Thank you, operator, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to today's management call. This is Ingo Mittelmann from Investor Relations. Thanks for joining this extraordinary call today on behalf of the release of our new midterm strategy of Wacker Neuson. As you know, we have already announced in several publications in recent months that we will publish our new midterm strategy in the middle of the year. Today is the day. Over the next 15-20 minutes, we will take you through the key points of our Strategy 2023, and outline the prospects of Wacker Neuson over the coming years, the triggers that will fuel our growth in the future, and what you, as investors, can expect from our company. That's it from my side. I'm now handing you over to our executives, Dr. Karl Tragl and Christoph Burkhard, who will lead you through this call.
Thank you, Ingo. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our call today. Thanks for joining. I'm Karl Tragl, CEO of Wacker Neuson Group. Some of you may have noticed that at Wacker Neuson, we are currently celebrating the 175th anniversary of our company. What began in 1848 with a small blacksmith shop in Dresden, is now a globally successful company with revenues well above EUR 2 billion and numerous satisfied customers around the globe. The design of our machines has always evolved over the years, as you can see here. What has remained is our innovativeness of the products. Innovation was and is part of the DNA of Wacker Neuson. I also visited personally today, one of our innovation center. I'm really impressed at what's going on there.
That's the reason why I'm not in Munich, and I'm in a different line. We are convinced that this is also. Innovation is also one of the keys for our future success, and this is why we thrive to remain a company that stands for high level of innovation and reliability of our products and services also in the future. It's the future that we want to talk with you about today. Our vision of where we want to take our company until the year 2030. In addition to the high level of innovation we have demonstrated over the past years, we have also put our focus strongly on our customers.
With outstanding engineering capabilities and great usability of our products, we have given customers many reasons to decide for Wacker Neuson products again and again, when it comes to deciding what brand of machinery to buy. This is very important to keep in mind when analyzing our company for our future potential. The users of our machines are using them for hours and hours in their everyday work life. Of course, the price for a machine always plays an important role, but there are many, many other points that matter when it comes to deciding for a brand. At Wacker Neuson, we understand what our customers prefer. That is why we are convinced to make a great contribution to sustainable construction and agriculture, to a better working life of our customers.
We have understood that only if people and the environment benefit from our product solutions, we can be sustainably successful in the future. The most visible sign of our conviction in this respect, is our zero-emission product range, our emission-free, and also noise, reduced noise ones solutions in light and compact equipment. We are convinced this will be an important contributor to customer satisfaction in the future and a successful future of Wacker Neuson as a whole, and this is more, this is our commitment. Now, let us dive right into the future strategy of Wacker Neuson Group, what we call Strategy 2030. If you follow our company for a while now, you will know about our last official corporate strategy, called Strategy 2022. It's time for an update.
Over the past 12 months, we took a strategic deep dive into all aspects of our Wacker Neuson Group. Working on the Strategy 2030 took significant time and effort. For all of us at Wacker Neuson, it was very important that this strategy is thoroughly planned, multiple times reviewed, challenged hard and repeatedly, and improved in the single details that we were working on. Taking care of the details is something which is very important for us. Most important is, our senior leadership teams have been involved in that process, and they are all fully committed to deliver towards it. Strategy 2030 is a result of the conviction of all members of the executive board, as well as the members of the supervisory board and everybody involved in the process.
On the bottom left side of this slide, you see what we call the House of Strategy. It stands for our mission, our perception, where we want to go, and how we want to get there. Let me highlight first, where we see Wacker Neuson in the years to come. In terms of revenue, we want to take this company from EUR 2.25 billion as per 2022, to a level of EUR 4 billion until the year 2030, corresponding to a compound average growth rate of about 8% per year. This 8% per year is, by the way, also the compound average growth rate of our company over the past five years, which includes the very challenging years of the global pandemic.
Our growth scenario there is based purely on organic growth, including OEM business from our future cooperation with John Deere in the U.S. Additional inorganic M&A growth is always an option, as you know, M&A is an unpredicted, unpredictable topic, and thus, not included in the Strategy 2030. At the same time, we want to significantly improve our profitability. Our EBIT margin is set to grow from 9% in 2022, to sustainably above 11%. It is very important to notice that we are confident to achieve this level of profitability well before the year 2030. The third topic, our net working capital ratio, is expected at a level of up to 30%, and is derived from a balance between operational resilience, acknowledging the imperfect global supply chains, and free cash flow generation for sustainable growth.
