registered basic capital were presented through electronic postal vote or through a authority or through and with proxies.
For now the company has ordinary shares for the value of 3,213,991, and preference shares for 3,250,174, and there is no voting rights attached to that. The notice to the public 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. If necessary, supplementary lists will be drawn up to determine the respective attendance. After the announcement of the change in attendance, I will also hand over the announcement text to the notary Dr. Reichart. A copy of the supplementary lists will be made available for inspection in the AGM portal. We will now proceed with the discussion of the agenda.
Starting with the report of the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board, in particular explaining the proposals mentioned under agenda item one. Agenda item one concerns the presentation of the adopted annual financial statements and the approved consolidated financial statements, as well as the combined management and group management report of the company and the report of the Supervisory Board, in each case for the financial year 2022. In this regard, I note that these documents have been accessible on the internet at the following address since the convening of this Annual General Meeting, www.sartorius.com/hauptversammlung, and will also be accessible there during today's Annual General Meeting. I also note that the annual and consolidated financial statements for the year ended December 31st, 2022, as well as the combined management report and group management report prepared by the Executive Board, were audited by KPMG AG Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft Hannover.
The auditors selected at the last AGM and have received an unqualified audit certificate. Following its own reviews, the Supervisory Board approves the financial statements of Sartorius AG and the Group for the year that ended on December 31st, 2022, as well as the combined management report and the group management report prepared by the Executive Board and the Supervisory Board in the meeting of February 10th, 2023. In doing so, it follows the recommendation of the audit committee, which had dealt in detail with these financial statement documents and the audit findings of the auditors on February 9th, 2023. Thus the annual financial statements of Sartorius AG have been adopted in accordance with Section 172 of the German Stock Corporation Act. In accordance with the legal provisions, no resolution is planned for agenda item one.
Ladies and gentlemen, before I now give the floor to the Executive Board, I would like to briefly report on the 2022 business year from the perspective of the Supervisory Board. A detailed written report of the Supervisory Board is included in the Annual Report on pages 12 to 16. Therefore, please allow me to focus on selected aspects in my explanations. In 2022, in this business year, a total of six meetings of the Supervisory Board took place. At these meetings, the Supervisory Board dealt in detail with the economic situation and the strategic orientation of the group.
In particular, the Supervisory Board was informed promptly and comprehensively by the Executive Board about all significant business transactions, as well as about all central issues of business, development strategy, risk situation, risk management, internal control systems, and the net assets, financial position and results of operations of the company and the group. Furthermore, the main topics of the consultations were the following: various financing topics, in particular the conclusions of a new syndicated loan agreement, various corporate strategy topics as well as strategic initiatives and projects. The acquisition of the British company Albumedix. The self-evaluation of the Supervisory Board and adjustment of the competence profile and rules of procedure. Various topics related to Executive Board remuneration and the company's progress in the areas of sustainability strategy and sustainability programs.
Further individual topics of the Supervisory Board's deliberations in the past financial year are mentioned in the written report of the Supervisory Board. I would like to point your attention to this report. Ladies and gentlemen, I would now like to ask the Chairman of our Executive Board, Dr. Kreuzburg, to explain the 2022 annual financial statements. Dr. Kreuzburg will also discuss the development of the group as a whole and outline the prospects for the future. Dr. Kreuzburg, I would now like to ask you to give your presentation.
Yes. Thank you, Mr. Kappich. Dear shareholders and dear guests, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to welcome you as well on behalf of the Executive Board. I'm very glad that internationally, you're participating so lively in our General Meeting. I hope that this newly developed virtual format is actually in your own interest. I'd like to tell you about the business model of Sartorius in the first part of my speech. In the second part, I'd like to talk about the results of the past fiscal year 2022, also direct our gaze into the future and point out future perspectives. Like I said, please let me start with a more general part. I'd like to speak about the perspective of Sartorius. Our business purpose, our mission as it were, is completely directed to the topic of health.
