Good afternoon, everyone, welcome to Konecranes Capital Markets Day. My name is Kiira Fröberg, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Konecranes. It's been more than five years since our last Capital Markets Day, and we are really excited to discuss our strategic focus areas and financial targets with you today. Before we start, just a kind reminder, today's presentations contain forward-looking statements. Here we have our preliminary agenda for today. First, our President and CEO, Anders Svensson, will give you an overview of Konecranes' updated strategy, after which our CFO, Teo Ottola, will talk about our new financial targets. We'll end the first session with a Q&A with both Anders and Teo. Questions can be asked either in person here at Pikku-Finlandia or through the webcast chat function during the presentations. Anders, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Kiira. A very warm welcome from my side as well to this Konecranes Capital Markets Day 2023. Like Kiira said, this is the first Capital Markets Day we host since 2017. We are quite eager to tell you about our updated financial targets and also our strategic enablers that will take us to those targets. Before we do that, I just want to mention our new purpose that we launched also today, shaping next generation material handling for a smarter, safer, and better world. I will start with just a snapshot of what is Konecranes today, or actually what was it 2022. We had a net sales of almost EUR 3.4 billion with a comparable EBITA margin of 9.5%.
We had orders intake of EUR 4.2 billion, and we ended the year with an order book of EUR 2.9 billion. We're active around 50 countries with our approximately 16,600 employees. Those numbers are the end of Q1. Our sales in service represents 44% of group sales, and equipment represents 56% of group sales. Our geographical split is EMEA, 51%, and then in the Americas, 36%, and in APAC, 13%. We have a really solid platform with leading market positions to build on in all of our three segments. If we start with service, here we have an unparalleled global service network, and we see ourself as the leading market position holder. Service represents 38% of sales.
In Industrial Equipment, we have a technology leadership position, and we also see us here as the market leader. Industrial Equipment represents 34% of our sales. In Port Solutions, we have the widest and deepest offering in the industry, and we rate ourselves as a top two to three position in different areas. Port Solutions represents 28% of group sales. We should remember also in port solution sales, we also have Port Services, which represents roughly then 6 percentage points out of those 28%. We have a broad customer base, and that provides us both with the stability and also an opportunity for growth.
We are represented, or we have customers represented in all these industry verticals, all the way from fast-growing areas like warehouse and distribution, where it's expected to grow sort of 10%+ CAGR in the coming five years to a more modest growth within the general engineering, which is expected to grow 2%-3% CAGR in the coming five years. You can see here on container handling, we have an N/A. It's because we don't have a forecast for the next five years. We have a forecast that this year we'll have modest growth, then in 2024, we will be back to a growth of about 4%. Being present in all of these customer segments really provides us with the stability.
Should one segment go down, we have other segments that we can then continue to grow in. The opportunities is that we are not equally strong in all these customer segments and all geographies. No matter if we have a stronger or less strong position, there's opportunities basically everywhere, both geographically and in the different industry verticals. Now moving to the mega trends that are shaping our market and providing also business opportunity for us. Starting with sustainability, you know, sustainability is the norm for most businesses in the world nowadays. Not only for your own business, you need to focus on the whole value chain.
Here we as Konecranes, we enable decarbonized, circular, and safer world by embedding sustainability in everything we do from our own operations, but also to the offering that we provide from our customers to enable them to achieve their targets. Next one is digitalization and automation. Here it's about productivity and seamless operations. More and more achieving productivity and seamless operation is depending on automated solutions and digital solutions. Here Konecranes provides automated, intelligent, and more complete material handling solutions to really boost our customers' productivity. We also have geopolitics and macroeconomics. Geopolitical issues are really changing the dynamics in the world and also in the global flows of both goods and information. Macroeconomic changes or challenges like we have now and have had with interest rates high and inflation being really high, really provides economic uncertainty in the world.
Konecranes contributes to this by improving data management and also improving the resilience of global supply networks. The material handling market offers possibility to capture growth. We are especially strong in cranes and hoists and services, and within cranes and hoists, we also here include them port cranes. We also have presence in other areas, such as industrial trucks and lifts with our lift truck business, and also with our Agilon business in automated storage and retrieval systems, and also our AGVs and other businesses. We have presence in many areas, and our focus is to remain with our core businesses, but at the same time, look at adjacent businesses that can provide us with growth opportunities, but also to support our customers with a broader material management or material handling needs.
We have a clear strategy to execute in all of our three business segments. We're starting with Service. It's to deliver service growth. Here we have renewed service programs that are more tailored towards different customer segments to enable our agreement base to grow. We also have enhanced customer experience, and here it's about sort of being easy to do business with. Commercial and operational excellence, equivalent parts for third-party equipment to enable our unrivaled network of service technicians to really also be able to capture share of wallet on equipment installed base. Data-driven sales is more and more important to know when and where we should really support our customers. Also here we have bolt-on acquisitions for our service business. This has been a point where we have been extremely strong in history.
We have had a period for a couple of years, five years or so, where we have been less strong in bolt-on acquisitions. We're happy now to announce that we have also started again with the announcement of the Whiting acquisition at the end of last quarter. Improving Industrial Equipment profitability is the next segment. It's about simplification of go-to-market models, renewed and standardized offerings, platform harmonization, operational excellence, optimized portfolio, and stabilizing and fixing profitability in our process cranes. We are generating profitable growth in Port Solutions, sorry. It's about focusing on our core business with the best growth opportunity and growing our port service business. There's a tremendous opportunity within port service, also for outsourcing initiatives from customers going forward.
Capture and automation opportunities, we have a really strong technology platform. Here we can really leverage catching automation, digital solutions, et cetera, going forward. Operational excellence, and maybe you could also include project management excellence within that, making sure that we can deliver these large projects on time to cost to our customers. Launching sustainable offering, and here it's about electrification of all of our offerings. Now especially, Mika and his team are working on lift trucks electrification. You will see more deep dives in these areas from Mika and Fabio during the day. As a group, we focus on profitable and high growth offerings and geographies. We also intend to leverage our technology leadership through automated and digital solutions, but also to provide sustainable solutions for our customers going forward.
We're also focusing on markets and customer segments that really appreciate the added value that we bring and also are ready to pay for that. Pricing leadership is important for us. At the same time, we need to manage our costs so that we are still competitive in the world market and working more with internal efficiencies, such as filling our factories optimal make or buy decisions, and also SG&A efficiency or fixed cost efficiency. We come to an important slide. This is our updated ambition. It is to become the world leader in material handling solutions, creating value for everyone. With everyone, we mean ourselves, employees, customers, investors, the world, next generation. It's quite broad, but this is our ambition.
Financial targets. We start with sales growth, and we want to have sales growth faster than the market. Here we define the market as nominal world GDP growth according to IMF. The second target is then to achieve a comparable EBITDA margin of 12%-15%. We want to achieve this as soon as possible, but no later than in 2027. With a range of 12%-15%, it means that through the cycle, we should be within this range. If we have a down cycle, we should not go below 12%. If that would happen, we need to take continuous measures to get above 12% again. It also means if we are in the cycle above 15%, you should understand that that's probably not sustainable over the whole cycle.
It can happen, of course, and we want it to happen a lot. We're also updating or actually launching a dividend policy today. We have been very strict following a typical pattern in how we do dividends, but now we actually have a policy also here to go with that. It's to pay stable to increase in dividend per share over the cycle. How do we intend to do this then? We have selected five strategic enablers that will drive our business forward towards our ambition and towards our financial targets. The first one is deepening customer focus. The second one is accelerating efficiency. We have scaling technology innovation, advancing responsible business, and enhancing our winning culture. We will do this with an operating model with clear authorization and accountability in our organization.
I will now go through these five areas with similar slides like this one, talking a bit of some of the key initiatives and examples. On the right-hand side, you see example of key metrics. This does not mean that these are all the metrics we have, and we have a lot more metrics than this. This is some typical examples of how we follow if we are tracking towards where we need to be. The second slide in each area will then be sort of a deep dive example of one of the initiatives within each area. Deepening customer focus. Key initiatives here are, for example, providing the best customer experience.
In here, one example is that we will work with a decentralized operating model where we empower the organization, the customer-facing organization, so that we really can service our customers in the best way possible. Co-creation with customers. This is consultative and collaborative approach based on standardized offering. It does not mean that we will go and make sort of one-off solutions for all of our customers. It's like LEGO. It's based on standard offering, but we are flexible to work with our customers to create the best solution for them. Service excellence. I already mentioned the renewed service program. Fabio will talk more about that going forward. Targeted acquisitions to strengthen our core. Critical here is bolt-on acquisitions, especially within service, where we have sort of a global, well-working machine set up that we then can just bolt-on acquisitions using the same processes, tools, et cetera.
The deep dive here is then a bit what I mean in terms of decentralization. We place the needs of our customers at the heart of decision-making every day. To be able to do that, we need to empower our frontline, our customer-facing organization, meaning our business units and regions, to be empowered with the authority, decision-making, but also to hold the accountability for delivering close to the customers. That will make us much quicker in going back to customers, coming up with answers to customers, and taking decisions and informing customers. Our business areas will then more work on implementing common policies and tools, systems, and also, of course, govern the performance of the business units and regions. The performance management will be a key theme for us going forward.
If we're off track, we will have initiatives to get back on track. The group will then work on common strategic initiatives, also developing common processes, policies, tools, systems, et cetera. Our job will also be to performance manage our business areas and making sure that we track according to where we need to be. The group will also then manage capital allocation between the different businesses. This does not mean that we from now on will start working in silos in all our different business units and regions. We have smart people, and smart people collaborate, which means that we will collaborate across within a segment, within a business area, within the group when it adds value for us and for our businesses. We will not force all businesses to depend to participate in all initiatives- Accelerating efficiency.
Here's about supply chain efficiency, optimizing of manufacturing operations, footprint, make or buy strategies, et cetera. Simplification. This is a key one. Simplification of go-to-market models, our platforms, systems, organization, reduction of matrices, and all of these kind of things to really enable our organization to be quick. Operational excellence. This is, for example, the Konecranes Way, which is our lean initiatives. Also project management excellence, and I think Mika will talk about that a bit later as well. Portfolio optimization, which is where we evaluate and potentially divest some of our non-core or non-performing businesses. This we also did at the end of the first quarter where we divested MHE-Demag Industrial Products. This is a picture then of our supply footprint. The red ones are common supply production sites. Component supply production sites, sorry.
The light red ones are then hybrid factories between cranes and component supply factories, and the black ones are crane factories. Crane factories, you need normally to have regionally. That's why you have them spread out. This is where basically fabrication shops and assembly centers that put together a crane that doesn't travel well, that's why it needs to be regional. The sea green color is then our ports factories. We are continuously then optimizing our operations, our footprint, driving simplification of how we do things, maximizing efficiency throughout our businesses. It might not seem so, but a lot has happened. If you go back to the last capital markets day in 2017, since then, we have reduced more than 15 factories globally. If you go back two years, we have reduced five factories.
We are continuously working active with our supply footprint. The next area is then scaling technology innovation. In here, we have renewed offering. It's about simplification, standardization of offerings. We also include here our Core of Lifting offerings, which is our home designed solutions for components. I will come back to that in the next coming slide. Automation and electrification. Here it's about electrifying our full offering. Digitalization is about using data for insights and predictions, even generating new business models for us going forward. Then we have technology expansion for targeted acquisitions and corporations. It could be key technologies close to our core businesses, but it could also be that we venture into adjacent businesses. This is a little bit about our Core of Lifting, and it comprises of purpose-built and integrated packages of gearbox, motor, control system, and connectivity.
These are then, defining these and creating sort of the core components internally provides our cranes with a more optimized solution, and that creates longer lifetime, optimized performance for customers and cost as well, and then increased safety and productivity. When we embed sensors in these and software, it provides our customer with real-time data updates and also enables process optimization and predictive maintenance and failure predictions and all those kind of features going forward. That's really an advantage we have over many other, competition, that we have purpose-built componentry. We use technology innovation and digitalization and put that together to a package which is optimized for cranes and lifting motion. The next area is advancing responsible business. Here we have our climate action and circularity and key initiatives here is our ambitious, climate agenda. We have safe solutions and operations.
Basically, we want everyone to go home every day safe after a full day's of work, be it Konecranes employees or our customers' employees. We want to be the one that really puts the best solutions in place to do whatever we can that this will be reality. Inclusive and fair working conditions, it's about expecting human rights in our own operation, but also throughout the value chain. We embrace the broader sustainability agenda and supports our customers in achieving their ESG targets. Within our sustainability strategy, we have four commitments. The first one is that we deliver safe, secure material handling solutions. The second one is we enable a decarbonized and circular world, and that's the environmental part of this then. We create fair, inclusive, diverse, and engaging working environments, and that's also included in the human rights perspective.
We have the last one that we expect high ethical standards of ourselves, but also from our business partners. Our sustainability work has already been recognized with leadership ratings from institutes and organizations. From MSCI, we got an AA rating. From CDP, we got an A- rating, and we got again a gold medal from EcoVadis, and ISS ESG rated us prime. Not on the picture, but adding Sustainalytics rated us as a low-risk company recently, and we were actually rated as company number seven out of 549 within the machinery segment. That's top 2%. Konecranes has been a signatory member of the UN Global Compact since 2010, and we are fully committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, all 17.
We have hand-selected the nine that impacts us the most and where we can make the biggest contribution and working really tight with those, also including, you know, sustainability agendas and commitments. It does not mean that we don't work with the other eight, just to be clear. I will not go through all the highlights from 2022 because there is quite a lot actually. But I will mention that at the end of the year, all our factories were powered 100% by renewable energy or renewable electricity. We have made great progress already towards our climate targets. We are a member of the Science Based Targets initiative, and our climate targets have been validated as in line with the ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In this initiative, we made two targets or two commitments. The first one is to reduce our own operations' absolute greenhouse gas emission by 50% from 2019 to 2030. This target we already fulfilled for 2022, so eight years ahead, and we're quite proud of that. The second target was regarding our value chain. Reducing 50% of greenhouse gas emissions, absolute one, from 2019 to 2030, that's encompassing use of sold products, but also steel-related purchases. That represents approximately 75% of our total greenhouse gas emissions. We have a progress here as well. Looks very nice, 26%. We have done a lot of initiatives here, we're proud of that. This is also fueled by a lower sales volume in 2022 versus 2019.
With sales increasing, some of that will come back. We have a lot to do yet in this area, and we will continue relentless. Now I will focus on our own operations. Since we already achieved the target, we need to raise the bar a bit. In 2022, all electricity in manufacturing operations is renewable. In 2023, or it's by the end of 2022, just to be clear. It's not the full year. 2023, the first carbon neutral manufacturing site, and that's actually here in Finland, Hämeenlinna. They have done enormous amounts of investments, working really hard to reducing energy consumption within the factory and using renewable electricity, changing everything they can to save. However, there's still some parts we haven't been able to reduce, so we have bought carbon credits for those.
