Good morning, and welcome to Lassila & Tikanoja Capital Markets Day. My name is Eero Hautaniemi, and I'm the President and CEO of Lassila & Tikanoja. Today, we will have two sessions. In the morning, we will cover New Lassila & Tikanoja, and in the afternoon, we will dive into Luotea with Antti Niitynpää and his team. First, let's go through the strategic rationale for this proposed demerger. The goal for the demerger is, first of all, to improve the performance of both companies through a stronger management focus, accelerate both organic and inorganic growth through more efficient capital allocation, increase the attractiveness of the companies by improving transparency, and therefore, increase the shareholder value. From a shareholder's perspective, it is quite simple.
The current shareholders of Lassila & Tikanoja will receive one share from New Lassila & Tikanoja and one share from Luotea. We are here today in the Capital Markets Day. Next week, Thursday, we will hold an extraordinary shareholders' meeting, where the final decision will be made on this proposed demerger. The completion of the demerger will take place last day of this year, obviously, depending on the outcome of the extraordinary shareholders' meeting, and then the trading with new shares will start second day of January 2026. As I said, let's focus in the morning on Lassila & Tikanoja, circular economy leader in the Nordics. Today, I will have with me presenting Antti Tervo, Senior Vice President, Growth and Operations, and Joni Sorsanen, our CFO.
Together with Antti and Joni, we will take you through what Lassila & Tikanoja stands for today, and why we think that the demerger will unlock a very exciting pure-play circular economy company. We will spend the 1st hour on L&T's leadership position in the attractive Nordic markets and our unique platform. We will have our 1st Q&A session. Following this Q&A, we will continue with our growth strategy, our excellent financial track record, and then we will wrap up with final Q&A session. To get you in the spirit, I'd like to show you a video that captures the vision for new Lassila & Tikanoja. The video, please.
It's here, there, and in this container. It's in ugly ducklings, in what hides behind the obvious, in them, and most definitely in you. It's potential waiting to be unleashed, and that is what we are all about. We are here to reveal the full power of the circular economy, to secure resources in balance with nature, to drive progress with our material expertise and impactful data, and to raise standards across industries. Sounds ambitious? We know. That's the way we like it, because the bigger the challenge, the greater the potential.
Okay. Few facts. Lassila & Tikanoja is a pure play circular economy leader in the Nordics. What do we mean by that? Everything we do is centered around circular economy. If we look us by service, waste management and recycling represent about 2/3 of our business, hazardous waste and remediation, about 15%, and industrial services and water treatment, about 19%. By customer sector, we serve practically all industry sectors, the public sector, and households.... Leader in the Nordics means that we have a clear number one position in Finland. Our market share is approximately 20%, and we have a good foothold in Sweden. In terms of numbers, our net sales 2024 was EUR 424 million. Our adjusted EBITDA, EUR 86 million or 20% of sales.
Our adjusted EBITA was EUR 44 million or little over 10% of sales and our ROCE was 14%. We have a profitable and highly resilient business. We are a crucial part of circular infrastructure by providing essential services for society and industry. This picture here illustrates some of these essential services within our broad offering. We'll go our service offering more in detail later, but the key common denominators are at the top of the page. We increase recycling rate across industries. Our aim is always to increase the recycling rate of our customers. We target a recycling rate of 70% by 2030. We produce sustainable raw materials through reuse, recycling, and different treatment and processing. We produce valuable materials and products out of waste. We eliminate harmful materials.
There are a lot of harmful materials currently in the value chain that should not be there. We make sure that harmful materials are removed from circulation safely and responsibly. Our services are essential for ensuring circularity. It is also very important how we do it. Our end-to-end offering is unique, and this is a competitive advantage. End-to-end means we cover entire waste-to-value cycle. It all starts with integration into our customers' processes that ensure efficient sorting and treatment at the source. Collection, sorting, and recovery, treatment and processing, elimination of harmful materials, recycling and utilization as secondary materials, and finally, with best-in-class reporting and advising capabilities that provide crucial transparency for our customers. Unique in the way that no other player in Finland can offer this comprehensive end-to-end solution.
It gives us several advantages: ability to win at the waste source and hence secure stable material inflow, access to waste, which means security of supply to our treatment and recycling processes, and ability to optimize the process. We have a balanced portfolio, and we are equally strong at the source in handling and treatment, and we have exits for all of our materials. In summary, we have highly synergistic offering that is valued by our customers and brings us a competitive advantage. This takes me to the next slide. As you can see here on the right-hand side, almost all of our top 15 customers use our full service offering. This evidence is the relevance of our full offering and the fact that it is valued by our customers. For us at L&T, this means competitive differentiation.
It enables operational efficiency and process optimization and offers us an opportunity to capture the full margin potential in the waste-to-value chain. Later on in the presentation, we will discuss how we intend to further leverage this full offering of our customer entire customer portfolio. Let's look at the market. Our market is attractive and supports our strategy well. We have large and growing markets. In the next three to five years, our addressable market will amount to approximately EUR 10 billion, and the market is growing steadily at around 3% per annum. Trend is increasingly to maximize the value of waste through recycling and reuse solutions and minimize incineration and landfill. This is supported by, for example, regulation.
There are landfill taxes, and there is a proposed Emissions Trading System for waste to energy at EU level by 2028, resource scarcity and drive for self-sufficiency, and overall, society's push for circular solutions. All of this is positive for Lassila & Tikanoja as we focus on circular solutions that benefit from these trends. I will come back to this market environment later on in my presentation more in detail. We have a very strong financial track record. Our growth has been resilient over the past five years. This reflects our strong market position, our two-sided business model. We earn revenues both in upstream service activities when we receive the waste, and then when we sell the recycled materials and products after our treatment activities.
Our profitability is strong, and we have a solid track record of very stable and predictable margins. When we compare ourselves to some Finnish and international peers in the sector, our EBITA margin of 10.5% in 2024 stands out as one of the best in the sector. Going forward, our target is to accelerate growth further, which brings me to our midterm financial target. As a pure-play circular economy company, following the demerger, we are stepping up our growth ambitions. We are targeting more than 6% average annual sales growth, and we have all it takes to reach this target. We have large and growing markets, we have unique and very competitive platform, clear growth strategy, strong cash flow, and balance sheet enabling growth investments. At the same time, we are committed to maintain our strong profitability and target EBITA of 11%.
Our target is also to maintain a strong balance sheet. Our dividend policy is to pay out at least 50% of our net income. In addition to financial targets, sustainability is very important for us. We have an ambitious target to reach net zero by 2045. Already today, our handprint is positive, meaning we help our customers to reach 440,000 tons less CO2 emissions. This equals to emissions of 77,000 Finns. I'm proud of our very strong management team. We have a great mix of in-house experience and fresh perspectives. We have also wealth of relevant industry expertise. In addition to Joni Sorsanen and Antti Tervo, who will be joining with me later today in the stage, we have in the audience the entire management team.
We have Juha Saarinen, we have Hilppa Rautpalo, Jorma Mikkonen, and Edward Skärström. People here at the studio, please feel free to catch up with them during the lunch break and hear more from them. In our management team, we have all the ingredients for future success. I'd like to finalize this first section by summarizing the key highlights why Lassila & Tikanoja has a compelling investment case. We are a leading player in a growing market. We have unique platform with operations covering the full value chain. We are well-positioned for growth with clear strategy, and we have a strong track record of growth, profitability, and cash generation. This will now take us to the next section, and we will start with the market.