Health, and I think everybody, even before the pandemic, will be in agreement with that, is one of the most important global topics. What makes me say that? Well, for example, the part of the aging population, the older part of the world population over the next two and a half decades will double to 2.5 billion people. There's a high correlation between age and the need for medication and medical services. Also, the minority of children worldwide has access to vaccines. As you can see, it is still a very relevant global topic. Within this topicality biopharmaceutics and the biopharmaceutical industry are a central agent and are a central building block of fighting ailments, diseases and illnesses and preventing them. Also there's a whole lot of challenges in this area as well.
If we want to condense it very much, it's always very strongly about time and cost. It is very time intensive and cost intensive to both develop and manufacture medication. As you can see here, developing a new drug and getting it out on the market usually costs EUR 2.5 billion. The time from the first steps in the laboratory until the rollout on the market so that the patients actually receive it takes about 10 years. Still, you have to state, or maybe that's the reason why you have to state that there are many unique possibilities for therapies today that were not available a few years ago even. In the beginning they are very, very important, and so they're only available to a very small part of the patients who might benefit from them.
For example, three examples from rheumatism, blood cancer, and hemophiliacs. In rheumatism, I mean here in these three areas, lots of new therapies were developed, but here an annual therapy or even where healing is possible, we're talking about millions of expenses. That has to do with the high degree of cost inside the process chain, not necessarily the profits, you know. Now, our contribution to work on these challenges and to tackle these challenges and to master these challenges are two or maybe three topics that I'd like to point out to you. The first one you see here, it's about the first phase of the, well, let's call it the value chain, yeah, of the medication development. An example from our portfolio here from the laboratory area concretely comes from or especially from the area of bioanalytics.
That is that part of the laboratory area that we've built up over the past five and six years. One example is the CellCelector where you can very much significantly speed up the development of cells. I mean, five weeks may not sound like much, but it's a two-digit acceleration of this phase, okay? Often it's about automation, the systematic gathering of data, and the intelligent use of such data in order to be able to sort out candidates that are not promising. The second example is about the production of biopharmaceuticals. Here the point is often to get bigger output and bigger proportion of usable output. At these two things you can see how substantially the time can be reduced.
It's a first example, actually a product that came into our group of companies via an acquisition. The second example below is one of a very successful own development. In both cases, we have significant time reductions, and those time reductions translate into cost reductions in the production phase of a biopharmaceutical drug. Well, I said two or maybe three things we can contribute to mastering these challenges. The third point is actually resource usage. The technologies we offer, and you know that, are to a considerable point, I mean, flexible, disposable technologies that allow for conducting experiments and also using production sites and changing production sites in a very quick and easy way.
Compared to the previously dominating technologies that were like fermentation system based on non- oxidable steel, here the water and energy consumption could be reduced by 30%. It depends, of course, on the individual process, but it shows how the ecological footprint can reduce for our clients. We can say that on this journey we contribute to more good health to more people. This, the core of our business purpose addresses one sustainability goal. Sustainability as you know is more than climate protection, even though climate protection for good reason is placed in the center of today's current debates often. The United Nations have for good reason established and defined 17 sustainability goals. The third one is good health and well-being for the entire humanity. For all members of humanity.
With our business purpose, we are completely addressing one of these sustainability goals. Now due to the big need for improvement but also the big potential for improvement in today's situation in terms of time and cost and due to the dynamic development within the industry overall, innovation are very crucial. The innovation that we contribute are also crucial to our own further development. For many years, our activities in that regard have been based on three pillars. On the one hand, it is our own developments in areas where we are very competent, for example, bioanalytical products and quite a few more. We also are entering into partnerships, into corporations, as you can see in the middle and the lower layer.
You see here, for example, new materials, but also 3D cell printing technology, where we are partnering with the top experts around the globe. That can be other companies, it can be academic institutions, in order to be able to generate innovations in the best and fast possible ways. The third pillar is acquisitions. That may sound surprising, but for us, acquisitions are, in fact, innovation-oriented and innovation-driven, not so much volume-driven. Of course, we want to promote and support our growth, but it's not so much the size of such acquisitions, but the degree of innovation. Here you see a few examples of companies that we've acquired recently, I mean, in the last year. To finish this chapter, I'd like to point out our business model to you.