This balance is very important for us. Currently, as you know, we are slightly above this level, which always depends a little bit on the current supply chain situation and supply chain issues, where we as a company are still struggling with and we have to cope with. With the situation easing in the future, we believe that up to 30% is a very reasonable and achievable level. How do we want to make sure that Wacker Neuson Group can really deliver against this Strategy 2030? To give you a better understanding of how we will implement our strategy, we have summarized the necessary actions into a total of what we call 10 strategic levers.
I want to walk through all of them just very briefly, to give you a flavor of what we are thinking about and how we are working on it. The first one is Light Equipment market leadership. We want to secure our leading market position in handheld soil compaction and with rammers, plates, and trench rollers, as well as we want to establish Wacker Neuson as the leader in concrete consolidation with internal and external vibrators. The specific actions around that are implementing organic growth initiatives, which are by sales channel and by region and country. We have new products in our pipeline. We are targeting aftermarket growth there. Reduction of manufacturing cost is very important for us.
Finally, exploiting our cooperation around the Battery One, the future, the plan we currently work with, Battery One alliance concept, where we wanna lower the barriers for our customers and also other customers, to use electric products by providing Battery One batteries as a standard for multi-brands in the industry, which would give a huge customer benefit for our users. The second lever is about zero emission solutions. We are perspectively targeting a sales growth with our zero emission machines, and we would like to achieve a revenue target of more than EUR 150 million in the year 2025 already.
The strategic direction we are taking there and the actions is, again, there are new product lines, and we are already, and we will continue to also report in our calls about new product introduction on that side. We want to expand our technology leadership in the areas of performance, efficiency, and safety. Efficiency and performance is very important on the electric side as well, because this is driving the time you can use electric equipment. We also understand and know that we need a holistic approach, and we have to provide solutions around a complete ecosystem, where also charging opportunities, cyclic and recycling opportunities. There are many more things than just the product itself, which is driving our approach for the ecosystem, and the Battery One alliance is something part of that.
Our third lever is what we call time to market and innovation. It's just a basic idea. We have to get cost and price everything right, but we also have to drive innovation and be fast time to market. We want to reduce our time to market by applying more and more agile methods in R&D. We want to advance in terms of pipeline management. Those are basically tools in R&D processes, which we are currently implementing. A second important topic is exploiting the advantages from platform strategies and standardized components, which is very important, especially when it goes now towards electric equipment, because there we have the opportunity to start with new platforms, which we can build up from scratch. The third main topic there is to strengthen our project management roles, that we are strengthening pre-development activities....
Front loading in the project, and this is where I was, as I mentioned already today, visiting an innovation center in our company, which is really working very, very well. The fourth topic is what we call America's Growth Strategy. We want to grow our business in the Americas to reflect 25% of Group revenues until 2030. This was important in order to further diversify our business regionally. Balancing sales channel mix between independent dealers, contract dealers, and key accounts, and reducing the cluster risk from the past anchor dealer concept, is something which we are already reporting for some time now and which we will continue to implement.
We want to by this, we want to strengthen our sales within the retail segments, and we want to really more and more get a great mix per region and per state, between retail and rental segments. On the product side, we are expanding the range of our UTLs, our utility track loaders. We want to reduce the complexity in our remaining product portfolio, so handling complexity is something which we are continuing from the past strategy, and we want to focus on cost in order to have an advantageous price position. Last but not least, we reported on that already. We will wrap up our John Deere cooperation for excavators, partly manufactured from Europe, but the majority giving us a critical mass to start an excavator line in the U.S.
The fifth lever, Asia and the non-regulated markets. We really have to view both as one topic, Asia, which in the majority are non-regulated markets, but also the other ones like Africa, Arabia, and a few other ones, South America. For that, we want to use our Chinese operation as a best cost country production. Not only for the local market in China, but also for the markets in Asia and also the other export non-regulated markets, viewed from the Chinese operation as a best cost country production. We will develop further products there, which are really tailored then for those lower regulated requirements for Asia and other markets.