In this section, we will go through the market and its growth drivers, our position in the market, and required capabilities to be a leader in these markets. As I said, a few minutes ago, our markets are large. Independent research estimates that the size of our market was about EUR 8.7 billion in 2024, of this, EUR 2.5 billion was the Finnish market and EUR 6.2 billion the Swedish market. By 2029, the market is estimated to reach EUR 10.3 billion, meaning a growth rate of approximately 3% per annum. This underlying growth is driven by three main things: real GDP and population growth, increase in recycling rates, more and more waste volumes will find new life in reuse and recycling applications, which have a higher value than incineration and landfill....
Pricing. For example, tightening blending obligation will drive the value of recycled material in the future. This is the base growth of the market. On top of this, there is an additional potential of approximately EUR 3 billion. Through technology and method development, we will see more solutions in waste to material, waste to product, reuse solutions, and growth of remediation. There is a clear trend to maximize the value of waste through recycling and reuse solutions and minimize incineration and landfill. Our solutions are within recycling, hazardous waste treatment, and remediation. We do not operate in waste to energy, while our hazardous waste level landfills remain a part of our end-to-end offering. All key market trends support our recycling and reuse solutions at the expense of incineration and landfilling. Every fraction of material is valuable for us.
There are large future markets in waste to material and waste to product. Currently, incineration represents about 60% of Finnish waste handling market, but obviously incineration is not solution for future. On the other hand, our recycling rates are currently about 60%, which is 20 percentage points more than the average recycling rate in Finland, with a target of 70%, and the reason is obvious: there's much more value when we recycle waste to material and waste to product. Perhaps the fastest growing segment for us at the moment is remediation. Construction on industrial sites is steadily increasing in the largest cities, regulation is tightening, and there is a growing need for properly closed mines and landfills.
There is an increasing need to use remediation of contaminated land to enable future use, for example, in housing, reduce the use of natural resources by utilizing industrial and production waste, as well as improve biodiversity and create carbon binding solutions. Our ongoing projects and order book are currently worth of tens of millions of Euros. Let's shift gears a little bit and focus on our position in these markets. We have a strong leading position in Finland. We are either number one or number two in all of our service lines, with market shares between 14% and 23%. Most of our key competitors operate in one service line only. This goes back to my earlier point: we have a unique full offering that is a competitive advantage across service lines, and we will continue to leverage on that.
Even though we are number one or number two, we still have plenty of room to grow and increase our market share in all service lines. Our markets still remain fragmented. We believe strong players will have an opportunity to take share organically and through acquisitions. We celebrated this year, our 120th anniversary as a company. We have experience and credibility that is very hard to match. Our market is difficult to enter. Building a strong position requires significant time and expertise. We have built our position over several decades. This includes very established brand. We are market leader with this very strong brand, and we have very long customer relationships, up to 30 years. It requires technical and regulatory expertise. We have deep expertise in complex and tailored circular solutions. It requires environmental permits.
We have permits, portfolio of more than 3x of our current waste volumes. It requires scale. We have nationwide presence with fleet of more than 1,200 vehicles and 58 sites. It requires capital investments. We have well-invested infrastructure and state-of-the-art ICT systems. To summarize this section, we operate in large markets with structural growth. We have a leading position in these fragmented markets. Our industry has high entry barriers, it requires complex capabilities, which we have built over the decades. Next, I would like to invite Antti Tervo on stage to continue with our unique platform. Welcome, Antti.
Thank you, Eero. Good morning, everyone. My name is Antti Tervo, and I'm heading in at New L&T, the Growth and Operations. Hey, let's have a deep dive on what we are doing in our operations. Unique platform. What is actually unique in or at L&T? As Eero described earlier, we have a strong position in our markets where we are operating. Very important in our role is that we are closely present at customers' life daily basis. We have more than 140,000 customers in diversified segments. This enables us to have an access to number of materials we can recycle and treat. We have more than 12 million pickups yearly basis, how we collect the materials. We enable recycling.
More than 1 million tons of waste, where we have an access to 80%, we are recycling or handling today. Again, with the treatment capability and know-how, we have also strong understanding how the recycled materials can be used. We have already created number of materials which have an end-of-waste status, which is actual status for material which used to be a waste, but it's nowadays a product. It enables to have multiple sources where it can be used as a material for other use than it used to be before. Let's have a look more deeply, actually, what we are having and what are the key cornerstones to create the competitive advantage in our value chain. There are four elements: end-to-end portfolio in our offering, then we have a strong customer base.
It's important also that we have the right competencies in developing environment where we are working, and then the assets to perform the value chain and succeed on customer front. We'll start with end-to-end offering. What is very important, as stated earlier, that we are very closely working with our customers, and we are able to understand the different needs in different customer segments. Based on that one, we have actually three segments we are serving. We have waste management and recycling, hazardous waste remediation, and then industrial services and water treatment. Why we also look at our services from these three angles are that the all segments have certain specific areas where you need to have a special know-how.
For example, in waste management recycling, there is some plastic or cardboard as in traditional waste, whereas in hazardous waste and remediation, you have a more challenging hazardous materials you need to handle. Whereas in industrial services and water treatment, you are working very closely with the customers, for example, with water and liquids. Certain specific knowledge is very important. How we actually then build and bring these segments together, we actually have the same two side business model in all these segments. We are strong on the customer side, providing the services, and then we are recycling the materials, and we create also sales out of the materials we are recycling. Understanding industry specific needs, that customers are also able to fulfill their sustainability targets in the future, and of course, today.
We are supporting this with our data-driven approach. We are able to report more than 200 fractions, recycling rates, and help customers and us to further develop business together. On top of that, we have a professional services on all these three segments, that from early on, when customer is planning a site or operation, that what should be considered, that we will maximize the operation efficiency in regards of recycling, or when you are doing that during operation, or even the case when you are ending your operation, where, for example, remediation takes place. Let's then have a look more deeply, the waste management and recycling. Actually, this represents around two-thirds of our total business, and more than EUR 280 million. Here, especially, the maximized recycling is our focus.
We work very closely on our customer sites, providing the sorting solutions and also thoughts how we can improve and make sure, of course, that when they are developing their own operation, we are maximizing the recycling. We provide also digital services that we are online able to analyze where we are today, and we have also benchmarks that we can compare where we could be in different sectors. We enable together with customer improvements on those areas. There are a couple of examples on services and activities, what we are doing, and there's, for example, events where we are strong or trade and logistics, which is a strong customer segment in this sector. It's very important to understand how the customers do operate and how they want to operate in the future.
We provide strong logistic understanding with those 12 million pickups for those 1,200 vehicles we are having. It's very important that you are optimizing and working closely together on the market areas to optimize the routing and operation. With that, when we have the materials collected, we also keep and develop the know-how that we make sure that we will get the best output from the materials we are collecting. If we then have a look, the hazardous waste remediation overview, this represents around EUR 66 million of our net sales. Here, we are coming even closer to customer needs, and also we are handling challenging materials, which we actually see as an opportunity.
First of all, you need to handle materials like hazardous waste safe way. That's very important for us. We have been developing during the years, number of solutions in this area. Same time, we are recycling more than 60% from hazardous waste, which we are proud of. We are not satisfied. We'll see the further opportunities. Our really aim is here to minimize the environmental impact. In industry or certain sectors, you still need some challenging materials and chemicals that you're able to produce the service or products. We can help our customers to minimize the impact. Especially the complex areas are the ones we like. We will later on in presentation, see one customer example that when old industrial site have been remediated successfully with the customer.