I think the business model is very interesting, and it strikes a good balance between stability on the one hand and potential for growth on the other. On the one hand, because we, with our business, can actually address the entire value chain of our clients, so there is no great dependence on any one particular process step. It's not only the value chain, but also the process side is very big. We have a high degree of recidivist turnover, if you want. I mean, repeat sales, if you will. I mean, we have a high degree of repeat business and so a high stability. That's also very interesting in terms of profitable growth. You see here 18% of average growth over the past decade, and economies of scale that are related to that.
That means nearly 1.5 percentage point increase in EBITDA margin per year over the past decade. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd now like to talk about the fiscal year 2022 in a little bit more detail. I think you can say that 2022 was a very successful year, again, it was a very intense year, full of work. You can summarize it under the rubric of saying, well, on the one hand, you say, again, we had a great increase in sales, 15% to EUR 4.175 million. Again, moving into a geographical split that are more or less harmonizing, 37% were made in the Americas, 37% in Europe, and 26% in Asia. This increasingly also reflects the proportion of the markets we address.
Slightly different growth rates in the respective areas in the past year, that has to do with the basis effect that played a role here, a high degree of corona vaccine production, in 2021, also in 2022, decreasingly, took place in Europe. The EBITDA margin increased to 20%, to EUR 1.4 billion, also a strong increase in the result per share, EUR 9.57 or EUR 9.58 for preferred stock or common stock. The second point, a high profit margin. The third point is, as you see it in the header, is a normalization has set in. Since Q3 2021, we're talking about that.
When we pointed out that the very high, and sometimes, I mean, we're talking about increases of 50% increases per quarter in order intake, were not only based on the high additional demand for corona vaccines or also corona tests, but a significant part of that was that customers of ours actually ramped up their warehousing capacities and the stocks that they hold in order to protect themselves against disruptions in the supply chain. It was clear that this effect would turn to the other side again. This process actually started around the middle of last year, and it's still running. I will come to that again in a minute. Order intake is lower by 10%, EUR 4.07 billion, you know, cleared against exchange rates. We reported that last year.
Last year already, the direct corona turnover was EUR 220 million, you know, with the producers of vaccines, corona vaccines. The year before, it was EUR 500 million. You have to see that our 50% turnover increase took place, although the corona business was already plunging. Now, two divisions that we have here, both of them with above average development compared to the market. You can see that when you take a look at our competitors' numbers. Bioprocess Solutions increased by EUR 3.3 billion. You see here the effect that we told about with order intake. I don't have to repeat that. The operative EBITDA clearly increased to EUR 1.2 billion, margin 21%.
The operative margin was 35.7% as we forecast. Lab Products and Services division also very good year, EUR 848 million, + 12%, discounting currency effects. Order intake increased by 7% to EUR 885 million. The EBITDA, the operative EBITDA was EUR 222 million. The operative margin was 26.2%. That's also hit the goal. As you can find a whole lot of more results also with cash and cash flow and so in our Annual Report. I don't want to refer on this in detail because you can clearly look that up in the Annual Report, and you can also get it online in order to get the very detailed information.
Our proposition to pay our dividends, which is later on, you know, our agenda point two, the appropriation or the retained profit, we propose to actually increase the payout by EUR 0.18. That is about 15%, which would mean EUR 1.43 compared to EUR 1.25 for the common stock and EUR 1.44 compared to EUR 1.26 for the preferred stock. Which would mean the total payout is slightly less than EUR 100 million and a quota of 15%. Very small changes only to the previous years. During the past year, again, we had a very intensive and very extensive investment, EUR 523 million in all, 12.5% is our investment quota. That took place in a whole number of locations.
With one exception, that I will point out to you in a second. We are developing existing locations, and a particular exception of that is South Korea, where in Songdo, near to Seoul, we are building up a new location from where we will be serving the very important South Korean and Southeastern Asian market, with the exception of China. China, for many years, we follow the China for China approach. The products we produce for China is nearly all produced inside China. We are exporting into China, but hardly anything out of China. What is important for China as well is often it's an extension of production, substantial extensions of production capacities even. We're also investing in the research and development infrastructure to a great degree.
With all these investments, it also plays a role that increasingly we're also investing in, renewable energies, or we're trying to increasingly use renewable energy sources. We see two examples here. On the right, it's Bangalore in India, which, is of course, very good for using solar energy. On the left-hand side in Göttingen, we make good use of the fact that here we have geothermal sources by actually, drilling deep into the earth, and we are using that as much as we can.