That's not a future strategy for us to buy ourselves out. We will continue to work to take those emissions away, but this is a way to bridge where we aim to achieve. Our new commitment is by 2027, we should have a carbon neutral manufacturing network in Konecranes. By 2030, we should have a carbon neutral fleet, and here we mean cars and service vehicles. The next one is enhancing our winning culture. Here is about workforce planning and talent acquisition. It's really important for us to have efficient talent acquisition. We need really high competence within automation, digitalization, electrification, but also maybe even more important, service technicians. We need great service technicians all over the world. Next step is talent and leadership development. It's about continuous learning.
It's about providing the kind of long-term development areas for our employees that forms commitments and loyalty, and that's also where we achieve talent retention. Talent retention is much more efficient, much cheaper than talent acquisition. This is really critical for us to be successful in. Developing company culture and ways of working, this is a huge one. This is how we do things. This is embedding profitability growth mindset throughout our organization. It's about implementing authority, responsibility, and accountability close to the customers, so we can be agile in serving our customers and quick in decision-making. Leveraging technology for culture building, it's about having online forums, online trainings, et cetera, and we have quite a lot of this already. Coming into the organization, I saw quite a lot of this, and I was quite impressed.
We need to continue with that because that's really something that is valuable. Coming into this organization, I of course had my experiences, my background. I combined that with what we are doing within Konecranes today. I saw things which I thought was maybe a bit of a gap compared to where I want us to be. Not that we were really bad at it, but we had potential for improvements. We have then embedded our winning attitude and growth mindsets. Really a winning attitude is something I want to get into this company. Engaging culture, really important to get all of our employees to feel a part of this. We are a big puzzle, and everyone is one piece of the puzzle. It doesn't work if we don't all commit to the same thing.
We have different roles, but we're all on the same team. Engaging culture, getting us to be one. Engaging values, we are now working with our values updates, not because we have bad values. Our values are 27 years old, the world is changing, both around us and our company is changing. We will review and make sure that it's up to date and it's valued today and it engages our organization. We need to have a competitive mindset, this is both internally and externally. We need to be in the internal league tables. We need to want to be on top. We need to want to be the best service organization in U.S., the best factory in EMEA, the best sales team in APAC. We want to be on top. That's what we need to get into this.
That also then transpires externally so that we are go-getters externally. We need to deliver on what we promise. We need to have a sense of urgency when we do things because we need to understand that we are blocking our colleagues if we are not having a sense of urgency. We are stopping our customers' business if we don't have a sense of urgency. We need to understand that it needs to be fixed now. If we can't fix it now, we need to have an open and proactive communication. We need to inform people internally, externally, customers. You get less pissed off if someone informs you what's happening. We need to be easy to do business with. All of our customers want someone who is easy to do business with.
If we are complex, difficult to do business with, much, much more difficult to gain market share. We need to performance manage what we intend to do, follow up through the organization, all layers. If we are off track, we need to take actions to be back on track. This is the only way to run a decentralized organization if you have a strong performance management. We need to work with continuous improvements. This is not a revolution that we are trying to make. This is a great company, 100 years of experience and heritage. This company is fantastic. We have leading market positions in everything we do. We have the best products, we have the best services. We don't need a revolution. We need an evolution, and we need to develop on how we do things, how we prioritize things. That's what we are working mostly on.
When it comes to managing performance, we will manage our businesses in a way that we give them mandates. If you have a mandate for stability, you have a mandate for profitability, and you have a mandate for growth, that means different things. If you are in the stability phase, it means that your result is not good. You are not competitive in terms of profitability. Your result is fluctuating. You don't control your risks. You need to focus on fixing that first, creating stability in your business, managing the risk exposure in your business. You get the mandate to fix profitability. You need to get your profitability up to industry leadership, preferably. After that, you get your mandate to grow. That's both organic growth and inorganic growth.
You will not also get the capital allocation to be able to do so. We will have a more active portfolio management going forward than in history. We will not shy away from fixing, turning around, growing, or exiting businesses. This is more of an illustrative picture, like you see here, of where our different businesses are. We have some businesses that are clearly in growth, and we have some businesses that need to improve profitability and others that still needs to fix the basics. A bit of a summary of my section here. Our purpose, shaping next generation material handling for a smarter, safer, and better world. We have a really strong platform heritage to build on, and we have a clear plan to execute in our different businesses. We have great people, great competence, capabilities, et cetera.
We have leading market positions in services and equipment. We have a broad customer base, provides us stability and opportunities. We have an unrivaled global service network enabling us to capture more of our own installed base, service sales, but also capturing competitive installed base service and also add-on bolt-on acquisitions. We have technology leadership that will help us to lead development going forward, especially when it comes to these demand drivers and trends in the market regarding sustainability, productivity, and seamless operations, et cetera. We have plenty of market opportunities, and I've tried to illustrate that in the presentation. I believe now that we have an inspirational purpose and ambition as well, and clear strategy for developing our businesses.
This will take us to the next level in terms of growing our sales faster than the market, where market is defined as nominal world GDP, achieving our comparable EBITDA margin target of 12%-15%, where we are not below 12% in a downturn in the cycle. If we are above 15%, it's probably not sustainable over the cycle. We will deliver on our climate targets, we'll achieve improved resilience through our service growth. It's really critical for us to do that. We will do this by having fun, we will increase our employee engagement, that will also get retention in the organization, pride in the organization, that makes you give 110%. Thank you. That was my section.
Thank you, Anders. Now it's time to hear more about Konecranes' financial targets. Please, Teo, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Kiira, welcome also on my behalf. My presentation today actually is comprising of three different themes. We will first be taking a look at the historical Konecranes financial performance a little bit, we will be taking a deep dive on the segment financial targets, like already discussed. Finally, a couple of comments on balance sheet, cash flow, and capital allocation. On this slide, what we have done actually that we have taken to the same picture, orders, sales, comparable EBITA margin, for a period starting from 2017 and ending at Q1 2023 rolling basis. Like already has been mentioned, our previous CMD was in 2017. You may recall that we had targets also at that time, 5% annual sales growth and 11% comparable EBITA margin.
If we take a look at this picture, we actually have been able to improve profitability, not exactly to the line of 11%, but improving anyways. Sales growth has been basically missing, our sales are more or less on the same level as they were in 2017. This lack of sales growth obviously also is one of the key reasons why profitability has not reached the targeted 11% level. The lacking sales leverage, operating leverage is the main reason. Now if we take a look at 2022 in particular, the order intake was excellent in 2022. It was not really visible in our sales, maybe apart from Q1 2023 to a certain extent, but by and large not within the sales.
This of course gives us an excellent order book at the end of 2022 as well as at the end of Q1 2023. Which again then supports us in reaching our financial targets going forward. The order book strength is there when we start this next five-year period. This slide is very busy, but I will try to explain. Here we have taken to the same picture, group and all of the three business segments, so that we have sales, gross margin, and fixed cost as a percentage of sales in the same picture. Now the bar is the sales, gross margin is the red line, and fixed cost to sales is then the grayish line.
These are actually, the pictures are comparable with each other, so the scaling is the same, even though we are not really disclosing the cross-margin percentage as such, but these can be compared to each other. Of course, essentially, if you take a look at cross-margin and you deduct the fixed cost as a percentage of sales from that one, you basically end up with comparable EBITA margin that is. If we take a look at the left-hand side first, it is the group numbers. The cross-margin line has been maybe even surprisingly stable over the years, given everything that has taken place. Whereas fixed cost to sales has been decreasing as a trend, and that has been supporting the profitability improvement that we saw on the previous slide. There is more volatility if you go into the segments.
Service first, this is of course also the secret behind the profitability improvement within Service. Our cross-margin has been increasing and our fixed cost to sales have been decreasing, even if we have not had any massive sales improvement in Service either. These improvements obviously are as a result of the continuous improvement activities that we have been doing and that Fabio will be referring to in his presentation today as well. Industrial Equipment, there also, again, I mean trend-wise, fixed cost to sales has not actually been the issue. The cross-margin, however, has been fluctuating and has not been trending in the right direction. Now the latest dip in 2022 is the thing that we have been also talking about.
We were late in price increases in certain product categories, which impacted our 2022 cross-margin within Industrial Equipment. On the board side, there is volatility in the cross-margin that is primarily as a result of the product mix topics. There is also certain volatility in the fixed cost to sales, but that is primarily as a result of the sales volumes. Maybe two additional comments on this one. First, if you take a look at the industrial businesses, we have the fixed cost to sales is almost on the same level in Service and Industrial Equipment, even though of course cross-margin is significantly higher in Service.
When you take a look at this and think about our industrial optimization program, which is primarily targeted at improving Industrial Equipment, so it's no surprise that Fabio is talking about simplicity and streamlining business models. The more complex environment you have from the business model point of view, the more likely you are to have also high fixed cost to sales. Start with the service and service growth. Clearly faster than the market is our target for sales growth in Service. There are a couple of reasons behind that Industrial Equipment. We have certain product categories where profitability is very good and we would of course like to grow there. At the same time, we have was the same topic as for growth.
Both Service profitability is higher than the profitability for the Equipment businesses on average. Of course it will be supporting further the margin target. On the right-hand side of the slide, we can see that how far we are from to the trajectory that we would be having to reach the say midpoint of the target profitability range. The rate of improvement into the balance sheet and cash flow topics, and we have some other, let's say, targets here in these slides as well. Let's start with the gearing. We are maintaining our target of being below 80% in gearing.
When we take a look at this slide, also gearing has been actually surprisingly stable throughout the years and net debt given all the, all the changes in the marketplace. The of our rolling 12-month sales. The previous target that we had was 15%. However, we also changed the net working capital definition. Actually the 15% with the old definition is actually very close to the 12% with the new definition. There is no significant change of ambition level here. This 12% is a little bit more ambitious, apples to apples comparison than the previous target. Say cash conversion in another way.
In this slide, we have taken the free cash flow excluding net working capital change, which is the grayish bar and comparing that to net profit, which is the red one. What we can see here is that the free cash flow, actually every year has been higher than the net profit. The only exception to this is 2017 in this. Would most likely continue in the near future. Jumping into the loan portfolio and the maturity profile. On the left-hand side, we can see how the maturity profile of the debt portfolio is. 2023 bar is very, very small, so we have basically refinanced whatever needs to be refinanced for 2023. But there will be refinancings to be done in the coming years as well.
We can see, the profile as such is quite okay. No problem there. This picture is on drawn money, it is actually excluding revolving credit facility, which is due in 2024, it's a committed one, we obviously want to refinance that as well. The expectation is that we would be refinancing that still during this year, most likely, during the summer. It's not in a way, now included in the, in the columns, in the bars, in the picture. On the right-hand side, we have net debt to comparable EBITDA, which is another very commonly used indicator of indebtedness. We are primarily using gearing, it's very healthy to take a look at this one as well. It has been trending downwards quite nicely.
We were to take a look at this with official EBITDA, not the comparable one, the volatility obviously would be bigger. At the end of the curve, basically at the Q1 2023, we would be almost on the same level. Difference from the indicator point of view would actually be very small. Jumping to the dividend payments. This is also something that was in Anders' presentation already. We have been paying stable to increasing dividend in the past. The only exception here again is the year 2020, when we agreed with the, at that time, merger partner that a certain euro amount of dividends would be paid. Otherwise, we have been paying stable to increasing dividend.
As the dividend policy says, we intend to continue doing that stable to increasing dividend per share over the cycle. As a final slide, then a couple of comments on capital allocation priorities. On the left-hand side, we have the priorities. Capital expenditure, of course, on a very high priority here. We want to make sure that our manufacturing machinery is in good shape. We want to be competitive going forward as well, and we want to serve our customers well. Like said, it may be good to assume that the CapEx levels will increase from the current level slightly, but no, not necessarily a step change needed there. Dividends have been a high priority, and like the, and of course we will continue to pay dividends in line with the dividend policy.
Acquisitions is the next, strengthening the business with both bolt-on acquisitions, particularly those, but also adjacent acquisitions, provided that there are good opportunities and they fit well with the strategy. Debt repayment, of course, there as well. We are not mentioning share buybacks specifically in this slide, but share buybacks have been in the toolbox. Not that we would have used those very often, but have been in the toolbox, and obviously will continue to be in the toolbox going forward as well. But the primary way of, let's say, returning money back to the shareholders would be dividends, at least in the near future.
If we take a look at the right-hand side, there we have the let's say, free cash flow accumulation and how it has been allocated between different categories, capital expenditure, dividends, acquisitions, and then this cash portion. This slide is actually very difficult to put together now that the leasing payment accounting practice has been changed within the period. Anyways, it gives a big picture on how things have been. The share of dividends obviously is quite high also when taking a look at it from the cash flow point of view.
If any change is to be expected, this kind of % division, maybe we would like to spend a little bit more on acquisitions, given that we have again reactivated ourselves in finding more, let's say, actively targets that would be fit well to our business portfolio. This is actually, this was actually the last slide of the presentation. I think that we now move into the Q&A.
Thank you, Teo. Like I said, now it is time for the Q&A. Any questions from the audience? Maybe we start with— Just a moment. The microphone is coming. I think Panu, you were the first one.
Thank you. It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske Bank. I have two questions. First one is on the Industrial Equipment. You mentioned that you have, like, higher-margin products and then some, lower-margin ones, and you want to grow the higher profitability ones. What does it mean in practice? Are you kind of open to exiting some areas where you are and, when you look at your portfolio, what kind of criteria you apply when you decide whether you keep something or divest something? The second question is on the decentralized op, like organization that you mentioned in the presentation. Just wondering kind of where are you now, compared to where you want to be? Is it quite centralized currently, or are you already decentralized and you just want to continue on that? Is this a big driver for you towards the targets overall? Thanks.
Thank you. I'll start with the Industrial Equipment question. I think we will see more maybe when Fabio has his presentation next after the break. In general, we have different businesses that are in different stages. Even if you are on the stability stage, and even if you are loss-making, if you have potential, we are not going to divest the business. We of course gonna fix it. It's more if you have businesses that are non-core or over a very long time loss-making or doesn't have the prospect of generating growth, et cetera, then we might consider divesting that business. It's nothing that we will say now that we are divesting. The one we did was already the MHE-Demag Industrial Products. It was both non-core and also non-performing.
That's why we divested that business in the end of the last quarter. When it comes to the decentralization or a better word is empowering the customer-facing organization maybe, to control both their top line, their costs, and hence their profitability and also their net working capital. It is mainly to give authority to service the customers, decision-making power to service the customers, but also to be able to demand accountability and not having to ask five people for their accountability of not performing in cost. It's giving people the full mandate basically. Of course, there's, there will always be some allocations, et cetera. We are in many of our businesses already far come. I mean, if we look at Port Solutions business, it's managed and has been managed largely in that direction.