It really means that you need to have a chemical understanding, you need to have operational understanding to make sure that, for example, final industry site can be remediated as safe as possible. Again, some examples on the services, what we are doing and what we can see on these pictures, it really says that we are close to customers. We have advanced recycling solutions for hazardous waste. We have even done the first landfill projects in Finland, so taking actual raw materials out from once closed landfill, which we'll see opportunity in the future. Positive is that we have done it, not just thought about it. From hazardous waste, we'll look at what we are doing in industrial services and on water treatment. This is around EUR 80 million of our net sales. Here, the customer environments, again, do differ in sub-segment level.
Whereas we provide standard services, we also concentrate to create spearhead services on sub-segments. We understand what happens in forest industry or pulp and paper factory. We understand what happens in the metal industry, or what happens, for example, in big infrastructure sites, which are handling, for example, water treatment. We have actually developed methods on this sector. This area still lack of innovations that we can do better cleaning, but also making sure that the customer doesn't need to run the operation down, but we are able to help them during the operation. With that, we also look at carefully and try to understand as best as possible what actually materials customers are handling and doing, where they are also require a cleaning.
Another point of view is that we are doing the cleaning, we are helping the operation to run, and the materials what are got out from the operation, we know how to recycle and what to do for the materials. Here, especially, it's important that you have a fast and nationwide service. When the factory goes down, you need to have the response on nationwide present operation. Another way around, when you are having a maintenance breaks, which are very crucial, especially for the process industry, you need to have a necessary economies of scale and how to say it, right equipments, right place, right time. That's really important to have the loyal relationship with the customers. Examples on activities, what we are doing here are really coming close from the customer process, like boiler cleaning in energy sector. We are having expertise.
We have even own developed methods on that sector. We are doing mobile treatment for the water when customer has a challenges, or we are having inspection services to have a look whether the pipelines are in order or whether there's some preventive maintenance which might be required. Strong support here also from the hazardous waste, because we are often dealing with the chemicals, challenging materials. We have a substance in our hazardous waste and remediation area, there are strong actually synergies here also with that business line. If we summarize our end-to-end offering, we have spearhead services to all three segments and even the subsegments. Compare, for example, that industrial combinate, there are differences between combinates, whether it's a metal or process industry. You need to know detail what happens in these different industry sectors.
Retail, there is no one retail shop. There are different chains, they have a little bit different demands. You need to have, of course, standard service, you need to customize the service and develop your service towards those demands. We have a strong nationwide network, which creates operational efficiency. I mentioned the example, just that how, for example, industrial and water do work together with hazardous waste and remediation. Same way, for example, if we think about hazardous waste. When you do recycling of hazardous waste, you might get out, for example, plastic, and then we have actually our traditional waste management, which is then having a channels and treatment methods how to recycle plastics. These elements do support each other.
As said earlier also, yes, we have number of customers which are using more than one service, but there are actually a number of customers who are just using small part of certain service, so we have possibilities to also expand our portfolio towards customers. Doing this, it also enable us to capture the full margin potential. Having offering and trying to understand customer, of course, it's important that we know the customers and who they are. Coming to diversified portfolio, it's actually very wide for New L&T. We have very balanced portfolio of different segments, and as said earlier, very important, we have an understanding of sub-segments. There is no one retail or one industry, and if we have a look, for example, customer examples, we have number of customer examples from diversified segments.
Very important is that we have also the necessary services, especially what certain sub-segments do need. Also in the future, our target is that we serve multiple segments as well, so that gives us very good balanced portfolio towards the future as well. Among with those 140,000 customers, just top 20 are taking 25% of the net sales. Also reflects or combined with the diversified segments we are working, gives us a good base that we have a number of customers we are working with. On the right-hand side, we can see that we have customers even 35 years of experience on how to say it, with us, and a number of customers, more than 20 years.
Our target is that all of these customers would be 35 years, and even the oldest ones would be then 50 years in next 15 years. For us, it tells that if waste management or industry has started there, that you collected waste and you put it in a landfill. Nowadays, we are recycling. We are very close to operation on daily basis. We have been part of that track and route with our customers. That's why it's very important that we develop our actions also in the future, we will be also next many years with our key customers. We ask feedback and have an close discussion with our customers. Our Net Promoter Score was 46 this year, which is nice that we have seen a good development there.
Where actually customers see us succeeding or doing well, we can highlight three areas, especially the transparency and reporting. There is not any more information or work which is not documented. When we do that together with the customers, we are able to react and improve and face and also recognize challenges. Reliability and sustainability are having also strong overview and how to set results from the customer point of view. That's very important, with service offering and quality, we are also doing strong, and of course, our target is to even be stronger in the future. With this, we are very humble and that's why we are doing this feedback, how to set continuous basis we are asking from the customers.
With customer satisfaction and close relationship, we have been able to also have a actually strong recurring contract base with our customers, which has been also developing in last years. Our average contract duration is six years. Today, there are 70% of the customers who are using actually more than one service line, which tells us also that it's not just the one service line which is strong. There's also a set strong amount of customer which are using more than one service line. What is important today as well, that why we have a lot of fluctuation in the market and changes up and coming, our contract base is also inflation protected. We are able to also.
contract wise and also contract structure wise impact, also have a look if inflation will negatively impact to us. Put that on the contracts as well. The real customers, of course, do tell us how we perform. Here we have three examples, these represent examples of nationwide service, diversified areas of business that we are able to provide. For example, in retail, Pruman Group, 41 stores served in Finland. That really tells that nationwide, we are able to provide standard operation with strong service offering. Hartela, construction industry, very long relationship from 2005. Today, recycling rate 70, even targets are to reach more.
Every construction site or area might be a little bit different, well, we are able to still have a strong recycling rate there, and we are actually trying to reach together higher rates in the future. Industrial site, relationship more than 15 years, more than 20 locations served. As an example, industry, when you look at it, the one side what might be built on 2015 or 2010, first sites in this industry case have been built in 1930s. You're able to operate and find solutions with the customer in changing environments. From customer front, let's have a look who we are and look at that, what kind of a team of professionals New L&T is having. We have today more than 2,000 professionals, almost 300 professionals working at New L&T.
We have a strong eNPS, so employees' Net Promoter Score, this is very important for us because we are working closely with our customers daily basis. We have a lot of how to say it, we are meeting customers every day, and also looking at that capabilities to meet the challenges in the future. 2,000 training days a year, it's really important for us that we make sure that the capabilities are also developing. Our professionals are not just one area of competence we are actually requiring. We have today chemistry, we have a biologist, that we are able to provide the biodiversity solutions. We have logistics experts and so on.
There's a really cross-functional competence you need, because when you are doing recycling, you are actually dealing with contaminated materials, so you need to have a cross-functional understanding. Our average employment duration is almost 10 years. That we respect. With the continuous training and understanding of the market, we, of course, try to have it even higher in the future. Safety is the one key measure for us. We are dealing with hazardous materials. We are active player in the traffic with our strong logistic network. We are today above the industry average, but our target is zero. With 25,000 preventive actions, we try to early recognize the challenges and also improve our activities in safety. That we are able to also make sure that our operation model works very well and is transparent.
We have data-driven operation model, which is just recently renewed. To keep the customers satisfied, and of course, our own employees to manage the operation, we have went through more than 160 processes during last years to understand that our operation model is as efficient as possible. We have defined eight key processes, which especially are important for us across the businesses. Whether we are doing remediation, which is kind of project business, or we are doing recycling, which is logistics and treatment, we have an IT infrastructure and operation model which supports that. We have actually invested more than EUR 20 million to cloud-based IT infra, which is a platform towards future.