We want to maintain the cost focus there to have really attractive cost structures, and to be within the domestic markets, where we are targeting focus areas, focus segments, but also for the exports. We want to use our strong sales channels in Asia, especially in Australia. Our sixth topic is digitization and automation. This is really a broad topic ranging from digitization of the classical construction machines on electronic and digital products created in combination with machines, up to digitization, administration, and manufacturing processes, and also what we call them this way, the automation. It's a broad mixture of revenue growth, more from machine digital product side, as well as efficiency and cost reduction on the process and smart manufacturing sides.
We have new digital products in the pipeline, and we are working on great cost reduction there by automation of internal and external processes. This is basically the bridge then to the seventh lever, cost, operation, and footprint optimization. We want to increase our competitiveness through reducing the manufacturing costs, and we want to provide the right capacities. The basic idea behind that is that we are utilizing our existing high-cost country locations in Germany and Austria, bring them to expand the volume there up to a optimum working point, and then bring the other volume to low-cost country or best cost country locations, like in Serbia, where we have recently opened our first stage of the new plant, and we have significant further expansion plans there.
It's really a mixture of optimizing our current locations and the current production sites, and using and utilizing the growth we have for those sites, but also bringing part of that growth from day one to best cost country. And this balance will drive our cost operation and footprint optimization. We are reporting in three segments: Light Equipment, Compact Equipment, and aftermarket Services and solutions. And this third topic is also very important for us, where we want to drive the company to the future. We have two aspects there as well. The one is just expanding our growth and profitability by expanding more and more aftermarket and service sales. But it has also to do with process optimization to have high speed of delivering spare parts and services to the market.
This is something also which we talked about already, and I will come back to that in a moment. The ninth topic has to do with sustainability actions. It's basically the implementation of our sustainability strategy. We want to contribute towards a more sustainable world by focusing on selected areas of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. We picked some of those goals which are important for us and where we can contribute back to environment and society. Naturally, they are one of the biggest or the first topics, has to do with carbon emissions, or working towards reduced carbon emissions and a carbon-free world one day.
We have a specific program where we will achieve Scope 1 and 2 of carbon emissions in our own operations, therefore, we call it Scope 1 and 2, by 50% until 2025, compared to our baseline, 2019. Within those five to six years, we want to halve our emissions. This is mostly by switching to green electricity, reducing internal fleet emissions, and what we are currently doing in a big program, installing photovoltaic systems on our plants. Our target there is in the plants where we can do that we achieve around about 30% of our electricity there, generated emission-free by own photovoltaic systems. We're also working on Scope 3 emissions, which is up- and downstream emissions.
There in the downstream part, our zero emission program is a significant contribution, but we also will work with supply chain to do a baselining and a target setting on Scope 3 carbon emissions, then many other KPIs which have to do with sustainability. Finally, this is our conviction. It's all about the people who are implementing it, the people who have to be committed, the people who have to, our employees, work with, and our teams to work with our customers and suppliers. We are targeting number 10. We want to become best company to work for, where we have specific programs on employer attractiveness, how we attract talent, how we develop our leadership teams into the future, but also methods of execution and implementing our growth and profitability levers.
Behind each of these individual strategic levers, there is a detailed program with milestones, and you can see some of those examples visualized here up to 2025. I just don't want to walk through them, but you can see them over here. Behind those levers, there are teams who have a detailed roadmap. They are based on strategic directions, and I explained those strategic directions in the past minutes. Their implementation, individual actions, and next steps in the coming years, that's where we really want to focus on. One of the messages from today should be that it's not only setting perspectives or setting future directions, but it has a lot to do of how we implement.
Just to give you one example here, coming back to our footprint optimization, we have per location, Korbach, Reichertshofen, or Linz, Pfullendorf, we have a program for expansion to get more volume through those plants, but going in line with cost reductions, which we can achieve by implementing those expansion plans. Then we have, in addition to build up the rest of the growth, we have stages of our expansion of our plant in Serbia, as well as our plant in China. This is what I mentioned already. We have a similar plan for Menomonee Falls with the excavator line there to come, where we want to get it to an optimum working point for growth and cost position.