Of course, we will push it further going forward. It's a journey that we will take, starting basically in this year. We will not make revolution here either. It's evolution, because we're not planning to go all the way and be extreme in some direction. We are planning to make it as far as it suits our company and adds the most value for our company.
Maybe if I may add on the if the question regarding the divestment was particularly on process cranes, which has been a little bit, let's say, problematic from the profitability point of view in the past. Fabio will be presenting the plan regarding that one. In essence, it is less tailor-made solutions, more standardization, and simplifying the business models as a result of that, and thus improving the profitability. Fabio has a part of that in his presentation.
Hi. It's Erkki from Inderes. A couple of questions from me, if I may. First, Teo, you showed the historical trajectory in your profitability improvement. Wasn't it so that when 2017, 2019, a lot of that improvement came from the MHPS synergies? Would you agree that it will be much more difficult from now on to remain on that trajectory?
I would agree with the comment that much of that improvement came from the MHPS synergies. I would not necessarily agree with the comment that improving further would be significantly more difficult because we have to remember that the 5% per annum sales growth that we were aiming at did not really materialize and sales have been more or less flat. With the sales growth and the operating leverage as a result of that one, I think that the trajectory makes complete sense.
Okay, thank you.
Maybe adding to that as well, I mean, with the empowerment of our business units and regions, they will also be responsible for driving cost efficiency. If you give that to a business, they normally find efficiencies. We will at the same time also have SG&A or fixed cost efficiency initiatives in the group, not with the ambition to maybe cut from where we are in terms of absolute cost, but to make sure we don't increase as much as you would normally do when you grow your top line.
Okay, thank you. Secondly, will the improvement be, I would say, more front or back-end loaded, I mean, on your path to the target zone? Or have you already identified a number of quick fixes in profitability that will show in the next 12 months or so?
Yeah, I think we have already shown some quick fixes already in Q1. Of course, this is not a hockey stick, if that's what you're asking. This is initiatives, and Fabio will talk about his sort of initiative in Industrial Equipment mainly. It's also a bit in the service side. That will also yield EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million EBITDA by the end of 2025. Already now that is contributing quite significantly in the quarter, in Q1. I mean, if we don't add cost to our fixed base as we're now starting to get out more of sales, you will see a quick effect on the fixed cost out of sales percentage. We're also working with a lot of simplifications and efficiency measures, removing complexities like we have internally, outside the program that Fabio has, and you will see effect from those as well. This is not a hockey stick.
Okay. Thanks.
Tom here in the front row.
Thank you. This is Tom Skogman from Carnegie. In the last strategic period, we saw a lot of EU items and factory closures. Now you show the map, you know, with all your assets. Is it so that we should not expect kind of significant EU items in this kind of strategic period, that you're happy with the kind of setup that you have? You know, are the targets based on further large closures which, you know, typically cause a lot of costs and headaches as well? Will it be more smoother?
If you look at what we have set as targets here, they don't have factored in that we should do a lot of big one-offs. Not saying that we won't have one-offs in the future. For sure that will happen. We need to optimize our footprint and our operations always, as any company. To achieve our targets, none of those large sort of factory closures, et cetera, are incorporated in to be able to achieve those targets.
Thank you. Christian Nygaard, Pareto Asset Management. I have a question regarding the lack of sales growth over this period of time that you showed us. nominal GDP has grown quite strongly over that period of time, so why have you not been able to grow? Or has that been sort of a deliberate strategy not to grow in order to sort of trim the portfolio or something like that? Related to that, to quote you on the first quarter call, you said that most indicators point down, but still, orders grew strongly. I think that was on top of, first quarter last year which also showed very strong growth. You know, both these elements move, the opposite direction, compared to what you would have expected. Please enlighten us.
Do you want to start with the history?
I can start with the history. It has not been a conscious strategy of not growing. That is not what it is all about. There have been priorities that the company has taken. Now, sorry, Fabio, I am taking part of the comments from your presentation, because I know that it happens to be there as well. If we take a look at the beginning of this, let's say 2017, 2018, maybe even 2019 to some extent, so obviously we were focusing on profitability and getting the our act together after the MHPS acquisition, which was, in our standards, a very big one because it increased the size of the company a lot.
We were focused on efficiency and setting the systems and the ways of doing together, and that hampered growth. Then when we were basically ready for the let's say growth phase, we had pandemic, which definitely didn't help, particularly in the service business where these kind of, let's say, agreement sales, for example, is extremely difficult without having physical contact to the customers. These kind of things are there. Now when we take a look at the current situation and hopefully no new, let's say, catastrophes arise globally, but we are ready to go to the growth phase, particularly in service, but also in the other businesses. Now when we take a look at the order intake in 2022, and for example, regarding Port Solutions or the order intake, obviously has been on a fantastic level already. There is indication that the growth will come.
Okay, that means that, I mean, even in a flatter world, the Konecranes engine is now working, better.
Yeah. I mean, our view is that we are becoming more customer focused. We are making it easy for customers to do business with us. We are driving decentralization so that we have an empowered organization that meet customer. They don't need to ask five levels up for approval to do something. They can support the customers today, installing a sense of urgency from our fast response. That's what gets customer loyalty. Then we have, like I had in my presentation, a technology leadership within the areas that are sort of the market trends going forward. That will also help us. We have the, our service network that we can take more of our own sort of install base.
Also with Fabio's initiatives, equivalent parts, we will also be able to take even more of competitive install base, adding acquisitions to that. Then our winning culture, becoming more competitive and becoming winners. We have an engine in the company that will deliver going forward.
Thank you.
I think Antti was next.
Thank you. Antti Kansanen in SEB. First question on growth that you mentioned that perhaps the industrial production hasn't grown in line with the GDP. Now we are talking a lot about building back manufacturing base in U.S. and Europe, nearshoring and things like that. If that occurs, how do you look at your product portfolio on the industrial side? You mentioned the adjacent emerging product groups, which are perhaps not under your core. Is it something that you want to build up bigger organically, make acquisitions? Do you think this kind of a nearshoring trend would also be a positive driver for your ports and core industrial product groups?
I think this is an opportunity for us, nearshoring, as when you build new sort of setups, that's of course an opportunity for us for new builds. At the same time, when you go into the ports, if the ship goes for 24 days or one day, it doesn't really matter. It's how many lifts you do, right, in the port, as long as you can't replace it with trains or trucks or similar. I think there is an underlying demand, and I think that question would be suitable also to take when we are listened to our segment presentations. I think it suits well in there regarding a future strategy for products, et cetera.
We don't see that we will exit a lot of things currently. If we were, we wouldn't, of course, be able to communicate anything until the decision was taken with unions, et cetera. We are constantly evaluating our portfolio, and we will become more active sort of portfolio owners internally.
Nearshoring opportunity, I guess that if you take a look at that as a phenomena, it probably would be beneficial for us because if you move production from one place to another one, typically you do not bring the old cranes with you. In a way, you will need to do new builds, and this would of course be a business opportunity for us. This is for industrial business. If you take a look at it from the port's point of view, if the trade routes change, of course, new capacities may be needed in new places, and that would structurally be a good thing from our point of view.
Okay. The second question is on the margin target and kind of the cyclical range that you have in there. Just to get your ambition level right, if we compare the around 10%-11% that you are making today, is that a comparison period? Is that a good comparison for the 12% or 15%?
You know—
Quick answers, please. We're running out of time.
Yeah. You know, our company is a bit cyclical. As you know, we normally, Q1 is not our strongest quarter. That might change a little bit, so you won't see the same cyclicality going forward. I mean, that's something that it's difficult to exactly say if it's representative to where we are if that's middle of the cycle or not. You are wondering if it's 2% or if it's 4% up from existing levels. I guess we'll have to deliver a couple of more quarters, and then you will be able to adjust the models correctly.
Thank you. In order to keep the timeline, we now need to conclude the Q&A, but we will host a longer Q&A at the end of the event. All the questions through the chat function have been received, so don't worry. They'll be taken also later. Now it's time for a 15 minutes break, so let's be back around 2:30 P.M. Thank you, Teo. Thank you, Anders.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome back from the break. Our next presenter is Fabio Fiorino, Head of Business Area Industrial Service and Equipment, and he will tell us more about what's next to our industrial businesses. Please, Fabio, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Kiira. Once again, good afternoon and welcome. I'm live too. Yes, thank you. For the next exciting topic, delivering service growth and improving equipment profitability in the Business Area Industrial Service and Equipment. Perhaps we should start just with a quick overview of the two segments. Starting with Service. We provide industry-leading lifecycle services for all types and makes of industrial cranes and hoists. The foundation of the business is our agreement base. Our goal is to improve the safety, productivity, and sustainability of our customers' operations. As mentioned, the foundation is our agreement base. We have quite a diversified agreement base. It is, I think, good to point out that about 55% of that base is made up of assets of third-party manufacturers and not our own.
We also have the largest and most extensive service network in our industry, and we're a leading provider of next generation digital services. Switching over to Industrial Equipment. We are a global leader in sustainable lifting solutions, covering a full range of industrial applications. It's worth pointing out we have dual channels to market, our Konecranes brand for direct to end user business. We also have an indirect channel, a distribution channel, that we go to market with several well-known and world-leading or regional brands. It's also good to underscore that 60% of our hoist volume goes through the indirect channel, which really underpins the importance of this indirect channel. We have a very comprehensive offering. It allows us to have economies of scale. We have deep industry expertise and application knowledge.
About 80% of what we do of our volume is standard, and about 20% is specialized equipment. We have also embedded sustainability, both in our product portfolio, in our features and in our design, but as well as in our manufacturing. As we saw, 100% of renewable energy in our manufacturing sites. We also have seen that one of our Finnish sites is now carbon neutral as of this year as well. Again, embedded sustainability. Now we switch over to mega trends and underlying demand drivers. As mentioned before, safety, productivity, sustainability certainly are key to our customers. Digitalization, automation is one area or one of the means that our customers are trying to achieve these targets. Regulations and compliance. That area always gets to become more complex.
There are more regulations related to safety, of course, sustainability, and that's another area where we can help our customers. That certainly also helps us. Aging workforce and outsourcing, those kind of go hand in hand. Again, those support as well our business, you know, goals and trajectory. Last but not least, we're all painfully aware of, you know, the world geopolitical situation and what's going on, especially in the past, you know, couple of years. That is also driving these rethinking the supply chain and supply chain alignments or realignments. As was mentioned before, whether it's friend shoring or near shoring. Again, we are where our customers are today. We're also where our customers may wanna be tomorrow. We can certainly help our customers in that transition and in realigning their supply chains.
Of course, if they move more towards the, let's call it the Western world or other areas where we have a stronger footprint, it of course helps us, as was mentioned before. It is a trend that would be beneficial to us, as I believe Teo mentioned before. Switching over to market share and market size. We are a global leader, but we have plenty of opportunity for market share growth. We look at the total industrial market size, about EUR 20 billion-EUR 25 billion. EUR 10 billion-EUR 15 billion of that would be in service and about EUR 10 billion in equipment. When it comes to market share and service, in the Western markets, we're about 15% market share. When it comes to APAC, less than 5%.
That's primarily driven by some of the larger economies in Asia, of course, China, Japan, South Korea, where we don't have large penetration today. When we look at Industrial Equipment markets, we're certainly a leader in standard cranes and wire rope hoists, 20%-25% market share, but not as much in the light lifting equipment. That's an area there's plenty of growth opportunities, and we talk about the different segments in Industrial Equipment where we can grow. Certainly outside of Europe, especially in North America and in APAC, we have a smaller market share than we do in Europe in light lifting equipment. When it comes to process cranes, you know, we estimate our market share is 5%-10%.
Again, that's a lot driven too by the emerging markets and the heavy process industries like steel in some of those markets. We also have a quite a diversified customer base across industries and across geographies. Our largest segment is general manufacturing, but general manufacturing in of itself is quite broad and diversified, for example. Our second top area is governments, EPCs, A&Es, and general contractors, and that's a primary focus area for the equipment business. Of course, the equipment ends up in the other industries as it is bought through these general contractors of EPCs. When it comes to our customer base, it is also quite diversified.
Our top 100 customers make up roughly 15%-20% of our volume, so we do have a really long tail of customers, well over 70,000 customers in the industrial business. There's plenty of opportunity to increase penetration, share of wallet with existing customers, whether it's at an existing site, whether it might be across various sites of the same customer, or it might be across different customers within the same industry. We may do very well with a particular customer in a certain industry, but not as much with a competitor of theirs or another customer in that industry. There's a lot of opportunity in short, across both industries, customers, and geographies.
Now switching to gears a little bit, looking at our financial performance over the years, if we start with service, we've certainly had a pretty strong track record of strong performance and have proven to be quite resilient even through the difficult times. If we look back a little bit in history, 2017-2019, that was kind of our post-Demag acquisition, post-MHPS acquisition. Really, I think that was kind of covered a little bit before, the focus there was on this integration, delivering the synergies that we had promised. Also we were in the middle of what we call our One Konecranes deployments, our business transformation, digital transformation at the time as well.
There was a lot of focus in bringing in those businesses, getting the systems in place, again, delivering the synergies, which we did actually quite quickly in the service business. Then by 2020, we were ready to pivot to growth. Unfortunately, the world told us otherwise, and we had to shift gears and really focus on business continuity, the safety of our people, taking care of essential industries, cost flexing, rapid adoption of digital technologies. Also at the same time, the beginning of 2020, we had made the MHE-Demag acquisition in Southeast Asia-Pacific. Quite frankly, we had to do that integration through the pandemic, which was quite a, quite a challenge. Now we're at 2023, and our focus once again turns to growth.
Certainly expanding our agreement base, renewing our offering, sticking to our continuous improvement trajectory, digital services, ecosystem, and of course, bolt-on acquisitions. We had a great example here shortly of recently, excuse me, in Whiting in North America. We're switching gears in service now towards growth. Looking back in the performance of Industrial Equipment, we've had a quite a strong orders recovery, while the focus now remains on improving profitability. Going back in history, very similar to service. If we look at 2017, 2019, again, the focus there was on the Demag integration, the, you know, elimination of some overlapping operations and so forth. Really, there was a lot of process crane project cost overruns back in those days as well.
Of course, 2020- 2022, the pandemic hit, supply chain constraints, inflation, and all those other wonderful things, was quite challenging for the Industrial Equipment business. Of course, we also focused there on safety and cost flexing. We had the MHE-Demag integration as well, affecting equipment. It was about a 50/50 in terms of volume between Service and Equipment. As mentioned, you know, we navigated the supply chain challenges and inflation challenges. Now we're at 2023, and our focus in Industrial Equipment is on profitability. Simplifying the go-to-market strategy, as was mentioned before. Already we had stated this from our industrial assessment that we will start to simplify our business, starting with our go-to-market strategy. Price management, commercial excellence, completed platform harmonization, rationalization we had started way back from the MHPS or Demag acquisition.