A year ago, we said that our overarching sustainability and climate protection goals through to the year 2030, as you can see here in a graph, it means that for all three Scopes, as you call it, which means the entirety of the emissions that are spread out across the entire value chain of our products. I mean, not only that which happens inside our own fabrication and manufacturing facility, but it's also everything that comes first and what happens after. We set ourselves the goal of 10% intensity reduction per year. Intensity means CO2 equivalence per turnover. I think that's the most realistic and most tangible number that we can actually develop. This reduction goal is more ambitious than that the European Union has actually set for themselves.
This, of course, cumulates over the years, which means by the year 2030 compared to the base year, 2019, the emissions will have reduced by pretty precisely 70%. I mean, what happens in our own factories, we have a zero emission goal, if at all possible, and that's possible for 99%. There's only a very small fraction of processes where it's not possible, but for all the others, we go down to Europe. It means that we take a lot of cash in our hand to be very, like, you know, idiomatic about it is about 1% per turnover. Before it was 0.5 tons. These are also part of the medium-term remuneration of the management board here.
Increasingly, we're also focused on topics like our ecological footprint, especially water and material efficiency. Water plays a role with part of our production processes. Here, for example, we'd like to see the membrane production where we have a number of initiatives running to reduce materials. Material efficiency, talking about plastics, not only in packaging, but plastics for us is often a functional product or a functional material. Here too, we're thinking about how we can reduce our footprint further. Now the coming three slides, I'd like to take a look to the very important personnel side. In many ways, this is critical for our success. I mean, clearly so. Not only because of demography, which means that and only in inverted commas, you have a lack of well-trained personnel, but the all staff.
Also because innovations is also a result of what people do. So it's always to have the real people on board. I'd also, you know, direct my view to the quantitative side. As you can see in here, over the past years, we have grown by 2,000 people per year to now nearly 16,000 employees by the end of the year 2022. Which means also not only an incredible amount of work on the HR department, but also on staff integration and onboarding. We do that with a lot of passion. We are offering a lot of intern development possibilities. More than half of our leadership positions can be filled internally. I intensively told about that the demand situation is normalizing.
Now on the quantitative part of the staffing side, we're also taking a look at efficiency, integration, and also streamlining capacities, as we've already communicated, by the way. Streamlining also means a moderate reduction of headcounts in certain areas, but also especially in contract workers, which is not necessarily reflected here in these numbers. I'd also like to talk a little bit about diversity among our staff. You can take, of course, different perspectives. One would be internationality. Nearly 120 nationalities are working for us worldwide. Also if you take a look at individual locations, you often have a very internationally diverse staff. It's a pretty young structure actually, due to the high hiring campaigns of the past years.
Average year of 39 years is pretty young for a company that's been around for so long as Sartorius has. Then also what is important, not only for the political discussion, but also for ourselves as we are here, the equality of opportunities for men and women. We have a high proportion of women in leadership. 47% of female leadership personnel at the first level below the board. Again, the internal development is in our focus here. Sometimes it means on the timeline, you know, how fast can the improvements be made, but they're also much sustainable.
You see internally as well as externally some information on that. We do half year surveys of all of our employees. The next one will start in a couple of weeks. We ask them a number of questions over and over to be able to compare the answers. We have good consistent results. For example, with regards to how proud people are to work for us and how much they like working for us. Another important factor are external feedbacks that we get on the most important platforms and how we compare to other companies. I think in general, that gives a positive image. Coming now to the end of my report on the past business year, I would like to talk about the development of the share prices in the last year.
Here, not really surprising, we've seen certain declines, 38%, 33% in the preference in ordinary shares. Why is that not surprising? Well, on the one hand, we had a difficult market environment in the last 13 months now. There was an increase of the interest rates and for growing companies that is especially important in how they are evaluated. You also see the comparing indices have double-digit declines. Since the mid of 2020 to end of 2021 at least, we had high valuation factors in the biopharmaceutical sector and in life sciences and in research companies. These high valuation factors have had to normalize, that was to be expected.