With that, its main aim, of course, that we are able to also respond the customers' needs, also do the strong operational efficiency in the future, help us in the decision-making, having transparent operations, and of course, increase the scalability in case of, for example, thinking inorganic cases. As earlier stated, it's very important that also IT and operation model create advantages for us. Here we have a couple of examples how we have created advantage for ourselves with the operation model and IT. If we have a look at how the orders are coming in to us, we have a own tool for customers they can use 24/7, anytime, anywhere. 50% of our orders are coming in from there. This is integrated to our operation model.
Customers are interested today, especially that when there is a pick-up or when they have a change in our operation, so they can change the times when the pick-up should take place and so on. We have more than 10,000 B2B customers using our solutions there. Recycling rates development, it's important that you understand that what you should improve. We provide online reporting to our customers with our Ympäristönetti solution, where you can actually see where you are today yourself with 200 fractions. We have a long variety of fractions when we take all of the hazardous waste and traditional waste materials. You can see the development of the waste from that one tool, and even including industrial benchmarks, so customers can little bit compare that how they are compared with others.
This we use together also, that how we can improve recycling. From operation model, let's jump to our infrastructure. We have looked at it, at who we are and how we operate, but it's very important to have the tools and resources to perform the operation. The nationwide presence close to customers is not just employees, it's also 1,200 vehicles, 170,000 collection points. We have treatment facilities all over Finland, and we have more than 50 environmental permits. If we have a look those challenging materials, harmful materials, we have a five hazardous level landfills, which are actually fulfilling the demand in whole Finland. Why the permits are important, is that this environmental business requires license to play. First of all, you need to follow the rules and regulations, also enables to perform the operations and recycling you need.
This is licensed work, how to say it. All over 40 cities, we have sites today with 2,900,000 tons, almost 3,000,000 tons of permits. It tells us that we have a capacity to grow. Let's have a look three examples. First, from the fleet, how to make sure that the fleet also corresponds to requirements in the future. We look at little bit our treatment capacity, and then we look at some experiences and real-life examples from the treatment. We as we have a big fleet, it's also important to understand that the power sources for the fleet usage are changing. You used to have a diesel, nowadays, you have electricity, you might have a gas.
We have been one of those front runners who have been investing on this, that we know that how different technologies do develop, and we understand the life cycle, how it works, that we have efficient operations. As said, even today, one-tenth of our fleet is low emission, electricity or gas, as an example. Our investments, there's even already one-third we are putting on these new technologies. When we have the fleet, we're still using diesel, we are actually using more than 3 million liters of HVO renewable fuel. We can say we are one of the biggest ones in Nordics. This really helps us to face in the future when there is a growing demand to have lower emissions.
We have a roadmap actually towards 2045, like Eero presented earlier, that we actually are emission-free, and we are now well on track on that. Treatment capacity. 58 sites today we are working with nationwide, making sure that when we have those 12 million pick-ups, we have the infrastructure to take the volume in and create materials out of those. What comes to permits? I said we have a capacity 3x more handling than we have today. This is not just which happens in a one or overnight or couple of months, how you develop the permit infrastructure and your site infrastructure. As an example, in northern Finland, where we created a new treatment center, it took 14 years to have the treatment site in place. Again, we have a capacity to take more materials in.
We have a strong portfolio for different waste types. It's not just the one, we have 200 fractions we are treating today. The permits do not restrict our growth. Having a strong permit base, of course, the facilities for the treatment, and strong logistic network with the fleet, of course, the thing is how you utilize the network that you will create value out of the materials. Here are examples from three different sectors. For example, plastics. L&T has a strong and long history to recycle plastics. We have in Merikarvia plant. We are the B2B sector, very strong in recycling plastic. Here also, together with understand that there is not just the one plastic, but there are a number of fractions, for example, which are coming in.
What you try to get it as pure as possible with our sorting solutions to work together with the customers, you still need to understand that how to get it clean and how to create a material to customers. There is not just the one, how to say, plastic you provide to customer. We provide more than 100 fractions to resell for plastic industry. That's the one competitive advantage what we are having. Hazardous waste, 60% of recycling. We can say that we are one of the front runners here. We have been developing this recycling long time. We have three strong sites which are doing recycling, and we have number of examples where we have created actually for hazardous waste value after treatment. We are getting industry assets as an example, where we are creating new products for industry.
We are taking the coolant fluids, where we are creating marking materials for forest industry, which are safe to use there. These are just a couple of examples we are having. We look at the recycling, the first thing would be reuse. Reuse is one of the elements we have been developing lately. We have had a strong operation. We did the inorganic move during last summer that we expanded our operation. Today we are handling more than 4 million pallets. Strong relates to package re-recycling, which is increasing. There's also regulatory demands to increase that one. We are already involved there. We have four sites today. Just imagine in the past, when you just throw up the pallet away, we are today able to recycle 10 x. We keep it in a circle together with our customers.
To summarize, to have an unique platform requires unique elements, and we have four areas where we have competitive advantages. We have a strong offering, which we are developing all the time, and we have spearhead segments, to succeed in number of segments. We have a loyal customers and diversified contract base. Today, 2,300 professionals with developing capabilities and has been able to do in the past, and that we see in the future as well. We have also new operation model, which provides us some platform to also develop and making sure that we are able to show our results to customer and develop together. This is then enabled with a strong network, which enables us to grow and develop. Thank you for your attention, and, I think we have a next session, Q&A, together with Eero.
Thank you, Antti.
Put it there, yeah.
Now we are ready for your questions, and Lilia will join us on the stage, and she will go through the questions we get online.
Good morning, everyone.
Nikko, go ahead.
All right. Nikko Ruokangas from SEB. Sorry, yeah. Thank you. Nikko Ruokangas from SEB. Thank you for the presentations so far. I have a couple of questions related to the growth you are targeting. First of all, do your growth targets include also acquisitions? Then if they do, could you kind of, discuss a bit how much of organic growth are you assuming there?
Yes, excellent question, Nikko, and I will cover that in next session, if you are patient. In the last session today, we will go deeper into the growth, and maybe if I don't answer to your question, then we can come back to this in the last Q&A session. Is that okay?
Yes, that sounds good. I would have also a couple of other questions also related to the maybe acquisitions and so on, but I then save those to the later stage. Maybe, maybe on kind of you discussed the things you were kind of going through the more than 100 processes when you discussed about the IT infrastructure and how you can improve the efficiency. How have they been already visible in your numbers? Do you see kind of a room to get bigger benefits out of the improved efficiency going forward?
Yeah, very good question. If I first reply on high level, then Antti will go more into details, as he knows them better. On a high level, this big project has been very visible, especially in 2025, when we have had the rollout. We had in waste management and recycling and for hazardous waste, we had four waves of rollout. Then for process cleaning and environmental services, we had two waves?
Three waves.
Three waves, yes. We had extra cost in 2025. We had to have extra resources, and obviously, this type of huge rollout requires some extra help from consultants as well, and our partners. Obviously, that was not the end goal for this. There are many benefits that we expect to see in the future. Many are around sort of how we can better service our customers, but also we expect to see increased efficiency gradually now, starting at 26 onwards. Maybe, Antti, if you can open a little bit more in detail, sort of what does it mean in practice going forward?
Maybe as Eero just said, while we have different waves, we have also approached the operation model such that where we have a logistic and treatment business and where we have a project business. We have certain segments in our operation model, which especially support these different sub-segments, what we are actually operating. We have a common platform, we have the, how to say, industry-specific activities, where we, of course, target to also create operational excellence. Both, of course, that we are more cost-efficient, we are using our resources as efficient as possible.