As was mentioned also, we had just done a recent divestment of the MHE-Demag Industrial Products. Didn't quite fit our core business. It was also not performing to the level that we would have expected. Q1 was quite promising. It certainly set us up for a good start to our focus on profitability. Perhaps a few words on bringing service and equipment together. I think it does benefit all stakeholders, including our customers, our people, as well as shareholders. It does bring an enhanced customer employee experience. First of all, having this one team, one face in front of the customer is certainly helpful.
It also brings a lot of clarity in some of the things we're doing, the simplification and a lot of focus. It's very good for the customer and employee experience. It's been quite, I think, already well-received both by customers and internally, so it's been a very good step. The other good point is that it, you know, it allows us to really have a fully aligned industrial strategy. You know, having two BAs, two different leadership teams, while as much as we can work and collaborate together, it is not as easy as having one leadership team to be able to have a fully aligned industrial strategy. And that is the case today. We have put together the two teams, the two leadership teams. We have now the best of the best working together in one direction.
It also allows us to have a simplified organization operating model, which allows us to be much more agile, decentralized, and also be much more focused on the customer. With all that said, we have not abandoned our segment focus, if you would. Our end-to-end focus on the different businesses, whether it's service, whether it's equipment. We very much wanna make sure we continue to have that focus to drive profitability end to end by segment. We're not putting everything into one bucket. We're striking the, let's say, the balance between the best of both worlds, if you would. Maybe if we dig a little bit deeper into this operating model, and I said, you know, we've done this to strengthen focus on customer centricity, on efficiency and growth, right? To, again, be agile, be more decentralized.
If we look at our operating model, we really have two frontline organizations. I like to say two customer-centric frontline organizations. We have one organization that's really focused on the end user business, what we generally call beta business, the direct business, right? Konecranes Industrial Service and Equipment, using the Konecranes brand. There, the primary purpose is the customer ownership, sales, service, and equipment delivery. That's a regional organization across the world. Then we have another customer-facing organization. In this case, it's a distribution business, an indirect channel, right? Their focus is on building a distribution network. Distributor development, distributor support, right? That's more of a brand organization with well-known brands across the world. Through these two channels, we're basically delivering, promoting, and selling the various services and products, right?
Service, which is field service, spare parts, et cetera. We have standard equipment, which could be light lifting equipment, it could be standard cranes, wire rope hoists. Then we have what we call solutions, and those are process cranes, nuclear cranes. You know, type of equipment that's very much much more integrated into the customer's process, a lot more heavier automation and a lot more integration. It could be, for example, a automated die handling cranes for the automotive industry. It could be waste to energy cranes. It could be automated paper roll storage in the paper industry. That is our what we would call our solutions business. Last but not least, we have this warehouse automation business. Certainly much, much smaller than the other three. It is based around our Agilon product line.
We're now in the process of relaunching the Agilon product line with cool new features, some real new upgrades in that area. That is another segment or area that could have some potential for the future. Across these products and services, you know, we have teams that are dedicated to the commercial and business development, to business process and systems, supply operations, product management, development, and support, as well as the traditional support functions, you know, finance, HR, legal, et cetera. This is our new operating model. We've been building the team since the middle of last year. We're in pretty good shape. We continue to evolve it, continue to push that decentralization as Anders mentioned, continue to on this path of being much more agile.
Again, wanna emphasize this balance between driving the product line, the business line end to end, versus also sharing that customer experience and that one face to the customer, right? As well as being able to share resources in the support functions across, and be able to coordinate across the different businesses as well. It's quite a, I think, a good balance that we, I think we're achieving. Again, the best of both worlds, I think this model brings us. What is our ambition? We're certainly the leader in this industry, but we also wanna set the benchmark among industrials. I'll reiterate our guidance here. In service, sales growth clearly faster than the market, and comparable EBITDA margin of 20%-24%.
In Equipment, comparable EBITDA margin of 8%-10%, sales growth in line with the market. Focus on growth and service, focus on profitability and equipment, customer centricity above all. Anders already introduced the strategic enablers, I think these strategic enablers, you know, allow us to or guide us with our key business area initiatives. If we look at deepening customer focus, for example, you know, one of our key initiatives under that umbrella would be simplification. We've been, you know, on this journey for already at least, let's say, the past year or so. Simplification go to market, simplification our operating model in our offering. Being much easier to do business with, right? I mean, that's what we're talking about here.
Making it easier for our own people, giving them much more clarity and focus, and then making it much easier for our customers to do business with us. The other aspect's commercial excellence, and a lot of focus on the customer experience and the customer journey, whether that's a digital customer journey or otherwise. That's another area, this commercial excellence, another initiative that we have been also working on for a while. Under the accelerating efficiency umbrella, we have several initiatives going on. You know, operational excellence, and that's been quite a while, especially in service. We've been focusing on the end-to-end optimization of the end-to-end processes, right? You know, I'll mention a few of them. I'll go deeper into these here in the service section. Supply chain efficiency. We talked about footprint optimization.
We talked about the Konecranes Way or lean in our operations, supplier diversification, et cetera. A lot of good stuff there. Portfolio optimization. Shedding the things that are dragging us down, as both mentioned, the Industrial Products, adding the things that will enhance our operations, enhance our ability to be more efficient as well as to sell more. Scaling technology innovation. We are in the midst of renewing our offering, both in the service side of the business as well as in the equipment side of the business. Again, I will go much deeper into that in the respective sections of service and equipment. Underpinning all of this, of course, advancing responsible business and enhancing our winning culture. Now let's dive a little bit deeper, starting with service and our focus on growth.
Our agreement base is the key platform for growth and asset management throughout the lifecycle. Perhaps we start with what is our agreement base. Well, our agreement base is made up of inspections, preventive maintenance, and predictive maintenance, perhaps a little bit of corrective maintenance. It makes up about 20% of our overall service sales. That's kind of the foundation of the entire business. Now, that agreement base drives what we would call corrective maintenance. What's corrective maintenance in simple terms is repairs, repairing the things that through the preventive maintenance, the predictive maintenance, and the inspections, we have found. Those two very much go hand in hand, and that represents about 30% of the business. Pretty much 50% of the business is built really as a machine, if you would.
These processes are very much intricately tied and very highly digitized. We have really built this machine in terms of being able to deliver the preventive predictive maintenance tied to the corrective maintenance. On top of that, there are perhaps some more value-added products and services, whether we would be retrofits, which, you know, replacing componentry and machinery, improving ergonomics, safety, et cetera, productivity. Some consultation services that would drive us to do larger modernizations or larger projects, you know, modernizations of themselves, lifting equipment, et cetera. Here this may be a little bit more of a consultative sale, and then perhaps we do need sometimes our service sales or field sales force to be able to close these type of sales.
Very much supported by inside sales. Sometimes a lot of this is very much analytics driven. We have, you know, we have a good grasp for both our agreement base and install base, and we have a good idea when some of these assets are in need of modernization or may need a retrofit, et cetera. We can drive a lot of this promotion of these services by doing data analytics on the asset base. This is about 25% of sales. A large portion of that is tied again to the agreement base as well. The last 25% of sales are basically spare parts and accessories, and these are spare parts that are not installed. They're basically sold without labor, right?
Here, the key to this is, you know, making it easy, convenient, transactional, easy to identify, et cetera. About 50% of those spare parts are sold through e-commerce. The other 50% is basically, you know, through inside sales. That 25%, the customers are either agreement customers, could be non-agreement customers, it could be resellers, and a good percentage of that is actually our distributors from our alpha brands that would be part of that 25%. How do we achieve organic service growth? I would like to say it's as easy as one, two, three. You know, expand the agreement base. That certainly drives the entire business as we just saw.
One of the ways that we're gonna do that is we are renewing our service programs to be much more targeted, and I'll get into that in a second. Continue our focus with the comprehensive agreements for critical production assets with, and with larger accounts. This is kind of our sweet spot. You know, the larger accounts, multi-sites, you know, perhaps they have operations across a continent, across the world, more complex operations. They're looking for asset management, et cetera. Those are the folks that really appreciate what we do, really appreciate our value proposition. That's where I think we would see the bulk of the growth coming from these accounts. Then enhanced customer experience driving customer retention.
If we increase our retention rate, reduce that churn, we're also able to grow faster as well. That's. Let's call it basic math. We have been focusing much more in the past few years in the profitability of our agreement base rather than to just, you know, drive the growth indiscriminately. In fact, we have been focusing on those larger accounts and the folks that, you know, bring us the higher profitability, and we bring the highest value too. The other area is continuously improve sales efficiency planning and service delivery. This is getting a larger share of wallet of those customers in the agreement base, be much more efficient, much quicker, much better at servicing them. This is again, goes back to fine-tuning our machine in a sense.
Things that involve here are sales model evolution, leveraging much more inside sales and customer support, some of the digital tools, creating a much better customer experience through what we'll call smart planning, automated quotations, configurator enhancements. We're rolling out next generation field mobility tools are making our field people much more effective and efficient in dealing with the customers. I'll go a little bit into detail there. The last piece is to expand focus on third-party equipment. As mentioned before, 55% of our, of our agreement base is third-party equipment. Much larger percentage of the non-agreement world or the installed base out there is, of course, third-party equipped. One of the key initiatives here is equivalent replacement parts. These are replacement parts that we either re-engineer, manufacture, or source ourselves rather than buying them from the third-party supplier of that equipment.
That, of course, allows us to perhaps provide a better offering to the customer, perhaps a little more cost effective, and at the same time allows us to improve our margins as well. Hoisting, hoist and component replacement, retrofits, and modernizations. Of course, when we have the maintenance agreement, and it is time to upgrade the equipment to optimize that equipment, we do so with our own technology. If the hoist on that crane needs to be replaced, we of course, offer that to be replaced with our own equipment. Same thing for controls, same things for major modernization. So having our hands, our eyes, our ears on the customer's equipment and being at their site allow us to really, you know, transform their equipment and introduce our technology and our platforms across their entire operations.
Of course, the other part is just totally new equipment, whether it might be light lifting equipment that our service salespeople can sell on the spot or replace, or it could be lead generation for cranes. We get a lot of our lead generation for our equipment from our service personnel. Again, that's quite highly digitized and the process is very much integrated through our platforms. Let's talk a little bit about these renewed service programs. It's not like we didn't have service programs before. We have. We have tweaked them a little bit. What have we done? We're trying to tailor them a little bit better to the different customer segments.
If we start with this condition program, the target of the condition program is really smaller accounts or those accounts that don't have, they may have many assets, but they're not that critical. They're really looking for, make sure it is safe, make sure I'm compliant, and if it's broken, fix it. Otherwise, I don't wanna hear from you. This is about doing easy to do business with the folks that really their hoist and cranes are not that critical to their entire operations. This is where we've had more of the churn in the past 'cause our focus has been more on an asset management. What we've done is we have tailored that condition program. We've added routine maintenance to the inspection, so we can do just about what they need in one-stop shop.
We have streamlined the sales and service delivery process end-to-end. Much more automated. We have taken out some of the consultative approach that we have for those higher customers. We've created the sale and delivery of that program to be much more cost-effective, much more efficient, which allows us to deliver that program in a profitable way. The customer gets to deal with a world-class maintenance company, but gets the type of services that they need and are looking for. That should address reducing the churn on the lower end of the market, let's say. Most of that we're driving towards being evergreen agreements. Again, very highly automated in the entire process.
Of course, we are doubling down on our care program, and this again goes back to these larger accounts, multiple sites, larger Fortune 500 companies, regional companies that really are very much concerned about their equipment. They're looking for asset management. They're looking for that safety. They're looking for improved productivity, sustainability. They're looking for the whole lifecycle approach, which of course we are the leading provider when it comes to that segment. We continue to invest in, you know, the digital and advanced services to support this predictive maintenance, to be able to have the fleet view that the customers require. To have the consultative approach, both, you know, people on the ground and be able to meet with all levels of the organization and be able to jointly plan their operations, et cetera.
That is really kind of our sweet spot, and that's what we do really well. We will continue to build. From the care program, of course, we can continue to expand the outsourcing to what we would call commitment, where it includes full-scale outsourcing of maintenance all the way to complete, which would include also some operation of the equipment if necessary. Digital enablers in service, they have always helped us enhance the customer experience and deliver services more efficiently. Perhaps to dive into a few of these. Unified customer portal. I think this is important to point out. Now that we have service and equipment, and we're bringing them together, we have a lot of wonderful online tools and some award-winning tools, right? We have our yourKONECRANES Portal. We have our Konecranes STORE.
We have Crane Advisor when it comes to equipment. What we're doing is we're bringing all of these pieces together for a unified customer experience. A lot of these self-service tools for quicker contact and support, make sure our customers have full relationship view. Again, this is one of the benefits, I think, in bringing a service and equipment together. It's not that we couldn't have done it before, but it's a lot easier now to get these things done and a lot more efficient. That is one big piece. We're doing the same thing with our own people. You know, making sure that our own people have the full view of the customer, that are able to help the customers end-to-end, whether it's service or equipment or anything else in between.
We're investing in customer engagement tools, sales enablement tools, offer configuration tools. Again, empowering our people to better serve our customers, improve that customer experience, improve that retention. Also improve our employee experience, which also translates to better customer experience. Couple of other areas that are more focused on service, smart planning, as we call it. It is to, you know, be able to schedule work that's really aligned with technician proximity, skill, and material availability. We're optimizing the way we dispatch our technicians, our field force. Making sure that, you know, they're not spending their time driving, they're not spending their time looking for parts, they're not spending their time doing admin tasks, et cetera. Making sure we send the right person with the right tools, with the right information, with the right part to the right place.
Sounds simple, but it's all about the execution, right? Again, there's a lot of opportunity here. This whole continuous improvement in service, there's a lot of runway left. Hand in hand with that goes our next generation mobility tools. We call it our mobility app SLIM. Now we're on SLIM 2.0. We just launched this year. 10% of our workforce is now on the next generation tool. It has been extremely well-received. It really improves the employee experience of our technicians. It helps them, you know, guide them in their work. It gives them information in what they're to do in terms of being able to have standard operating procedures, videos, live tech support.
It helps them with improving our data quality when it comes to our assets, and everything's driven by data quality on the end-to-end process. This is really an exciting next generation here. We are gonna really accelerate the deployment starting actually this month. We kinda went through the first few months to really do the trial and make sure that the back end was robust. We're now ready to step on the gas, and over the next few months all our service, entire service workforce will be on the next generation mobility tools. We also believe we have an unmatched offering and leading technology and service. Again, that we talked about these equivalent parts a few times. Both these parts can be used in our corrective maintenance offering, right?