Another thing that's important for everyone who invests on more long-term is that the development of the Sartorius share compared to our competitors can be seen long-term, really got a strong three-digit growth compared to quite a moderate single-digit growth in the indices. It's always important what kind of time period you look at. Now coming to an end, I would like to look at the market trends and our expectations for the futures and our opportunities for the future. First of all, we can say that the market that we focus on will continue to have strong growth drivers. You see on the left-hand side, some of them are listed. We still have good filled R&D pipelines that are very broad now.
We don't only focus on monoclonal antibodies, which are that used to be the main modality for cancer therapies that were so successful over the last years. We also have the new modalities, gene therapy, cell therapies, so kind of a broad and deep pipeline. Biosimilars play an important role in increasing our single-use products. Are still penetrating the market and innovation, as already mentioned, the dynamic, the impetus that drives growth is still part of the picture. If you look towards the right of this slide, you can say that our portfolio, which we keep growing and also with our global reach, we're in a very comfortable position. We can meet our customers' needs. We have a strong team out there on the market. Also internally in our processes.
We think that we are ready to seize the opportunities that come from this market growth that is expected to go on till 2023. On average, that's important to say because as already said, we do see lots of one-off effects, lots of ups and downs in these years. One more word on that, of course, there are changes that one , two or three years ago were not expected. For example, de-globalization, which is happening in some areas and can already be felt in some sectors. We can't tell yet how much that will be the case in our markets. For example, what about the trade between the Western world and China in the future? Will it remain open? Will there be some roadblocks?
Now I'd like to point your attention to the ups and downs around this basic growth curve. Here, once again, it's important to look at the right timeframe. The last two or three years, we've seen exponential growth rates, especially in the years 2020, 2021. Strong double-digit growth, especially in the bioprocess sector. I have already pointed out that on top of the strong decline that has to do with COVID business, the COVID test production and the COVID vaccine production. Another important topic was with the inventories. What this graph shows is that this is this yellow line that is our projected, and I think very realistic growth curve. In 2019, we have forecast that for the time period 2019-2025, and then the wide bars are the actual results.
On 2021 and 2022, we were above that curve by quite a lot. At the end of 2022 year, we are one year ahead of our midterm planning because of these one-off effects, not because the basic trends changed. They're also very positive, still very strong. That means that now in 2023, we see a return to this positive basic growth path. It also means that the curve will flatten somewhat. Give you a couple of more numbers. They were also published, but still, kind of show the trend that I'm talking about. In the period before 2019, starting in the 2010 years, we had average growth of 13%, and then we were 19%, 25%. Now we want 18% of the effect price effects.
We already have a faster growth between 2019 and 2022. In the first half of this period that we're now looking at, we were at about 30%. That shows again how much this initial first phase of this midterm perspective is ahead of schedule. You really need to keep that in the back of your mind if you now look at our forecast for 2023. This is displayed on this slide. At the beginning of the year, the end of January, we've published that we do expect a slight growth in and stable margins. That means a sales increase in a low single digit area. If you factor out the extra COVID business, which will be close to zero, then it would be high single digit growth.
Because there will still be a decrease in our drawback in the drawdown in inventories. Inventories were built up, that already played a role in the end of 2022, and it will also still play a role in the first half of 2023. So we expect the two halves of 2023 to be very different and then within Lab Products and Services, we have a moderate high single-digit growth and then high single-digit growth if you exclude COVID- related businesses. Coming to an end now, I would like to talk to you about our ambitions for 2025. For the first time in 2019, we have defined some numbers. That was EUR 4 billion and a lower margin than the one that you see here.
We have already increased our target to EUR 5 billion because we see that the basic trends were stronger than expected. Now we increase that by an additional 5%, which is inflation adjusted because we have adapted our prices in both factors, BPS and LPS, EUR 4.2 billion and EUR 1.3 billion. Our increased margin targets were not increased again, 36% for BPS, 28% for LPS, 34% for the group. I do really think there's a promising positive outlook for the future. Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to thank you for your attention, and I'm looking forward to the general debate and your questions. Thank you very much.
I would like to thank Dr. Kreuzburg for his presentation and the explanations on the annual financial statements 2022, the current developments, as well as the future prospects of our group. This concludes the freely accessible live transmission on the internet. I would like to thank you for your interest in our company.