Each of those plans in this lever footprint optimization, each of those plans is owned by the local profit and loss responsible management teams, what we call our Geschäftsführungen, and they are reviewed with us, the executive board, twice a year in an operations meeting. The purpose of this presentation is to give you a flavor on how we want to achieve that we have a strong focus on implementation for the Strategy 2030, and that we have a very strong management commitment behind that. Which directly leads me to my most important driver, or our most important driver of successful growth story. This is our teams. Our teams, this means our employees all around the globe. Our teams, we also feel, has to include our customers, our business partners, and of course, you, our investors.
We are confident that we will achieve great things by combining all of this to one team in the coming years. We will continue our company success story and lift Wacker Neuson to the next level of growth and profitability without compromising our financial stability. We are looking forward to having you as reliable partners on this path into our future on board, and we are looking forward to show you that we can implement that.
Thank you, Karl, for sharing these insights into the future of Wacker Neuson. Now we have enough time for your questions. Please note that the Q&A, as well as the entire call, will be recorded and made available publicly on our website. Operator, I'm now handing this back to you to explain the Q&A procedure.
Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star followed by two. In the interest of time, please limit yourself to two questions only. Anyone who has a question may press star followed by one at this time. Our first question today comes from Alexander, from Gallista. Please go ahead.
Yes, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the questions. The first one I have on the sales target, EUR 4 billion, is an ambitious goal. Could you maybe provide any color how you see the phasing of this growth over the coming years? Should it be more of a more or less steady growth? Or do you expect any particular year to be specifically strong based off the rollout of your individual sort of growth drivers that you have outlined? Thank you.
Thank you, Alexander, for that question. There are basically three growth levers, or the phases, basically, we have still the current drive of our strong order books. The second one is, in 2025, 2026, we will start delivering products and machines to John Deere, this will then add or step into this, and we will have an accelerated growth with electric products. This could mean that it could be basically really pretty steady through the whole period of time. However, we should not forget market fluctuations.
Although we are less affected by that balancing with different sales channels and agriculture and construction, it would be a miracle if I could predict that, how over the next seven years, the market effects will work out. Basically, those are four effects, which I can put in. Three of them, I can put onto a timeline. The latter one is something difficult to predict, and you should make up your own mind how you would estimate how this is working then together.
Thank you. That's helpful. Then another question I have on the EBIT margin target. You say sustainable EBIT margin to over 11% by 2030. Could you maybe provide a little bit more color around the target of over 11%? Are we talking about really achieving this 11% and potentially having a tad more than that? Do you see you getting sort of outside of this 11% to maybe 12%, 13%, et cetera?
Let me add, you know, that the more than 11% was already the target in the Strategy 2022. We did benchmarking and analysis. We came up with the topic that this is something, a perspective, which is a good one to strive for. Then we did a third analysis on, do we have enough levers there to really achieve it? We could answer all three of them with yes. We just cannot answer the question, when exactly do we believe to have that on a stable level? Is there an opportunity to even overachieve? That's something which we cannot really answer at the moment. As I said, we did benchmarking. It's from the past, we made significant steps already into that direction.
We have plans there. I cannot say when exactly we can achieve that or if we could overachieve.
I think from my side, sorry to interrupt you. Just to make this clear for everybody listening, because you said, Alex, we want to achieve the 11% in the year 2030. The idea is really to achieve this early from this perspective. We're well convinced that we are able to achieve this, and from that time, it should be sustainably at this level. That's the idea, and we've also mentioned this in a phrase in the corporate news, but that just for making this clear.
I guess the reason I'm asking is that, when you put it together, given the fact that in 2022, you are likely to be at least at the 10% level already. The acquisition you expect is 1 percentage point, and if you put it together with the EUR 1.5 billion of incremental revenue that you are targeting, this ultimately then comes with a very little scalability, or you're expecting the growth margin to compress over this time frame. I'm just wondering if you can provide a, kind of a color, a detail, what is that? Is it really that scalability will be low, or do you expect for one reason or another, that the gross profit margin would be lower?
which somehow is contradictory to what the improvement potential you have outlined in your presentation. That's a little bit what does not entirely add up for me, to be honest.