We can offer them in terms of when we're repairing ourselves the equipment. They could also be offered online or in other means to other resellers, to end users, et cetera. We continue to build a number of items that we have in this equivalent parts offering. TRUCONNECT, our remote monitoring platform and offering, and which of course supports predictive maintenance. We continue to invest in that platform. We also have some pretty popular digital services. CheckApp for daily inspections. It allows the operator to do the daily inspection that in most jurisdictions are required, but it's a good idea anyways. That also brings that operator into the ecosystem. It also brings in that data that usually gets on a piece of paper and probably gets lost into our ecosystem as well.
Then again, also that's helping the customer with compliance, right? Making sure the records are there. That's a great, you know, great tool. Another worth mention is this digitized Slings and Accessories. A sling basically is, you know, between the hook and the load, right? This, there's literally thousands of these attachments, you know, in every plant. Very hard to keep track of. They still need to be inspected. They're part of the load path. You know, we're applying our RFID tags to these so we can track them. We're also bringing, again, into our reporting ecosystem, both for compliance and also ease of doing those inspections. Just some good examples of what the exciting stuff that we are doing.
If we switch gears to inorganic growth, you know, there are plenty of acquisition opportunities across various sectors. Of course, we are very excited about bolt-on acquisitions. You know, targeting bringing in an install base, right? That's again, it adds to the agreement base, brings service opportunities, may bring other customer segments, bring in new technicians, new technical resources. That's another great part of a bolt-on acquisition. We're able to quickly integrate these acquisitions, creating significant synergy potential. We have the infrastructure, we have the business model, we have the systems. We could easily bring in the sales and the technical workforce and onboard them, and we don't need the existing infrastructure per se of the acquisition target.
Recent case, Whiting, again, a company that's had over 100 years of history, already pretty much well integrated into our operations in North America. We're also looking for new technologies and capabilities. A lot about industrial automation, systems integration, maybe material flow simulation. You know, an opportunity to bring a more holistic approach to our customers. New market entry expansion. There are some significant markets that we could be much bigger in. Those are areas that we could continue to evaluate. Of course, there may be some other complementary products and services that we do sell today, but maybe it's an opportunity for some, let's say, vertical integration or to be able to sell more of some of these products. Of course, bolt-on and the technologies are very interesting to us.
Technicians, of course, are at the heart of our success and are key to our growth. We're of course, in a war of talent. We always get very good feedback on our technicians and our voice of customer. Usually we get our highest marks when it comes to our technicians, so we're very proud of that. They again, they're really key to our success. We, of course, in order to grow, we need more of them. We're doing different things to address that. Number one is, of course, let's improve their productivity. Let's make them more efficient.
A lot of the things that we talked about is to make sure that they're either with customers or working on the assets, and when they're working on the assets, they do so much more efficiently and more effectively. Just able to spend less time looking for information, looking for the tool, looking for the part, driving to the place, et cetera. Again, you can we may need less technicians if we can make the ones we have much more productive. Safety is another piece, right? Reducing lost time, that's another area that we can address. Of course, increasing retention. Same concept as with the agreement base. Let's increase their retention when it comes here to our technicians. Again, the employee experience is very important, a lot of the things that I talked about.
We're, of course, obviously actively recruiting technicians, and we're hiring on a daily basis, and we never have enough technicians. That's something that we continue to do. We are spending and investing into employer branding. People may know us in our industry, but we do need to go out and get folks from other industries. We're also looking at more diversified talent pools. We're hiring much more, many more female technicians, for example. There's 50% of the population that we can tap into. There's a lot of areas that we can continue to help ourselves and more and more in the future, we'll have to grow our own technicians, whether it's through training programs, through apprenticeships, through trade school cooperation, et cetera. Perhaps let's summarize the service growth plan.
We of course, have a proven business model. I think we've shown that. We have continuous improvement in our DNA and there's plenty of runway still left there. you know, country by country, but even in, in the countries that are at the top of our list, there's still a lot of improvement opportunity. now the time is towards sales acceleration. Where that's gonna come from? The many areas that we talked about, right? Commercial excellence, agreement retention, large account penetration, very important, but also reducing the churn on those small accounts with the optimized offering. you know, as was mentioned, renewing our service programs, evolving our sales models, account management, especially for those large accounts. This continuous improvement of the sales and service delivery end-to-end process and the customer experience and journey.
You add to that some of the new service products that are either out or in the pipeline, and the bolt-on acquisition and geographical expansion will take us to that sales growth that's clearly faster than the market. Now let's switch gears once again. Let's talk about Industrial Equipment and focus on profitability. As mentioned before, we are simplifying our go-to-market strategy to be more agile and efficient. You know, dual channels to market with shared equipment platforms ensure market coverage. They drive economies and scale and enhance profitability. Okay. Now you may say, "Well, that's nothing new to Konecranes," right? Now I've been around Konecranes for quite a while. We've always had dual channels to market. What is different today? Two things. Very important. One, we are using a single global brand, Konecranes, for end users.
Post- Demag acquisition, the Demag brand kinda straddled both channels. Demag brand today is by far the largest, distribution brand already. In many markets it is also an end user brand. That brings some confusion to the market, has brought some inefficiencies. That's part of the simplification, is to transition the Demag brand to fully to be a distribution brand. They're already quite there already, but it's to bring it all the way in all markets around the world. We're not doing that overnight and flipping a switch. We're very much doing that in a very systematic way to make sure that our customers are with us and see that transition. There's a lot of opportunity in that. The second piece when, that's just as important, perhaps more important, is shared equipment platforms.
Today, we do not have shared equipment platforms between those two brands. There's a lot of inefficiencies when it comes to the equipment platforms. I know we've talked about that in the past, but we haven't quite got there yet. Now it's time to execute. I'll explain a little bit that in more depth. We'll have focused and clearly defined sales channels, brands and offerings with dedicated teams to direct and indirect. If we talk a little bit about this product harmonization, you know, using Core of Lifting purpose-built components to make us more competitive and to drive economies of scale, we look at electric chain hoists. Today we have three global platforms for electric chain hoists. The goal is to go to one.
We're already on our way, it'll take us, you know, one to two years to get it all done. There is a huge opportunity there. Light crane systems, we're down to one, but we have not extended the full range or the full options across multiple brands, including to the Konecranes brand. This one's almost simpler. We have it there. We need to do some extension of that offering. Standard wire rope hoists. We have four, or we had four global platforms. We're in the process of ramping down two. That's already started. By the end of the year, we'll be down to two with the possibility then going forth to have a unified single global platform. Winch is kind of the same story. Winch is just a big hoist. Cranes, standard cranes.
We have two platforms, two different hoists, some different componentry, some different design, different processes. That makes it even worse. Different systems. We're now moving to one platform. That's already started. This is quite big. You may say it's the same thing that we've said in the past, the reality is that we're making it happen. This next generation of products, next generation light lifting, help us to deliver growth opportunities, enhance profitability. You know, a full range offering from basic through advanced and premium shared mechanical platforms. We're expanding the light crane system offering. Very important here. It's areas that there is a growth opportunity.
There is a lot of product expansion going on and, both in features and range and other things that we have in the pipeline for the light crane systems. Again, this is an area, more ergonomics, more assembly and manufacturing, et cetera. There's a lot of trends that support the light lifting equipment growth and has been for years. We're gonna set a new standard of lifting and wire rope, as we've done in the past. Our current platform is wonderful. We've had it for over 20 years. It's served us extremely well, but it's time to also take the next leap.
By the end of the year, beginning of next year, we will be launching what we call our S-series low headroom hoist, which will now set the standard in the industry once again. Higher performance, it'll be future-proof when it comes to the norms and standards of the future. More eco-efficient. Over-the-air upgradable features. Very much a scalable platform from, you know, base mechanical offering to a more, much more advanced when it comes to controls and automation, other things. We'll have connected smart features added to that, and interestingly enough, lower production costs as well. This is our next generation when it comes to wire rope hoists. We're well on our way to getting this launched. Bits and pieces and technologies are already out there, so it's not totally new.
This should be a game changer as well for the wire rope business. Process cranes. I know there's a lot of questions regarding process cranes, or sometimes referred to ETO. We're improving process crane profitability primarily through productization, but also through commercial and project management excellence. What do we mean by that? We look before their multiple winch platforms. First of all, these winches that are used in process cranes, we are rationalizing, harmonizing those platforms. There are many other technologies that go along with process cranes that need to be rationalized and harmonized. If we look at today, 20% of that offering is productized. 55% is tailored, 25% is somewhere in between. We're gonna turn that upside down, where 40% of that offering is productized.
What we would call ETO or engineer to order, we're gonna turn that into configure to order. That's, that 40% is basically addressing general industries, just higher lifts, maybe higher speeds, a little higher duty, et cetera. It's nothing magical. There is these industry-specific applications. You know, I mentioned your automated die handling in the automotive industry, paper roll storage, waste to energy, et cetera. We are productizing those. We're in the midst of making those much more productized, so it's, so we're not starting from scratch per se. Even on the tailored side, which we will only get to be only 20%, we're gonna still use existing Lego blocks, the Core of Lifting gears and motors and control systems, et cetera, to put them together for these tailored offerings.
That is, that is the secret sauce and how to get process cranes profitable. You add that, some commercial excellence and then price management and focusing on the right segments and proper risk management and project management, and we will have, I think, a very profitable business, and we're starting to on that path. Very, I think, good to point out. Process cranes provide significant lifecycle management opportunities when we talk about the entire business, including service. They are an essential part of the offering when it comes to large customers. Again, those very important large customers, we are the global leader, we're Konecranes. They expect for us to also have an offering in those areas, whether it be automotive companies, et cetera. The manufacturing footprint, I think we addressed that a little bit already.
It has been, we have been rationalizing and developing it over the years. It's good to break this up into two pieces. Crane manufacturing, which is really steel fabrication and then final assembly of cranes. This is not perhaps a factory or a plant as we would imagine, nothing too complex or. There, you need to be close to the customer. It's not easy to be shipping large steel cranes, you know, across large geographies, especially when we're talking standard equipment. There, you know, we have plants that are close to the customer, but we supplement that with subcontracting network, and we're continuously looking and evaluating that.
When it comes to the components or the core of the crane, that's what does the lifting, the machinery, the winches, the wire rope, light lifting equipment as well, there we have a bit of a different strategy where we're centralizing those into global and regional hubs. Somebody may ask, "Well, why don't you put them all into one, into a low-cost country and ship it across the world?" You would not have the delivery times necessary to be competitive in that market. We do need these regional hubs. We can certainly balance loading between them. We can certainly have global supply chains in cost-competitive countries. That final assembly, that needs to be closer to the customer, it cannot be just in one place in the world, in case somebody was wondering.
If we look at the equipment profitability plan, you know, as we already have gone out with this EUR 40 million-EUR 50 million business optimization, I like to call business transformation plan, very much the pieces that I spoke about, right? The operating model, go-to-market simplification, the sales evolution, the platforms, the footprints. Intralogistics is a big area in some of our plants. Divestitures, et cetera. That will get us a good way there. That's, that plan should take us through 2025. Then some of the next generation products that I mentioned would allow for some nice gross margin improvement. They're much more cost effective. They're also much more competitive, and they also allow us to sell into other markets as well as we're adding features and other things and expanding the product line.
Of course, there could be some sales leverage and lower cost structure to get us to the final piece. That is the equipment improvement plan. Perhaps we can summarize and conclude. We are pretty confident that, you know, working as a one customer-centric team, Industrial Service and Equipment is well positioned to deliver this plan. You know, in summary, Service, the salient points, service program renewal we talked about and tied to the agreement-based expansion, the enhanced customer experience and journey, commercial excellence, price management, this continued optimization of the sales and service delivery that we've been on, equivalent parts for third-party equipment, bolt-on acquisitions. Those are the key points in delivering service. Again, service sales growth clearly faster than market, comparable EBITA margin 20%-24%. In equipment, we just went through them.
Go-to-market, operating model simplification, this platform harmonization, rationalization of the platforms, the commercial excellence, the price management, renewed offering, the supply chain and operational excellence, portfolio optimization, bringing us to a comparable EBITA of 8%-10% and sales growth in line with the market. That's it. I guess time to say thank you, and time for questions.
Thank you, Fabio. Maybe you can click the next slide, too. We have time now only for a couple of questions, so maybe one question per person. Erkki. You can then start. Just a moment. The microphone is coming.
Thank you. I guess there's been a lot of talk about the product harmonization now over the years. Why has that not been too successful in the past?
I think perhaps there was hesitation as to what impact it may have in the market to some extent. Some of it might have been lack of execution. Some of it, of course, to be fair, there was a lot to do, and a lot has been also done over the years. Then we hit, you know, pandemic, supply chain issues, merger and all these other things that maybe were a little bit of a side distraction. But, you know, I'd rather not concentrate on the past. You know, I've been on the equipment side now for, you know, let's say a year. And I'm here to execute on the plan. Whatever happened in the past happened. Now we move forward, and we get it done. Simple as that.
Only one question?
Well, you know, if there are any other questions from the audience, so please you can stay for a second question.
Okay.
Then, Stig, after you. Okay.
Yeah.
Oh.
Yeah. I better rise. My name is Stig Gustavson. I'm a fairly large shareholder at the company, and as many of you know, the past CEO and Chairman also. First a comment. When we looked at Teo's figures a couple of years ago, there was a merger talks with this company was involving. Of course, that had under some impact on the performance of the company, and that's why we had a little bit sort of lost focus during those years. I'm happy that the merger failed, of course, it created resistance not only inside the organization, but also with our clients. I really had to say thank you so much for the boys and girls who took us through that without too much disturbance at all.
A special thanks to Teo, who was the Interim CEO at two times, two periods, actually. The second comment goes to Anders and Teo about growth. I mean, you, Fabio, very clearly commented on acquisitions, and that's typically a growth pattern for service. There are small acquisitions, but there needs to be a lot of them. I think you are quite on the right track. However, on the Konecranes map, there are also quite a number of white spots. That's also in this kind of mature business, one way of expanding into those areas is also through acquisitions. Now, we all know that those acquisitions, not all of them are attractive, but we should be open for that as well.
It would be good for also the CEO in this kind of Capital Market Day environment to state that those are also of interest for the company. That has been the traditional way of Konecranes to go into new territories, and I think we should not forget about that. They take time. The Whiting acquisition, the first talks were held in early 1990.
I remember.
Yeah. Demag took two years. We have to be open to that. I understand fully that it's not very, very easy to comment on those officially in a environment like this. I hope that you will also remember that. My third point and question goes to Ukraine. We all know that Konecranes has a fairly big factory in Zaporizhzhia, 350 employees, if I remember correctly, and also service operations along the Black Sea coast. I would like to hear what has happened to that. Also, we all know that after war comes peace. There are very good signs that already the Americans are moving into Ukraine for getting ready for the period after the war, because there will be a lot of restructuring or total rebuild to happen.