Again, which is also very important, that we are working closely with the customer, that we are creating advantage, that we are, together with the customer, able to react, that they are able to improve their operational efficiency, so that way improve our own service pricing and also able to serve for them. Two angles: cost efficiency, but also the better customer service.
Mm
... output.
Perhaps one final thing is, as Antti showed in the picture, we have one data platform from which we can now extract data, it is with those tools that we have already in place, hopefully we have even better tools going forward, we can really provide very transparent reporting for our customers. No one else in the industry have such capabilities as we do now.
Okay, thank you. I'll touch upon acquisitions slightly. As you mentioned, the pallet business acquisition this year. You can discuss about this and also more generally, could you talk about how do you run those integration processes when acquiring these kind of businesses? Then also, how do you make sure that you get everything out of the acquisition in terms of synergies?
That's a very good question. As L&T has done acquisitions in the, in the past as well, we have actually a process how we do the integration, and we follow the process we are having. Of course, the one thing that we will take the operation on hand very well and keep the customer satisfied. We have also planned together that how we can improve the operation in the future to create the value add on the market. For example, pallet business, where we are today, we'll see opportunities in the future. It's that how we, with combined actually efforts, we can be strong in our customer front.
Also have cost synergies, which is clearly the case in many of our acquisitions, because Recently, we have done, let's say, smaller bolt-on type of acquisitions that then enable future growth, and it is by design like that because the integration for us is quite easy, and in the future, even more easy with our new ICT platform. We quite often, if not always, look for companies where we can have synergies when we integrate them into our operations.
All right, good. Thank you. That's all from me at this point.
Thank you.
There is one question online.
Okay.
How much can you grow in each service line without investment to capacity? What is the investment pipeline horizon?
We will come back to that later in the presentation, but maybe a high-level, high-level answer. Our overall growth ambition is more than 6%, and in all of these areas, we believe we can grow more than 6%. The investments required obviously organically, if we just think of sort of replacement type of investments, it is not huge. It is less than our depreciation, but obviously we want to, on top of that, make sort of organic growth investments, and I will come back to that later in the presentation. Then acquisitions, it can vary depending on whether we are successful on one year in an investment or whether we can.
We do a bigger sort of organic growth investment on a certain year.
No more questions online. There.
Hi, Joona Harjama from OP Markets. Thank you for the presentations. I have few questions. Firstly, about the 11% EBITDA target for the New L&T. One could argue that the target is not very ambitious if compared to your historical performance and also considering that you have been operating in very low or very weak macro environment. Can you give us any color of setting that level of profit margin target?
Yes. Excellent question. Thank you. It needs to be looked at in combination with our growth target. As you said, we have been able to reach almost that level of profitability already in not so good market, but at the same time, we are now targeting to grow twice the market sort of growth, underlying growth. Obviously, that will require investment into people, into sort of operations and our facilities, and potentially acquisition as well. They will not immediately yield benefits for us, therefore, together, the more than 6% growth and 11% adjusted EBITA target, I think is a pretty reasonable target for any company.
Thank you. Thank you for the very good breakdown of the structure of your different business lines. You mentioned that you have broad presence in both downstream and upstream, could you summarize as kind of the sale structure in different parts of the value chain? How large share of revenues come from upstream and also from the downstream?
I let Antti to take a crack on that one.
Yeah.
We do not have exact figures.
Yeah
maybe Antti can give some light on that.
Well, as Eero said it, so we don't open that in detail. Of course, how we see that where we are going, and we have seen actually recent years that, whereas we have a strong presence in service, more actually important is coming the reselling and the treatment element. Also when we are coming to remediation, you are actually not just providing the remediation service, you are providing the recycling of the materials from the remediation site, so it's part of the project itself, so that's increasing. Coming up more and more actually significant in the future.
Thank you. Third one from me, coming a bit from the long-term outlook to shorter period. We know that the municipalization of the waste collection is coming, and I think you have commented earlier that it will bring some headwinds in 2026 and 2027. Do you have any comments on from this perspective?
Yes. It's not coming. It is affecting already, it has been affecting us, I'd say more, for the past two years already. It will impact our operations, 2026, 2027, and perhaps even 2028. What is then the impact? It is difficult to say, because it is negative. That we know. How much negative it is, we don't know exactly, because it very much depends on how successful we are in those tenders for the municipal sort of logistics contracts, but also the dynamic impact it has to the market. We have already seen this year, increasingly, that small players are exiting the market, and there is a consolidation happening.
The market is shifting as we speak, so very difficult to say what is the exact impact? It is definitely going to be negative for the coming years, but not hugely negative, and we can, to a large extent, offset that with cost efficiency measures.
Thank you. All from me.
There's first at the back.
Thanks. Antti Koskivuori from Danske. Maybe a more general question about the market growth and what that means for you guys. I mean, obviously, at least some part of that is increasing recycling, less incineration, which I believe probably means that the kind of marginal cost of the last material or taking that away from the streams is gonna be higher than for the existing materials. Does it mean that there's also more value for you guys in those, say, new streams, in a way? Does it require more CapEx for that growth?
Yeah, I'll say high level first.
Yeah, that's fine.
then you can complement. There is perhaps a little bit more cost, but I'd say the more important fact is that our customers request us to take more value out of the material, and that is what Antti was talking pretty well about. We really need to understand our customers' processes and their needs. Yes, it will require perhaps more investment in our treatment facilities, but at the same time, it is kind of a market demand that we have to meet. Antti, if you continue.
Yeah, yeah, please. Well, if we take from there that there's one thing is that you are able to recycle more and get more out of the material. One thing that you, of course, try to get as pure as possible at source. That's very important when we provide solutions. You maximize the capability to use it different places at the end of the chain, so resell for a number of places. An element of the value is also developing, that we have a look at how the industry is developing. You need to use more and more recyclable materials in your final products, so that's the one what we see that in the future if we look at towards years ahead.
Even increasing demand for recycled materials, which then also probably increases the value as well for the recycled materials.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
We'll keep the materials on a cycle more and more in the future.
Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that when the tasks gets more challenging, do you see better margin for you?
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Yes, we do, and we don't. It depends on the fraction. But there is what we believe in, and some of it, this still needs to be sort of proven to be a fact, that there is going to be increasing blending obligations for various raw materials, and then there will be more value-
Mm
... in the recycled material. In recycled plastics, the sort of prices have gone up and down, and it really depends very much on kind of how much supply is there, from virgin material. Nowadays, the prices, from our perspective, could be higher than what they are right now. They're still okay, but they could and should be higher.
All right, thank you.
Rauli from Inderes. Hi. A couple of questions from me as well. Firstly, you mentioned you want to increase cross-selling. I was just wondering, how does it look from your customer's perspective across your service lines, that kind of, are they the same or different people or departments buying? I would imagine that normal waste and hazardous waste could be the same, but maybe in industrial services is being bought by somebody else in the company. How does that impact your cross-selling efforts?
Yeah. Excellent question. If we look at that, yes, that's right. That traditionally, if you look at traditional hazardous waste, yes. When you are actually suing or you are having a need for sanction, that's also waste actually.
Mm
You need to report on, actually there is not any more waste you shouldn't report as an customer. Actually, when we come to remediation then, and site streams, they are also waste, how to say that source. You are able to provide the whole. That's the idea of our end-to-end offering, that we are actually knowing the source and actually what to do and treat, and that's why we are also having a number of industrial customers which are actually. We have cases where they are using basically all our service lines today.
Mm.
Of course, where we address now that we will expand the portfolio, more sub-segments of the customer to reach better cross-selling in the future.