Yeah, yeah. Okay. As you mentioned, and I don't wanna now argue with numbers about that, but, you talked about the gap we have from our today's operational level towards the more than 11%, and there is still some gap there because we're talking about operational level, excluding sale of land or something like that. There is a gap there, and I think we agree on that. The other point is sustaining that strength in a market which is technically in some respect, maturing. On the other hand, new products like electric, where there's price pressure on that. Also, the longer a company can sustain strong growth, the more and more it also has to go into more price-sensitive areas.
I mean, if we can do that simultaneously, grow with new products, with more price, in more price-sensitive areas, and in parallel, even expand the EBIT margin to our target, I think then we can achieve quite a lot. There is no real big effect working against that. I think that's part of your question, but it's a challenge to keep those three elements in the balance in the equation.
Fair enough. That's helpful. Thank you.
Maybe one thing to add here as well from my side, Alex, again, please do not forget that there is this one-time effect in the margin this year. This will take you down roughly 1%, so it's not the 10% that we're currently at for this year, if you take it from a purely operational level.
Thank you. Understood.
Ladies and gentlemen, I repeat, if you would like to ask a question, please press Star and One. We have the second question from Tore Fangmann from Berenberg. Please go ahead, sir.
Good afternoon, thank you for taking my question. Just while we have you on the line already, could you comment on your current end market situation? If you see any further pushbacks regarding the prices for now? Thank you.
I mean, thanks, Tore, for the question, but, hopefully, I don't get you the wrong direction. Ingo, you have to help me there. We have our next quarterly call quite in a few weeks, and I would like to leave that, the discussion on how the markets are at the moment, I would like to leave that to that call and focus today on the strategic call without offending you, please. Ingo, is that okay that we just
I think that is a fair point. We have to stick to the strategy as we're too close to the next call already. We've highlighted something in the past call that might be useful for you, so that we see an increased price sensitivity of our clients. We're not seeing declining prices, we're seeing an increased sensitivity. We will see it in the next weeks. I mean, the quarter is not over yet, but of course, we have first information on April and May internally, of course, and that's why we cannot highlight something of that in this call, 'cause it would be disrespectful to everybody not listening now. I can pretty much tell you it stays at what we said.
That's perfectly fine. Thank you.
Thank you, Tore, for your understanding. Thanks.
We have a follow-up question. Alexander, please go ahead.
Thank you. If I may, just two follow-ups, if the time allows. One, on zero emission solutions, you outlined the target EUR 150 million by 2025. Could you, and my understanding is that the current revenues from zero emission products are negligible. Can you confirm that? That would be incremental.
Okay. They are not negligible, but there is a growth path to get to EUR 150. We have revenue because then I don't have the exact numbers right over here now, I think 18 products electrically, which we are selling. We are introducing new products into the market this year. We are in the, I would say, middle two digits EUR million area at the moment, and it's a good growth aim to get to EUR 150 in the next three years.
Understood. Thank you.
Alex, one add on also here from my side. I don't have the correct number ahead of me as well, but I remember it was something like a little less than 2% of revenues for the full year. That's the mid-two-digit number that Karl is talking about. Taking it from there to 150 until 2025, as Karl highlighted in his, in his speech, is quite a step already, I would say.
Understood. The second additional question is on the Americas growth strategy. The target of 25% of the Group by 2030 would imply roughly EUR 1 billion from the U.S. or for Americas, which is around about half a billion of incremental revenues. Could you somehow, maybe not precisely quantify, but provide a ballpark, what do you expect John Deere contribution to be within this growth target?
Unfortunately, we are not allowed to talk about specific numbers with that respect according to our agreement with John Deere. As I said, just we will start delivering from Europe, I'm not sure, I think in 2025, and then one year later, we will start the manufacturing line in U.S. and delivering from there. We will have a pretty steep ramp up for that. That's all I can say. It is part of that revenue which we talked about.
Okay, understood. Thank you.
Thanks for understanding, Alex.
There are no further questions at this time. May I hand back to Ingo Mittelmann for closing comments.
Great. Thank you, operator. Again, the question from my side, are there any further questions? Now is the time. Don't limit yourself to two questions. Okay, that doesn't seem to be the case. Should any further questions arise, please do not hesitate to contact us at Investor Relations. We will also always make sure you get the right information on time. We've reached the end of today's call. Thanks again for joining, and have a great day.
Thank you, everybody. Bye-bye.