Konecranes has a very good position already in Ukraine. Konecranes is also a founding member of the East Office of Finnish Industries. The East Office has already now established its first foothold in Kyiv. I think that I would like to hear your thoughts about further expansions into that future interesting area. Thank you.
Well, thank you, Stig. It's good to see you again. First of all, maybe just to quickly address the market entry or expansion into the white spots, certainly it is one of our target areas. There are certain significant countries that we could certainly be either much more active in or we could enter. Not always the easy ones, but there are some significant countries out there still to look at. Some of that was, again, going back to the, you mentioned the merger, some of that was being looked at, but then we had to take a pause during that period. Thank you for pointing that out, Stig. Absolutely. When it comes to the Ukraine, well, you know, we haven't, we certainly still have the facility there.
There has been operations here and there, the folks that wanna work and then sometimes have surprisingly produced, you know, products throughout this war. They never cease to amaze me how the resilience and the courage of the Ukrainian people. We stand behind them as well. We have continued to support the people there. You know, when things stabilize, we can certainly, you know, get back to work. When it comes to service, the industrial service operations weren't a big operation, but certainly ports were much bigger, and I think some of that continues. Unfortunately, I think some of those are under occupied areas today.
If the tide changes, we can certainly, if and when, I should say when perhaps, we can certainly get back to business. There's nothing that's stopping us from doing that. Hopefully that answers your questions.
Thank you, Fabio. Let's now again try to keep with the timeline. We will have the last Q&A, and all the four presenters will join me for that. Fabio will also be available for more questions then later. Now it's again time for a short break, 15 minutes. Let's be back around quarter to four. Thank you.
Thank you.
Welcome back from the break again.
Our next presenter is Mika Mahlberg, Head of Business Area Port Solutions, and he will tell us more about what's next in our ports businesses. Stage is yours, Mika.
Thank you, Kiira. Warm welcome from my side as well, and I'm happy to share how Port Solutions is going to generate profitable growth in the future. Port Solutions is the leading Western supplier in container handling and ports industry. We have the deepest and widest offering in the competition environment, and we are industry-focused organization with well over 10,000 assets. All the latest ones, which is roughly 2,500, are remotely connected. We have the best knowledge, technical knowledge, and operational knowledge of the container handling in our organization, if you think about the competition environment. We can bring that knowledge to our local use and for the customer's benefit with our vast service network and with our lift truck's distribution network.
We have a clear sustainability roadmap to meet our customers' needs. If we look at the market development, you probably all know that the container traffic through the terminals is the common driver for the industry. In the time before pandemic, the growth was typically twice of the GDP. When the pandemic came, there was a drastic drop in the container volumes, and then very fast jump back to the high numbers. If we look at the numbers today, we're still on the historical high numbers and comparable to pre-COVID times. In 2022, there was a modest growth, about half a percent point, and this year, 2023, the prediction is that it's a similar 0.5 % growth.
When we move after 2023 to 2024, the prediction is, like Anders said, somewhere 4%. It seems that we are on the soft landing right now, and people are talking that the second half of 2023 is the time when the traffic will start picking up. It is good to understand that our customers, especially when they make investment plans and decisions, they look over the cycle, so they don't necessarily follow the traffic on the terminals. Of course, when you look transactional business, that may be true, but with the bigger investments, there are also other factors on those decisions. The container traffic volume on the terminals is not the only source of growth and is not only the only way that we look at our opportunities to grow.
Our customers are looking ways of removing waste from their processes, and they use digital tools. They also look how they can be more productive, improving the productivity, and they typically go into the automation discussions. Konecranes is in very good position to offer these digital and automation solutions. E-commerce has been fueling on the pandemic, so that was when people started to use money because there were no services available. This means that our customers' customers, so shipping lines and other companies that are in the logistics, they are looking for end-to-end integrated logistics solutions, meaning from factory to the door. This is meaning that there is a lot of activity for building inland terminals, distribution centers, and warehouses. With our current offering, we are in very good position to take that growth opportunity as well.
Sustainability is very important. Our customers and customers' customers, so terminal operators, shipping lines, have similar sustainability commitments as Konecranes has. This does not only mean increased sustainable equipment sales, but also our customers are looking how to intensify the footprint of their terminal. So how can they do that? That means that there are these automation opportunities which are basically spawning from the sustainability needs. We are very well-aligned with our customer needs in sustainability offering. Labor shortage is a global phenomenon, and our customers are suffering from that, and they typically look automation solutions in order to mitigate that problem. Last, geopolitical issues.
We all know and we have discussed about the war in Ukraine and increasing tension between the U.S. and China and all that insourcing, nationalism, protectionism, and all that. How we think it is that we are the leading Western supplier, so we have a certain competitive advantage. Also our asset-light global supply network that we are having globally in many continent is something that we can use as a competitive advantage in this kind of protectionism or buy America type of movements where people are looking for local manufacturing. If we look at the markets, first is the equipment market. Equipment market with all kinds of equipment in ports, container handling or unitized or other type of handling is roughly EUR 10 billion-EUR 15 billion. We hold about 10% market share of that.
If we look the stronghold offering that we are having, then in those segments, we say that we have roughly 25% market share. This market is driven by the global terminal operators. They have roughly two-thirds of the volume, so they are the ones who are making the decisions. They are driving this market. Automation segment itself grows roughly twice as fast as the manual equipment segment. Like I said, the hinterland, as it's typically called in this industry, offers a lot of opportunities, and there is a lot of new build opportunities. When we look at the port service market, this is EUR 8 billion-EUR 9 billion, and we hold 5% market share. However, this is slightly different than in our industrial service.
The majority of this market is in-house or insourced. It's not very common in maritime terminals to outsource a lot of service operation. In inland, it's much more common. We expect that step by step this will change. We see customers that wonder what is the core capability or core advantage that they are having, and those who say that service is not, they are more ready to also outsource that business as well. Konecranes is in very good position to capitalize all these growth opportunities. We have the widest and deepest offering, full line of equipment, services, solutions, automation solutions and software. We are the sustainability and automation solution provider, and we can support the customer throughout the lifetime they are having assets.
The knowledge that we are having sets us apart. We can extend or we can reach our customers with the local operation that we are having. Here is a bit of historical financials. If I look at the starting from 2017, this is a time when the business area Port Solution was formed. The three years until 2019 was mainly we focused on integrating the organization, optimizing the footprint. We closed three factories, and we were also combining the product platforms. Development was nice. In 2020, when the pandemic came and you saw from the volumes, the order intake drastically went down. It improved a little bit 2021, but not significantly.
In 2022, it started to boom. With the COVID time material availability issues and with the capacity issues or lockdowns in many countries, we were not able to capitalize all those orders, and now we see the sales increasing in Q1 2023. However, if you look at on the right-hand side where we have the order book, and these numbers are from the end of the year. End of 2022, we had EUR 1.6 billion order book, which is fantastic. Now if you have seen the Q1 numbers, we have EUR 1.8 billion order book.
If you look at the bars, they are telling that a lot of that order is going to be in sales, not this year, but next year and even beyond. We have very good basis to leverage the good and healthy order book that we are having. This is our Port Solutions operational model. This has been in use since 2017. We have six business units which are end-to-end responsible for global business. They have certain offering that they are having. They are profit and loss responsible, and they are facing the customers.
The advantage of this type of operating model is, of course, that we have business responsible people, and we have people who are next to the customers, and they are making all the decisions next to the customer. It's very lean, very direct and good in this respect. Of course, they are supported with the agile functions which are, which are there on the, on the left-hand side. In Port Solutions, we also hold a very unique repeat business model where the customer is in the focus. When we do sales, deliver and support our customers, our target is always the next order. Whatever we do, we always think that we do so well that when the customer thinks about next order, let it be equipment or service, Konecranes is in the pole position in their thoughts.
This is very important in this type of a business which is relatively small and kind of manageable, and same people are moving from one customer to the other. What is our target? We aim to be the world number one in our core offering. The financial targets we went through a couple of times, but let's repeat. Sales growth clearly faster than the market. Like I said, before COVID, it used to be twice or 1.5x the GDP. I'm sure that we can reach that. The profitability, comparable EBITDA to be between 9% and 11%, depending on the cycle. How are we gonna do that? Basically, we have listed the main actions there.
We are going to focus on the core offering. We have a specific program to grow both services. We are going to go after automation and sustainable offering and opportunities. We are focusing certain excellence operational excellence things which are internal topics. If we look at this, the market opportunities from the product perspective, these are the main products. If you look at the market size, then clearly service has the biggest market then the so-called yard cranes. ASCs and RTGs and ARTGs have a fairly big market as well. Lift trucks are having a big market. If you look at our global position, we are mostly either number one or number two in most of these cases.
Looking at the market trends, which are the piece of equipment or equipment system that is increasing kind of proportionally because these systems are fighting against each other sometimes. The most attractive are service AGVs and then the yard cranes and lift trucks. It's also noticeable that some of our customers have exited from this space, even from the growing market segments. This has, of course, helped us to increase our order intake and sales, and we believe that we have clearly taken markets in certain areas. Here are the things that we or the product areas that we're gonna focus on. Service, no-brainer. We're gonna accelerate the growth. As well as lift trucks.
We wanna be going with the bigger markets here and we want to accelerate the growth. The yard cranes, automatic stacking cranes, RTGs, ARTGs, we continue the good growth that we are having today. The rest, we wanna focus those as well, AGVs, mobile harbor cranes, straddle carriers. If you saw the market size, these are not going to offer such a potential to grow. However, in here, we wanna be as strong as we or stronger than what we are today. Improving, of course, the market share and improving the profitability especially. If we go to the strategic enablers, and I will go through a couple of topics which are the most important when we look at the profitable growth.
I have picked up the service excellence, project management excellence, automation and electrification, and I will explain a little bit closer about these topics. Port Service growth, I mean, Port Service, first of all, more profitable typically than Equipment business. It makes sense to grow this one. It also ensures customer happiness. It's very important from the repeat business concept point of view that we can be next to the customer, making sure that they are happy and they buy again. Very important. Increasing own and third-party fleet. With the current order book, we will substantially increase our assets. Of course, that is the basis for the coming years. When we started 2017, we started by purpose only looking Konecranes fleet.
We wanted to take kind of a first step so that we concentrate on the Konecranes fleet, but now we have added the third-party fleet as well. That gives growth potential. We are boosting e-commerce and other channels so that it's easier to buy from us. We are expanding geographical footprint. This typically means that we establish our operation, specifically port service operation in a location. We are looking constantly. Last year, for example, we established this in Mexico and a couple of other places. Data based offering, this is similar what Fabio was explaining. We will use data for predictive maintenance and that type of activities. Retrofits for automation and sustainable products.
These are very important because we have good products from the years ago that we have delivered and customers love them, but they want to retrofit them, get more sustainable product, for example, or automate. Our products are perfect for that purpose. We have also the bolt-on acquisitions in our mind. If we look at the up port automation. There are maybe 35 automated, semi-automated terminals globally. If you look at all these Konecranes has delivered either equipment or software to two-thirds of those. We have been in many of those projects. There's the reference list. You don't need to read all that. There's a lot of small font, but we are all over. We have a lot of references, good references.
A matter of fact, we were not even able to update all that. I hope that some of you have noticed that last week we published 36 Automated Rail- Mounted Gantries to Virginia, to Virginia Port Authority, to NIT Terminal. We already have their, I think it's 86 units and 30 units in another terminal, it will be having more than 120 Konecranes units, even more. Fantastic, EUR 130 million order. Another example is that which is not on the list yet is PSA, as well as Port of Singapore Authority in Sines, Portugal, that they bought 6 ARTGs to an existing terminal that they are expanding. They are in the process of turning the manual RTG operation to automated RTGs.
This gives a good basis for expansions and replacement. This is very important that we maintain. Again, the repeat business model is very important, so we can benefit the replacement and expansions. This is mainly for AGVs and ASCs and equipment control system. If we look at the different sizes of terminals, large terminals, yes, most of them are automated today from the very beginning, and they are typically looking for AGVs, ASCs or ARMGs, sometimes ASARs. Those are not really sold, but there is in a kind of a planning phase. Of course, equipment control system always goes with that.
The medium-sized container terminals, typically like Sines, they are looking for or they are most probably RTG-driven, so they have a handling system with RTGs, and they are looking for automating those. That's typical for medium-sized terminals. For the small-sized terminals, we don't see a lot of opportunities there. It's mostly for us, large and medium-sized. Inland terminals are built more. Like I said, they will come with the automation, not necessarily today, but they will go into a process where they start looking for productivity, predictability and all that which is happening with the automation. This will boost our service contracts, of course. Typically, in these terminals, we have a SLA, kind of a service level agreement.
We have remote connections, we have local people, so that is a good phase to add also that in service business. These brownfield conversions are more common today than the greenfield. I think we were predicting that already in 2017 in the previous CMD, then that has happened. Most of these cases are, like I said, these two examples. Those are existing terminals, and these brownfields are normally from straddle carriers to ASCs, and from RTGs to ARTGs. We have also selected retrofits non-Konecranes equipment for automation, so we are also looking at those opportunities. A lot of opportunities for automation. This is the way how we discuss and think the automation with our customers, so it's a stepwise process. Customer has the possibility to have a—
They can choose the risk appetite and the level of automation. We do stepwise automation approach. They can have smart features to help the operation. They can have a supervised operation where the operator is still on board, they can go to full automation, or they can have a remote operation. The beauty of this is that with our current product design, we can start selling the manual equipment and all that, all these phases can be done with the Konecranes equipment in the future later on. Core of Lifting technology platform is very important to us. We saw some presentation already in the beginning, basically Konecranes designed, mostly also manufactured component, mechanical, electrical, control systems. Now why I'm having it here is the power option. We do a lot of electrification of the mobile equipment.
Konecranes heritage is coming from the electrical side. It's very easy for us to add that into our Core of Lifting technology platform because we are coming from the crane side where electrics is very common. What we are doing now is we add the power options to our Core of Lifting platform. To complement that, of course, we have the remote connections to each of our assets that we are selling. Then we have the capabilities at the local level with our service, and then we have a centralized knowledge that we can use in the benefit of our customers locally. That's the whole system we are using as a technology platform. We want to, of course, utilize this as widely as we can with our offering. Here we have our eco-portfolio roadmap.
The gray line on the top illustrates the portfolio availability. What is available, and that's in relation to our sales. Today we have 80% of our offering if that was sold with the current sales numbers, is eco-efficient platform already. We intend to complete that by 2026, when we electrify the rest of the lift trucks that we still have. If you look at the red line, which is on the lower, that is the actual sales of our eco-efficient equipment. We are talking about only about equipment in this illustration. We are now on the level of 60%. Going forward, we have a kind of estimation for the coming years, but we believe that by 2030 we would be somewhere over 80%.