Mm.
maybe if you answer kind of how we have, restructured our sales-
Yeah.
... sort of from that perspective, I think that's what you were after.
Yeah, yeah, maybe that as well. Yeah, from the customer's perspective.
Yeah
... also from your, yes.
Yes. Coming to that if we have the offering in place, we support that with, actually our sales, so we have segment sales.
Mm.
When we look at the process industry, when we look at trade and logistics, when we look at construction, so we have actually one sales, which is providing actually the sales towards these segments. But maybe what, saying that, as said, there's a two-sided point of view that you need to have offering also to enable sales.
Mm.
That's the way we are doing from both angles.
Yeah. Okay. Okay, clear. Then secondly, you often mention that the regulation is driving the kind of growth in the market and increasing demand, which I believe is of course true, but is there any kind of game changers in the pipeline on the regulations since your market growth estimates is still, like, quite steady, 3% per annum? That doesn't look like there is any big changes as such coming. Is there anything potentially coming from the regulation side that could impact the market growth outlook?
Yeah, I don't think there is a single game changer that is coming, but all the sort of new regulation is by and large favorable for us.
Mm-hmm. Okay.
Sort of the big things are this blending obligation, the Emissions Trading System. Like now, we're receiving a lot of waste in Finland from Italy and some other Southern European countries because Germany put a tax on incineration of waste to energy.
Mm.
Finland starts to be the last sort of tax haven in Europe for waste to energy. Probably that will end at some point, even in Finland at the latest, 2028, when we are sort of part of the sort of EU regulation in this. There are things all the time, and obviously, the next version of our national waste law is under preparation, and at the moment, we are optimistic that there are a number of things that will also sort of make it more clear what is sort of the free market and what is the household waste that belongs to the municipal waste companies.
Yes. Thanks.
There's still one question here.
Hello. Nikko Ruokangas from SEB. One follow-up on the profitability question and targets you already discussed. As said, you have almost already reached the profitability target, but the growth investments are now kind of a reason why you are not targeting for higher. How much do the growth and profitability target go hand in hand, meaning that to reach the profitability target, do you also need to reach the sales growth target?
Not necessarily, but we need to grow to be able to maintain this high profitability. That's clear. We don't need absolutely grow more than 6% every year to get 11% EBITA. But, you know, we can, and we will increase our cost efficiency going forward as well, but there is limit how much cost you can squeeze out of the operation. Growth, top-line growth is really essential for us going forward. It's been, you know, difficult period for us this past couple of years when the market has been flat or even declining. This is not the way to go forward.
All right. I understand. Thanks.
Okay.
No more. Yeah.
No more questions there online. Did we have a coffee break?
Yep.
Okay, good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's have a coffee break and continue after that. Welcome back. Hopefully, you had some coffee also there behind the lines. This section is about growth. We have three pillars for growth. The first one is about strengthening our position in current services market. This means that we are aiming to do more cross-selling and upselling. Second one is to do geographical expansion in Sweden. As I said earlier, the Swedish market is more than double the size of the Finnish market, and hence, offers a great growth opportunities for us. The third area, as discussed earlier, waste to material and waste to product solutions mean much higher value for us, and therefore, that is a big opportunity for us going forward.
In this pillar, we also look into the possibilities of remediation. To reach our targeted growth more than 6%, we need to support these three growth pillars with organic investments and selective acquisitions. Our unique service offering enables great upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Even though almost all of our largest customers use our full service portfolio, that is not yet the case in a small and medium-sized segment. As you can see from this picture, almost 80% of our current customers do not use all of our services to the extent possible. As Antti said earlier, they are using maybe two of our service lines, but they do not use to the extent they could. We have very strong presence with our industrial customers.
They predominantly use our full service portfolio, and as I said, at the same time, this is not the case with many of the other customer segments. If we look at construction, currently, about 75% our sales to construction sector is around waste management and recycling, and only 25% around remediation or process cleaning and water handling. There are currently huge land masses handled in construction, and we have capabilities and facilities to do much more, like storaging and mixing various types of masses and very efficient solutions to remediate even very highly contaminated soil. Our small and medium-sized customers do not use our services as much as they could because they are very focused on buying single transactions.
We can do much better work in educating them of all of our different services, but more importantly, we need to make it as easy as possible for our small and medium-sized customers to buy more from us by digitalizing the ordering and the customer service processes even more going forward. As Antti showed, we have already very good systems, but there is clearly improvements that we can make for them going forward based on our data platform and our new ICT solutions. A concrete example of upselling and cross-selling is our process cleaning business. Obviously, we have years of experience of very, very high quality and safe solutions for several different customer segments, like metal, forest, chemical, energy, construction, and infrastructure industry.
Our know-how and equipment in high-pressure cleaning and sandblasting are state-of-the-art, but we are investing increasingly in the service method development, like blast cleaning, no-man entry solutions, like robotics and drones, and new and more safe and efficient ways meeting the ever-increasing customer needs. Second growth pillar. We entered the Swedish market early 2022 by acquiring 70% of SVB. Since then, we have, together with our colleagues in SVB, grown the operations organically and with bolt-on investment to more than double. We are roughly around EUR 20 million now in Sweden. As I said, the market in Sweden more than double compared to Finland, and in coming years, we'd like to continue to grow our operations.
Our plan is to continue to leverage our know-how in special methods like blast cleaning and support the growth with expertise sharing between Finland and Sweden. We will also evaluate possibilities to enter hazardous waste and remediation and waste management and recycling markets at some point in the future in Sweden. Third pillar is, how do we integrate further in the value chain? As we have gone through, we have approximately 1 million tons of material going through our hands every year. Our goal is to get much more value out of this material flow. At the same time, technology development is not straightforward, and it's sometimes very complex and requires time. Most recently, we have investigated chemical recycling of plastics and biochar, both of which we think have huge potential going forward.
As of now, we have not found yet a sort of industrial scale solutions that would be viable for us. This is an area we are continuing to invest in and expect to be able to publish concrete developments in the coming years. Another example of integration further in the value chain is our remediation business. There is an increasing need for remediation of more and more polluted sites as urbanization continues, and industrial sites and power plants are making space for housing in the city centers, in the growth areas like Helsinki region, Tampere, Turku, et cetera. Antti already mentioned this, and I think this is a great example of what we can do. This is a very recent example of what we have successfully done in the area of remediation.
We just finished a very large project in Vaasa for our customer, Kemira. We remediated contaminated soil of an old factory area and restored the site landfill to meet the very strict environmental safety standards. As per Kemira's request, we created a meadow on the restored landfill. In our R&D study, done together with research institutions, the meadow was evaluated to have a high ecological state. This serves as an example of how biodiversity actions can be incorporated into the industrial environment. Very big project with very good outcomes. Our growth ambitions will be supported with selected and targeted acquisitions. We have a solid track record in executing successfully acquisitions that offer a basis for further organic growth. Most recently, we have discussed about this SVB already, and then the pallet recycling business acquisition in Finland.
These kind of bolt-on acquisitions are very good for us because we have long experience in integrating acquisitions, and we have a very good platform to integrate these into. As a summary, we have a very large market with healthy underlying growth. We have a unique end-to-end service offering and leading position in this fragmented market, on top of which we have identified three clear growth pillars: up-selling and cross-selling, expanding our operations in very large Swedish markets, and integration further in the value chain with waste value solutions and remediation. All of this will be supported with organic and inorganic growth investments. That was the end of our growth section, and now I'd like to hand over to Joni, and he will go through the financials. Welcome, Joni.
Thank you, Eero. Thank you, and good morning, everyone. My name is Joni Sorsanen, and I work as a CFO at the current L&T Group. It is my pleasure to present you the key financial highlights of New L&T, together with how we drive financial excellence going forward. In this presentation, I will also tell you about our high-level profit growth plan, and I will end this session by repeating our midterm strategic targets. Our carve-out financials for the past three years demonstrate stable net sales development with solid profitability. The company generates net sales around EUR 420 million, with around 10% adjusted EBITA margin. Our EBITDA stands at around EUR 86 million, of which around 45% can be translated into free cash flow. I will tell you more about our cash flow profile later in the presentation.
Another key financial highlight I would like to emphasize is our decent 14% return on capital employed in 2024. Let's start by looking at our revenue streams. We provide mission-critical services that can withstand economic fluctuations. 68% of our revenue comes from long-term contracts, and within this category, for example, our long-term contracts in waste management, hazardous waste, and sewer maintenance services. 16% of our sales come from so-called add-on sales, which are also recurring in nature. This category includes, for example, our process cleaning services. Finally, the remainder 16% comes from, for example, remediation projects, as well as sale of recycling equipment and sale of recycled materials. What is interesting about L&T's net sales profile is that we have both sides of the trade.
Our position allows us to generate revenue in upstream through collection and treatment of waste, and also in downstream through sale of recycled materials. Another way to look at net sales is by service type. 66%, 2/3 of our net sales, come from waste management and recycling services. 15% comes from hazardous waste and remediation services, and the rest, 19%, from industrial services and water treatment services. If we look at our net sales growth in the past three years, we can say that it has been somewhat moderate. However, if we look at growth within these different service lines, we can see that, for example, hazardous waste and remediation services, as well as industrial services, have grown on a decent pace around 3%-5% annually.
Within waste management and recycling services, we've been affected by municipalization of the residential waste collection, which, by the way, nowadays represent less than 10% of our net sales. Within the waste management services, we have seen decent growth within our B2B customers, as well as within the producer responsibility organizations. Now, having completed the revenue deep dives, let's turn our focus on cost base. Obviously, we know very well our cost structure, and we know how to drive cost efficiency going forward. The single most important cost category for us is the employee benefit expenses, around EUR 140 million annually.
This includes both variable and fixed costs, and if we look at our employee base, we have around 2,300 employees, 600 of which are white-collar employees, and 1,700 of which are blue-collar employees. The second largest category is materials and services, which is variable in nature completely. This includes, for example, materials, subcontracting services, and waste treatment fees. Finally, our other operating expenses has various line items, the most important of which are related to our fleet, for example, fuel expenses, EUR 23 million annually, and repair and maintenance expenses, EUR 22 million annually. Overall, we believe we are in a good position to leverage operating leverage when the market starts to support us in the future.
This is especially true for the construction industry, which is at the moment on a very low level in Finland. Overall, we have a strong track record of well-protected margins. Here, we have presented you the carve-out numbers for the past three financial years. Those of you who have followed us for a longer period of time would remember that if we would include here, for example, 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, this picture would not change dramatically, which showcases the strong, profitable business we have. However, even though we think that we are among the most profitable ones in the industry and within our peer group, we still believe we have room for improvement. How are we going to do it?
In this picture, I would like to draw your attention first to the growth plan, which is set to provide the strongest absolute profit growth for us going forward. Eero just presented you with the three-pillar growth plan. Also within this growth plan category, we have operating leverage. We think that we have the capacity to take in more revenue without increasing our fixed cost. This will support us when the market starts to recover. Also important for us is to have tangible operational excellence actions in place. To offset some of the headwinds already mentioned here, for example, municipalization, demerger dyssynergies, as well as increasing ERP or increased ERP costs and amortization. Within operational excellence, we have tangible actions.
For example, within procurement, we have a strong procurement team working with annual spend of EUR 200 million-EUR 250 million, every day working towards achieving savings for the company. Moving on to capital expenditure then. The company has a fairly stable need for maintenance, annual maintenance, capital expenditure, ranging between EUR 20 million-EUR 25 million annually. These relate mostly to our fleet, but also to our facilities. If you look at the graph here, we can see that the dark blue bar has been fairly stable, representing the annual maintenance CapEx need. What has happened in 2023 and 2024, we have invested in our state-of-the-art IT system, around EUR 20 million, and also included in the light blue bars, we have investments in special municipal contract-related fleet. Now we have talked about revenue, costs, and capital expenditure.
Let's have a look at what this all means in terms of cash flow. Here we have provided you with an illustration of how our EBITDA translates into free cash flow. If we start from EBITDA of EUR 86 million in 2024, we deduct our maintenance CapEx of EUR 20 million-EUR 25 million, our annual lease expenditure of EUR 15 million, we hopefully add change in net working capital. We seek to release net working capital on an annual basis, we deduct interest expenses and taxes. We end up having around 45% of our EBITDA, in absolute terms, EUR 40 million as free cash flow. This is the amount we can invest in growth, both organic and inorganic growth, we can use this to distribute funds to our shareholders.
This EUR 40 million we can invest without increasing our leverage. Obviously, when we think about different growth initiatives, we need to make sure that these initiatives meet our internal hurdle rates so that we make sure that we create shareholder value in the long term. Moving on to return on capital, which is a really important KPI for us internally. L&T is a fairly capital-intensive business. In 2024, we employed around EUR 320 million. Just as we have presented stable profit development, we can also report stable returns on capital, ranging between 12%-14%. Our return on equity on a pro forma basis at the end of September amounted to 15.3%.
An aspect that has not been touched so far in this CMD is our joint venture, Laania, which is 55% owned by us. If you look at financial year 2024, our share of Laania's net profit was EUR 3.6 million, which in relation to the book value of our investment was around 20% return. The book value of Laania shares is around EUR 18 million in our balance sheet. We believe we have a strong balance sheet that gives us strategic flexibility going forward. After completing the refinancing in June 2025, we have no immediate refinancing needs. Our financial debt consists of two elements: our outstanding notes of EUR 75 million, which is due in 2028, and then our bank loan of EUR 50 million, which is due in 2030, assuming the utilization of two-year extension option.
Overall, through our stable and resilient track record in financials, we believe we have strong debt capacity to execute on our growth strategy. Also, we believe we are eligible for financing in the eyes of the debt investors. This all means that we can, in addition to this EUR 40 million free cash flow, we can also put our balance sheet in use when driving our growth initiatives. To conclude this section, I would like to repeat our midterm strategic goals. As already has been discussed, Our target is to grow more than 6% on an annual basis in the midterm, which we think is 3-5 years. In combination with the growth target, we are set to reach EBITA margin of 11%.
We want to keep our balance sheet healthy. Our leverage ratio is we want that to maintain between 1.5 and 2.5. Before moving to the Q&A session, I would like to point out our dividend policy, which is to distribute more than or at least 50% of our net income as dividends. Thank you!
Thank you, Joni. As in the previous session, Lilia has the online questions, but let's start the questions you may have here locally.
Yes, Nikko Ruokangas from SEB again. I have couple of questions. I'll go one by one. Starting with the acquisitions.
Mm-hmm
... almost asked about earlier. Could you now discuss a bit: Do you see that it is easier for you to make acquisitions or focus on acquisitions as a pure circular economy company? Do you think that that could kind of lead to accelerated pace of acquisitions going forward?