This, of course, depends not only on us, but on the regulators, governments and the appetite and the commitment that our customers are having. Of course, we do our best so that we hit the upper limit of the scale. Hydrogen is something that has been discussed quite a lot. I thought that it would be maybe good to have just a update on this one. Basically, hydrogen can be used even today by mixing it with diesel, then you reduce the emissions, or you can have a combustion engine which is using hydrogen.
The last is the fuel cell system, which is pretty much having an electrical vehicle or electrical mobile equipment, and you just replace the big battery with a smaller battery and with the fuel cell and a tank which is supplying the hydrogen. Of course, there are technical issues here, but this is more about the global production of clean hydrogen. That is the kind of topic here more than the technical thing that is technical. It could be done easily. It's not that complicated, but the amount of green or hydrogen which has been done with the clean energy or electricity does not exist that much.
You need a lot of low-priced electricity because the efficiency of making hydrogen is lower than using it in electrical vehicle directly. It's coming and we are working In Germany, with one of our customers, with 1 mobile equipment to test this so that we are ready to take that to the market when time is right. Here is an example of one product development that we are doing with a technology partner together. This is called Automated High-Bay Container Storage. This can be used in maritime terminals, but mostly in the hinterland. Basically this is a storage for containers where you can easily store containers.
The beauty of this system is that it's really in a reduced footprint, so it doesn't require that much space. You can take any container out of it, so they are not stacked on top of each other, but they are separately in the rack, and you can access those independently. We have done several studies, and we are in discussions with several customers and hope that of course, that we can conclude a deal in the coming quarters. There is also a very good sustainable aspect on this one. In most of these studies that we have done, if you put solar panels on top of this structure, you can basically generate in most of the places enough electricity to run the whole system, which is fantastic.
This is something for the future, and this is especially for the inland use in warehouses and distribution centers where containers are typically stripped and stuffed and they are in the end of the kind of road. We focus on operational excellence. These are the things that we do internally. Active price management, of course, this is very important. We have been able to push all the inflationary price increases, labor inflation, material inflation, transportation cost, all these volatilities quite well into our prices, and we continue to do that. We have a prudent cost management, and we run comprehensive procurement actions to make sure that we have a good cost base.
There is a good need to have a good key account management because of this repeat business model. You kind of see the customers many times over and over again. Of course the performance matters, but it's very important that we work with the key account management. Also, the global terminal operators, as you know, they may have 70 terminals or 50 terminals. The decisions are made either on the local level or in the head office. The balance between these two depends. Of course, we need to understand that. We favor asset light and flexible supply. This means that in big structures, we only do subcontracting. We are not looking for having a lot of factories.
The mobile equipment distribution or distribution model is also asset light. We are not having monies tied into local operation, but the third-party distributors are taking care of that. Project management excellence, very important to us. A big part of our business is project business, and here we look the competencies of our project managers. We certified them, we improve our processes and we look IT systems. We have been doing this several years already. Then finally, we liked standardized offering, and we want to use the Core of Lifting platform with all the benefits.
When we look at this from the profitability improvement perspective, the biggest amount we see in the profitability improvement will come from the port services, then the automation, electrification, and the rest of the Core of Lifting core offering. On the internal operational excellence and efficiency improvements, then some new business concepts. We are confident that we can reach that kind of profitability in or by 2027 latest. We have a very good plan. We are confident that we can do it. Just to summarize, we will use our widest and deepest offering to increase the market share. We have a clear plan for the port service to grow, improving the profitability of the overall business.
We have the automation, sustainable offering that will meet the customer needs. We continue to improve our efficiencies and internal stuff. We have very strong order book for the coming years, which will support this. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mika. Now it's time for Q&A with Mika. I will, this time around, start from one question from the chat, and I noticed that there we have some questions. Ship-to-Shore cranes weren't mentioned at all. Have you left them, or is it just too small a market?
It's not part of our core offering. What is outside is the Ship-to-Shore and manual RMGs. We run that kind of business, but we are very selective. We look only if we can make a lot of money on those, then we are ready to offer and sign a deal.
Thank you. Tom.
Yes. Hi, this is Tom from Carnegie. I have three questions. First, you mentioned that a big part of the margin improvement will come from service, but can you know, indicate, is the service margin now similar to the industrial crane service business and, you know, the sales split also in service? Is it pretty similar?
I mean, overall pretty similar profitability, but if you open up, it's slightly different than in the industrial service. We probably have more spare parts and retrofits, and this is coming from the reason why I said that the maritime terminals have not opened up the outsourcing, which means typically field service as much as the other industry.
The margin is pretty similar, yeah. The spreader market, I don't think you mentioned it at all. What is your position in spreaders?
We don't have spreader own. We only do spreaders for our own purposes. For example, for straddle carriers, we build spreaders, but we don't sell them as a external business.
Why?
Well, this is a selection that we have made.
Okay. Finally on lift trucks, you say you are number three there. I think, you know, Kalmar and SANY are number one and number two there. I think Kalmar has a big factory in Poland and SANY in China, of course, you know, and you manufacture the bulk of these in Sweden with lower volume. I just wonder how sustainable this is and what you can do to make sure that you are competitive in the long term in this business.
Right. We have two factories, one in China, one in Sweden. The volumes in China, they have been increasing all the time, almost reaching the Swedish factory volumes, but not entirely. The amount of hours that we are using, because this is only final assembly, is quite low per unit. I mean, this is not a competitive such a huge competitive advantage to have those hours somewhere else. We are not talking about big number of hours.
You will, in the long term, also keep, you know, production.
This is the plan today. Yes.
Okay. Thanks.
Other questions from the audience?
Hi, it's Antti from SEB. Just a question. You kind of illustrated the throughput levels historically, I mean, we haven't been that much of a higher level than pre-COVID. Your order intake was very sustainably EUR 1.1 billion, and now you're at EUR 1.7 billion. I'm assuming your prices are up. Could you talk about where the growth has really come from? How much is this just the timing of some of your core clients making big investments? How much is kind of a sustained market share gain that you referred earlier? Maybe open up on that.
Well, I believe that there is the latter. We have taken market share. These bigger orders, very difficult to say that how much does that play. We always have them, I mean, almost every year, and you can see from the quarterly order intake that some of those are spiking up. I would, I think we have progressed on all of these segments and clearly taken market share in some of those.
Okay. Second question is kind of the market and market share graphs that you showed, I assume they are global ones. Could you talk a little bit about your position in U.S. and Europe individually and kind of how much of your sales today go into those two markets?
All the strongest markets are in the U.S. and Europe, or North America and Europe. Of course they are fairly big markets as well.
Your sales exposures to those two?
I don't have any market shares, and we don't typically split the market shares, I mean, between the continents. It's basically global business from our customers' perspective as well.
As you, Antti, know, we don't disclose regional sales data of b usiness segments.
The last one is referring to kind of the EBITA margin improvement bridge that you showed. I mean, you're targeting clearly above market growth in sales. I mean, your backlog should ensure that in the near term. How much of those actions that you kind of showed or profitability improvement actions are already visible in that business that is sitting in your backlog today?
I mean, some of these actions we have been doing all the time. It's a continuous improvement. These are not, no kind of, something that you start from the scratch and then you do immediately result. It requires quite long-term development. Of course the, some of these, like I said, the project management excellence is typical continuous improvement. We started that, three years ago, so we have seen those results coming after maybe a year and a half, and clearly see them today.
All right. Thank you.
Thanks. It's Panu from Danske. I have two questions. Firstly, what are the main synergies between the Port Solutions and Industrial business and how much, kind of, shared technology do you use between those two?
That's a very good question. I mean the Core of L ifting platform, I mean, we share the components and technology. Secondly, I didn't go in detail, but all the systems and IT systems that Industrial Services is developing of course is available to us as well. This is, I mean, these are just a couple of practical.
Okay, thanks. Then secondly on the growth in services. I've understood that in the ports, they have not outsourced the service due to like the unions not favoring that. Do you see that as an issue or kind of going away if you expect more outsource?
I expect that market will start opening up. Like I said, that's I see clearly that some customers think that this is non-core if they think about their own operation. There are customers that really see that maintaining own service and service operation is really key for their success. I think that it will gradually start opening. I mean, it, there's a big difference if we go from maritime terminal to an inland terminal. Inland terminal is immediately like a factory, that they are open to discuss about service opportunities.
Okay. Thanks.
Yeah.
The gentleman in the second row was first.
It's Svante Adde. Two questions. You have quite a lot of Chinese competitors in some of those things. Has there been a shift in competitiveness between yourself and them over the last few years? One question. The other question, a little bit to do with the profitability of the various sectors. You may not want to talk about that, between the lift trucks and the other major products in harbors.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Of course, we're not commenting and we don't know about our competitors. I know that our, one of our competitive advantage is the vast local presence with our service network. In the pandemic, that might have been a big benefit for us. It's a kind of a guess that that may have played some role on it. The profitability, Anders was showing the kind of a BU row. You saw that our BUs are quite close to each other and one is a little bit more profitable, so you can maybe guess that which ones are those. That's about what we can disclose.
Maybe one last question from Erkki.
Hi, it's Erkki from Inderes. In Industrial Equipment you talk about the need to revise some product lines for probably divesting or rundown. Is there any need for same kind of revision in Port Solutions? We know that Kalmar for instance, they had very poor profitability, not only in STS, but also in RTG and RMG.
Yeah. We are not having any actions like that at the moment.
No plans whatsoever?
Not currently.
Okay. Thank you.
We would have time for one more question from the audience. Okay. Let's continue. Thank you, Mika.
Thank you.
Now it's time for a wrap-up, and Anders will summarize today's presentations, and then we will host the Q&A with all four presenters.
I'll give it to you.
Clicker.
Clicker. Okay.
Thank you, sir.
Okay.
Yes, please. Go ahead.
Thank you, Kiira. Now you have seen our updated ambition and our financial targets, and also our strategy, with which we intend to execute on achieving those targets going forward. I just want to have a short summary of Konecranes as an investment. We are the leader in technology in basically all the areas where we are present. We have strong market position in all of our business segments. We have a long-term commitment to sustainability, and we have already now shown great progress within this area. Attractive opportunities to growth in many areas. A target to achieve the range of 12%-15% adjusted EBITDA margin. As Teo presented, a solid financial position and dividend. With that, I will round off the presentations, and go into the last Q&A, Kiira.
Thank you, Anders. I think we will start now by a couple of questions from the chat. There are actually two quite similar questions regarding the financial targets. If we assumed no sales growth, same would happen as in past years, what would clean EBITDA margin target realistically be? Maybe Anders, you can take this one.
Okay, thank you. We need to recognize that in the history, in 2017, we had the large acquisition of MHPS, and then we had the MHE- Demag acquisition, and then we had also the potential merger, and later failed merger. There was a lot of things going on in our business that disturbed the focus from really focus on our customers and leveraging on the growth potential. With the growth strategy that we now present, we are certain that that won't be repeated. If it should be repeated hypothetically, the target for profitability is still the range 12%-15%.
Thank you. Another question, and I think this is now relating to your operating model slide, Anders. This sounds very much like the Atlas Copco model. One thing you don't stress in turning to a more asset-light operating model. Isn't that part of your plans, considering your ambition to increase CapEx, for example?
Maybe I give that one to Teo.
Thank you. It is a good question about the capital efficiency. I think that we could easily mention that asset-light model as one of the items and targets and activities that we do. Maybe the reason why it is not so prevalent in our presentations is that if we take a look at the operating model that we have now, so it actually is already quite asset-light. The balance sheet, if you take a look at that, may not actually tell it directly. If you unpack a little bit the capital employed that we have, so we have some EUR 2.3 billion-EUR 2.4 billion capital employed in the company. EUR 2 billion, almost EUR 2 billion of that is fixed assets, which in a way sounds like a lot.
When you take a look at that, of this EUR 2 billion, EUR 1 billion is pure goodwill, and also there is this pre-allocation goodwill that we are amortizing. Actually the fixed assets, for example, that we have there underlying, that amount is relatively small. And if we make a simple calculation and take a look at our return on capital employed, which was 16% now, roughly 16% now, at the end of Q1 on a rolling basis, and we just, if we carve just the official goodwill, the pure goodwill out, we would almost double the return on capital employed. It would be close to 30%. If we take the pre-allocation goodwill, it would be going even higher.
In a way, I'm not saying that there wouldn't be potential in making, make buy decisions or reducing the net working capital from the levels further where we are, but the overall model is quite asset light already. Mika did mention that in his own presentation. The rest of us maybe didn't. Overall, even if we have factories, so it's still quite asset light already as it is today.
Maybe now time for questions from the audience. Tom?
This is Tom Skogman from Carnegie again. You said in Port Solutions, the margin in service is pretty similar to an Industrial Equipment service one. That means that the margin is very low on equipment there, and the margin is very low, you know, in industrial cranes equipment as well, basically. I just wonder how... What is the reason to this? I mean, there must be some kind of bigger thing that, you know, there has been too many years without growth, and you are focused on growth or, you know, too much competition as, you know, markets have not, you know, been growing, or you have over-engineered the products or so. Just this big picture, I mean, many of you have been at least for a long time in the company.
Perhaps you can, you know, elaborate a bit on this, why you have ended up in, like, almost zero margin equipment businesses.
Sorry, who were you addressing the question?
Well, you can start.
I can start.
Fabio has been many years as well.
I can start.
I don't know, Mika's probably been-
Maybe I can comment on the Port Solutions. I mean, that is a misunderstanding that the Port Solutions equipment business would be break-even. That is a misunderstanding if you refer to that.
If you say that the service margin is pretty similar to Industrial Equipment, i.e., close to 20% and 22% of Port Solution sales is service. I mean, if you calculate backwards, the margin is pretty low on equipment then, right?
Yeah, but not breaking even.
No, not breaking even, of course, but pretty. I mean, it's not a good margin, so. Do you have any good kind of explanations what? I mean, there have been many years without any real organic growth, of course, and, is that the main reason or is it more that you have kind of over-engineered the products or internal issues being perhaps not being tough enough on costs or?
Well, I'll address the Industrial side. Within the Industrial, there are some very profitable product lines, and then there are others that are eating away at that profitability. It's not just, you know, traditionally keep talking about process cranes, but within the standard business, there are product lines that we're taking away from the overall profitability. This whole Industrial assessment that we did in Industrial transformation in large part addresses that piece. It's not just about process cranes. Process cranes is just a small part of that. A big part of it is this whole reduction in multiple platforms in the standard business and the complexity of the go-to-market and the whole complexity of having, let's say, parallel ways of working, parallel systems.
Once you start with a complexity up front in the go-to-market in the offering, it drives complexity end to end, from systems to supply chain to operating model, et cetera. There are areas, including in light lifting equipment and other areas in standard wire rope hoists and the platforms that we're moving to from where we are today that are very profitable in Equipment. To some extent, it's moving the portfolio from this mix we have today and complex mix and heavy mix to a lean mix in an organization in the areas we already know today are profitable. That's kind of that transformation. You may ask, why didn't we do that before?
As I said previously, I'm not gonna focus on the past, whether it was, you know, lack of will or whatever you wanna call it or just too many things going on, as was mentioned. You know, we can sit here and think about all those things. The goal now is we know what to do. It's about execution, and that's what my team and myself are focused on.
You have not felt that the kind of prices have been sliding all the time because of, I mean, all companies improve efficiency all the time, and if there is no underlying volume growth, I mean, then it's tough to make money often.
Sure. I mean the Here we're talking about some structural issues that we had to address, both in the, in the product portfolio, in the go-to-market, and all that coming together creates a much more complex end-to-end. This is not just about, hey, we have a product line, and we continue to improve its efficiency by lean methods, by doing, you know, different things, getting a more efficient sales force, et cetera. This is really, we are making significant, and I do wanna stress that, significant structural changes to our portfolio and to our go-to-market. That should have been, perhaps you could argue, that should have been done before, you know?
Let's, you know, I'm not gonna go there and start to say, "Well, why we should have done it, coulda, shoulda, you know, two, three years ago, or maybe when we went right after the acquisition, we should have moved faster." You know, we could spend a lot of time speculating. I could tell you that in Service, we moved extremely fast, and you saw that in the numbers. Unfortunately, Equipment, we did not, and maybe there was a little bit of strategic ambiguity. Now that we, you know, we are one industrial team, we're very clear about the strategy, we're very clear the direction, and we're gonna move fast. We already started that.
We already made significant moves, things that perhaps folks would have thought we would never have accomplished in such a short period of time in already moving some of the product lines in the direction that we are. Some of the strategic, some of the operating model changes that and go-to-market changes that perhaps folks thought that we wouldn't be able to do. Much was accomplished here in the past year, to be frank with you. You're seeing that already starting to show up in our numbers.
If growth, you know, comes back, I mean, in Port, you have a great order book. Will you need to do a step change in CapEx, or can you continue having CapEx so much below depreciation levels?
I mean, if you, if I look at the Port Solutions, order book, we don't need substantial investments to meet or to produce all that, to the market. There is no need.
The company can, even if growth comes back as you kind of indicate that you believe is the case, you know, CapEx can remain clearly below depreciation levels that we have seen the last, you know, seven years now.
Yeah. Thanks, Tom. CapEx will of course increase, but our projection is that it will stay below depreciation levels. If I should comment also on your previous question, equipment profitability, we are clearly not happy with that profitability in history that we had, and we are taking the actions to rectify that. Your observation is right, low profitability margin on equipment, it's fact. We have a healthy profitability margin on service. We are rectifying the profitability margin on our equipment going forward, and we are growing our service side.
Thank you.
Antti.
Thank you. Antti from SEB. Two questions, I guess, both for Fabio. First of all, on the outsourcing of services, I mean, you've been preoccupied with some of internal stuff and haven't grown on services, but have you seen that outsourcing trend has developed positively in the past, let's say five, six, seven years? Now when we are in an environment where there's maybe more shortage of labor and higher labor unit costs, can you kind of offer now more? Can you bring some kind of a cost benefits to your clients versus before?
I mean, there's definitely is a trend in that direction for the obvious reasons that you mentioned, the labor shortages, of course, aging workforce, as we mentioned. There is a propensity towards moving to outsourcing. There's a propensity to sticking to, you know, core, you know, core businesses and so forth. That should continue. It is not something like flipping a light switch. I think it's something that just continues to progress, and it depends on the industry at the speed it goes. It depends on some certain countries sometimes in union environment in different industries. In general terms, the direction is towards more outsourcing and customers are certainly, if they could, many customers would go even faster in these areas. It's hard to quantify and put a, you know, a number on it.
Maybe you can talk about it on a customer level or a successful case where you have taken over kind of outsource. What is the pain point that you are solving? What is the discussion look like with the customer who is kind of outsourcing to you?
I mean, the real benefit, first of all, is to be able to. That we provide specialized services, right? That for them to have a workforce that is trained on what is essentially equipment that really affects safety and affects productivity and could shut down their plant or somebody can get hurt, it really is a big benefit to have somebody that's highly specialized and know what they're doing, and they have the ability to do that kind of work much more efficiently. You know, a lot of these cranes, obviously they're up in the air. Not everybody wants to be going there. They're in sometimes difficult environments. And it does take specialized training. It takes folks that wanna be able to do that.
More and more the people that have been doing that over the years and, you know, the customers like steel that have had, you know, large, you know, crane groups within their operations, those folks are also retiring, and those things are not being replaced at the pace that they have. There are many industries, you know, automotive, for example, being one that's opening up, you asked for a specific industry, very much open towards, you know, outsourcing. The equipment is getting, you know, is much more automation. There's also more complexity in the equipment. That's another area that brings, you know, a focus of having somebody that actually knows what they're doing. It's also more connected, the equipment.
We can combine not only the technicians that are on the ground, we can combine that and leverage that with expert support that's much more centralized. If we start to bring all that package together, we can certainly, you know, bring much more safety, productivity, sustainability benefits to the customers if they did it themselves. Most customers know that in the end. It's just a question, do they have the will and the capacity to be able to, you know, make that big move, right? It's not always if you're dealing with the shop floor, the folks that maybe are doing operations or maintenance, maybe they. It's against their own benefit to outsource.
When you're dealing with more the executive management or the general management or the folks that are looking at the bigger picture, you have whole different conversations when it comes to what the benefits of outsourcing are. Sometimes it's also about having the conversation with the right people and showing the bigger picture of what the overall benefit. When it's with the right people, it's usually not that difficult. It's just, it's more on the onus is on them to make it happen to some extent.
Maybe one comment from me.
Yes.
Maybe one comment from someone who used to be on the other side buying the services. A big advantage that I saw was actually that you could take over the service technicians that we had, and then you could also, if they were off sick, you found a solution with another person, and that's something you can't do when you have it insourced, right? If you have one person, if he's off sick, then you have no one. Those kind of benefits are also there for customers.
Okay. The second question was then on inorganic growth and this bolt-on M&A opportunities. Is it?
Very wide kind of target market that you are looking at. I mean, interest rates are now higher, is there more kind of willingness of some owners to sell and perhaps less competition on those deals? Are they just so profitable businesses that it's very difficult to buy them?
You got quite a wide mix. First of all, there is a lot of targets, right? This is still quite a fragmented, excuse me, industry, especially the crane service, crane building, type business that's kinda on the front lines. There are certainly a lot of targets. And the attractiveness of a target really kind of varies. I mean, if you can get an installed base, you can get some proprietary equipment that's out there's already a spare parts business, et cetera, that makes them more attractive. If you can get, you know, technicians in the right places with the right industries, that makes it more attractive.
There is, you know, this range when we look at, in terms of the attractiveness of the business, certainly having the installed base proprietary technology, you know, rank, you would rank those higher, right? Of course, availability of technical talent and so forth. To answer your question directly, a lot of these are family-owned businesses, right? Some of that comes down to succession planning. In some cases, they are very much interested in passing it on to the next generation. In other cases, there's a lot of opportunity where folks are ready to retire, and there is no succession, and they would rather sell. Those, of course, great opportunities. There are other service companies that are being acquired by private equity, and they are doing some of their own consolidation.
Of course, a lot of those are ready to also flip them and sell them at the right time. There is an opportunity for, you know, to having those conversations, private equity that have done some of the consolidation in certain areas to be able to take those. But of course, in the end, this is, you know, the price does matter, and it'll vary depending on the particular situation some of these owners are in or what they're looking for. But it's not like there's lack of opportunity across the world. There are many of these crane and service companies across the world. Did that answer your question?
Pretty much. Thank you.
Welcome.
I think Svante had still one question.
It was partly a question, partly a comment. Isn't it also quite important that one looks at this business? It's actually divided up between equipment and service, and a lot of the competitors do show that as one business, and therefore you don't see that they sell their trucks or whatever, I should say, for a loss and make a lot of money on the services and spare parts over the next five years. I think that's very important. The other thing is that this business actually makes a great return on capital employed if you look at it, and probably better than most. I think one need to weigh all these things together and not focus on one specific point would be my comment, without any knowledge, obviously.
Any comments from you?
Well, I guess I should agree. No, for sure, the return capital employed is quite high on service, and it's very asset light if you wanna go that way as well. We actually have become more lighter in our asset utilization in, you know, traditionally you have all these branches out there and you have more of an infrastructure. Now we have centralized a lot more of the back office, very much gone much more mobile, so it is quite asset light. Certainly it's a lot easier today to bolt on acquisitions because that whole infrastructure is there and you're bringing on, you know, the sales and the technicians and the installed base, and you can bring that on pretty quickly.
Absolutely, I think we need to have a, let's say, fresh pair of eyes in how we evaluate some of these opportunities. We're certainly looking forward to being, let's say, more aggressive, perhaps. Is that a good word? In this arena.
No, I think the point is really spot on. This is also the reason why we have selected, even though combining these two into Industrial Service and Equipment, that we continue to report them separate externally because we want to show what we are actually achieving within both areas, not only combining them and showing, oh, what a nice business. We want to be able to show that we make this kind of progress in all of our businesses and not only try to live on service because our equipment should also make a healthy margin.
Could add one thing, also like just even the recent example, this last acquisition. When we bring on a company that usually do have service and equipment, and quite frankly, we can take away that equipment, let's say heaviness and usually there are losses in the equipment, pull that off, and then just focus on the service business. Then if there are equipment sales needs, we just handle it through our existing infrastructure. Yes, We certainly will peel away, let's say, the of those targets, the two businesses, and treat them quite differently in that we would probably ramp down the equipment side and the crane manufacturing and then take on more of the sales and service piece and bolt that on. That's kind of how we would view those things.
Of course, the whole back office and all these other things, very easy to bolt-on to our existing infrastructure.
I think I could take one question from the chat, this would be Mika, I would say so. How significant is the sustainability pressure from customers, especially on internal combustion engine-powered equipment?
I mean, I would say that most of the customers, they have the commitments. Of course, there are some smaller family-owned companies that may not have that kind of commitment. If I think about the largest customers, global operators, yes, they have all that commitment done. In some companies, if there is a more sustainable option available, they are almost obliged to buy that.
Then another question from the chat, maybe Anders could start with this one. What are the biggest risks you can anticipate yourself now, and those you don't see coming at the moment? I would guess that this is related to the financial targets.
Yeah. I mean, our biggest risks that we are coping with at the moment, it's still material availability, people availability and inflation, basically. Those are the ones that we've been coping with in the last year. The biggest risk I'm not aware of, probably I shouldn't answer that one because I'm not aware. You want to add something?
No, I think you hit it pretty well. I mean, certainly the labor availability is key for service, of course. Material availability has been a challenge, but I think we're turned a corner largely. Of course, you never know what's around the corner as well in these days.
Maybe one more question from the audience. Burak, here.
Thank you. I had a question on TRUCONNECT. I know this is a smaller portion of the install base, but it's growing, so maybe this becomes more relevant over time. The ability to connect your equipment, you know, apart from the revenue opportunity, drives a lot of efficiency in a variable cost base business that must have a lot of efficiency effects. What is the service margin opportunity or profitability opportunity on connected devices?
You wanna start?
Maybe you go.
Okay. Yeah, there are various revenue streams you can look at that, and there are various benefits on the remote monitoring, TRUCONNECT being, you know, our brand of that. TRUCONNECT, certainly having a connected asset, of course, also supports predictive maintenance. You could of course have there's a subscription service. There is, that is of course a high margin, by its, in of itself, by the, its very nature, in terms of having that subscription service. You could also, we have a remote support that you can, you could charge by the hour or a block or what have you in terms of, being able to support, connected equipment.
Again, I think we gotta focus that this type of equipment and the connections are most important in the critical assets, the larger assets, the larger accounts, production type assets where downtime is very expensive and it's critical equipment. It's. When you look at the numbers of connected equipment versus agreement base, it may seem small, but those connected assets are focused on the heavier cranes, the process cranes, the critical cranes. Not all assets in the agreement base are created equal. Very big difference between a waste- to- energy crane and a chain hoist that may be, you know, an asset in the agreement base. There is those areas.
There is, of course, the benefit for us to also be able to run analytics and be able to offer, proactively offer retrofits, other services. Something is about to fail, "Hey, here," push that to the customer. It also allows us in the future to have more of what we would call these commitment agreements, where we completely outsource and we take on the responsibility of the maintenance. Instead of creating today, we have, you know, we create sales cases with the predictive maintenance and say, "Hey, would you like to buy this brake? It's about to go." It would be just part of our overall earning model, and then we would just create a service request rather than a sales case and go get that fixed as part of kinda taking more of that responsibility.
Having that data gives us the knowledge to be able to create these other earning models where we could take on, kinda share the risk a little bit with the customer. There is, of course, the opportunity to improve our products as we get all this data. It makes us for a huge input for research and design and innovation, as an example. I mean, you could go on and on with the benefits of connectivity. You could also in the future, as we talked about the new generation being out there, over-the-air upgrades, for example. We've seen that also, I think, in the auto industry as well, right? Where we could add and turn on features, smart features on that crane, depending on the usage.
You know, you could go to, you know, pay per ton and all these other things. I mean, you could go on and on in terms of the earnings models and the availabilities. Yeah, I mean, it's a huge, huge opportunity. It is targeted today to these critical assets, heavier assets. There's also the installation and commissioning that is you do that remotely, then the expert doesn't have to fly in or have a whole bunch of folks flying around the world to get a critical crane, highly complex crane up and running. You could do that more with local assets and remote support. There's a lot of benefits from products and as well operational benefits and development benefits. Sorry for the long-winded answer.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe, maybe just an example that it really varies. I mean, we have almost everything is possible. In lift trucks, very simple tire pressure monitoring that that can be monitored remotely. That can be done, for example, and that's available, very simple. If that is needed, then somebody's ready to pay for it. On the other extreme, you have automated fleet of equipment which are really making the money in the container terminal and any downtime is fatal. Then we have SLAs and we have agreement to follow. Then like Fabio said, and then afterwards, if we need to focus on certain phenomenons or something, which is kind of a repeating kind of a failures or something, we can do that offline. I mean, it's endless game that you can do these things, and we are doing.
I think one big benefit is that not many providers can do this. We collect data from a large installed base. You can't do that if you're a regional player. Basically you're out of the game. That's a big competitive advantage going forward for us, being able from a large installed base, collecting data, providing services for different customers, which they couldn't do themselves and they can't do with local suppliers. It's a big advantage for customers as well.
Okay, I think now we start to run out of time, so no more questions, unfortunately. Was there still something, Anders, that you wanted to say in the end?
There was something.
Please go ahead.
Thank you everyone for showing interest in our Capital Markets Day 2023. I thank you on behalf of the whole Konecranes team. We also have some in the back there. Really appreciate it and hope that you found it interesting and rewarding. Thank you.