I hope so. At least, we have a much clearer focus now, and we have a process how we screen potential acquisition targets. We have internally a team that is actively working on that. The sort of the focus will help us to screen more targets. Now that, you know, we can allocate all of our also resources from balance sheet perspective to these acquisitions, I believe we will be able to accelerate our growth through M&A as well. Obviously, like always the case with M&A, you need a seller, and you need a buyer, and you need the price for that to happen. No guarantees, but at least now it feels good.
We have screened a lot of companies already this fall, and we have a sort of healthy funnel of potential targets.
Okay, sounds good. The other source of growth or where do you see market share gains of upselling and cross-selling, how much have those actions contributed to your sales or sales growth in the past couple of years? Now, as you are kind of including those as one of your growth pillars, are you expecting the pace of cross-selling and upselling to remain the same as earlier, or are you expecting acceleration in those actions?
I'm expecting acceleration, but Antti can answer this.
Well, he has to deliver.
I might as well. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe related to response earlier to question, a little bit same topic that I said, we have offering to different segments. We have a segment sales where we concentrate on these segments and especially sub-segments. What we have also proved lately that we work closely with our Swedish operation as well, we have certain common customers in Finland and Sweden. We have been able to bring actually services from Finland, like the blast cleaning services, where we help the boilers to recover faster than ever, how to say it? That's what we are doing. Again, there is an opportunity there.
What is also element of the, cross-selling, that when we have now the one sales approach towards the different segments and sub-segments, we are able to better transform our of course, own knowledge, but also, develop the activities towards the customer demands, like this blast cleaning. Another example I would take, for example, water treatment. We have more demanding requirements in Sweden today, for example, how you need to clean the water, and we have experience there in the mobile treatment. We have brought that competence to Finland, so we are able to provide that service in Finland today. How to say it? We support each other.
Okay, thanks. Last one from me and related to costs. Joni already touched this a bit, but what is the cost you expect to see from operating as independent company compared to time of before this demerger project? Does your profitability target and kind of this demerger mean that we should see at least lower or even lower profitability next year and then kind of accelerating after that?
Obviously, running two independent-listed companies is more expensive than running one, so there will be certain demerger dyssynergies. However, also we can see that now that we have two separate businesses, we can tailor our administration to serve in a sort of, so to speak, fit-for-purpose way. We are quite confident we can mitigate the merger dyssynergies through efficiency measures going forward. I would not expect the cost base to increase as a result.
All right. Thank you. That's all from me.
Maybe with the addition to what Joni said, so there is going to be a transition period around.
That's right.
... six months maximum, where we will see clearly additional cost. Before we have sort of fully independent systems, especially in the area of finance, where we're going to have some of these transitional services. They are not huge, but there will be some cost in the first months of 2026.
Yeah. Joona Harjama from OP again. You have quite ambitious growth targets, so I would like to ask, what do you see as kind of the main risks of not reaching the target? Secondly, is there any headroom for disappointments? I mean that do you kind of need to tick all the boxes to reach the 6% growth?
Let's say the biggest risk, at least from my perspective, is the macroeconomic environment. If the market in Finland and in Sweden remains as tough as it has been last year and this year, it will be challenging, no question about that. We are assuming that the market will normalize, and there will be at least sort of 1%-2% GDP growth in the market. We do expect the construction sector to sort of get back alive, because right now, especially in sort of the housing area, nothing is happening. On the other hand, infrastructure market is very hot, and we can see that in our remediation business, but that is not enough to offset the huge drop in the construction.
There is a certain assumption of sort of more normal GDP growth behind this 6% growth target.
Thank you.
Thanks. Antti Koskivuori from Danske. You showed the three business units or segments and the growth in 2022- 2024. Could you little bit discuss about the profitability in those three segments? I'm not asking for a number but just to kind of get an idea if there's big differences.
I would just, as you can probably imagine, we do not disclose the exact profitability figures. The differences between the service lines are not too big. Basically, the financial profiles of all of these three segments are more or less the same.
Mm.
We have exactly the same targets internally for all of these service lines.
All right, thanks. That's clear. Second one on capital allocation. Could you give us kind of a idea how you think about M&A growth investments and dividends? What's the kind of rough split in your minds for the coming three years or whatever?
Well, if I start with dividends, the target is to pay at least 50% of the net profit. If the sort of past performance is a sort of indication of future, then obviously that would mean around EUR 20 million or a little less would go to dividends. That leaves EUR 20-plus million for growth investments, either organic or inorganic, both of them are very interesting. We have, you know, interesting projects around the sort of further integration in the value chain, also we have a healthy funnel of potential acquisition targets. Both of them are going to require funds for us to be able to execute them. I don't know, Antti, if you want to add.
I think you more or less said, especially when we look at the, of course, the organic projects, that's how they will improve our capacity and also our capability. We both look at with the inorganic cases as well, for example, the case example related to Sweden. Where this was on how to say the expansion in Sweden, it also brought us competence, certain treatment areas, which we are now scaling in Finland. Other way around, we are scaling from Finland, boiler and knowledge and know-how what we are doing. That's maybe the angle, what we analyze as well.
Obviously, you know, these kind of new technologies, like, chemical recycling of plastics is you can't do that with, you know, single EUR millions, but it requires more like 10s of EUR millions, if and when we decide to go that route. There may be years when we invest much more than sort of the free cash flow, but on average, that is kind of the split we're thinking.
All right, thank you.
Yes, hi. You discussed already two years ago in the CMD, a lot about kind of looking into the new fractions and increasing the waste to value business, and nothing concrete actually really happened since that. Has that been a disappointment to you? Is this slower progress than you have expected, and what are the main hurdles you have faced that kind of had led to you to maybe discontinue some of the streams you have had?
Well, maybe we have not discontinued the streams, but certainly the sort of maturity of the technology was and is not where we would like it to be. So the industrial scale solutions just don't exist at the moment. We are not a sort of a technology startup, so we will not take something, you know, to try if it works. We want to see that it works, and then we can buy the technology and use it. We are not a startup. I don't know. Antti, what's your thinking?
Yeah. Well, likewise, and then maybe add on there, that once we also look at the technologies, we look at the source as well to ensure that you have the material, because this is recycling, it's kind of small-scale process industry.
Mm.
That's to understand the same way, and it's important that you do the pilots and look at it together with the customers as well. Maybe one thing to do, if we look at two years past, and like Eero said it earlier today, that actually in the remediation business, which is also kind of recycling element because we are recycling the soils, and we have created the biodiversity service around that one, so there we have been actually growing. Segments actually where we have had these economic challenges in Finland and Sweden, we have found out also segments where there's a growth, and then we have invested, and then we have also succeeded on those sectors.
All right. Thanks.
Online questions? Here are a couple.
Good.
Are you happy with the NPS of 46? Is that a problem concerning growth, and how is it going to be improved?
Maybe, Antti, you can answer that.
Yeah. Well, first of all, excellent question, and our ultimate goal is, of course, that would be 100, of course. We have a variance there, so we have customers who are extreme satisfied on our service, and we have areas that we have some room to improve, but average, of course, close to 50, it's on a good level, but we are not satisfied. We try to improve it, and especially, of course, we address areas where we see some levels which are below the average. We will approach those personally and manage those, and of course, where we have a higher than average, so our aim is to keep it. Our long-term target is actually around 60, what we are looking at in the next years or so. We are not there yet.
What is your competitive advantage in the Swedish market? How is the competitive landscape?
Yeah.
Actually we have a couple of advantages. First of all, the areas where we operate, we are strong, and we are able to serve the customers on those geographical areas. We have a strong understanding of the heavy industry and process industry in Sweden today, so we are able to serve the customers, and we know their environment. Then we are able to support from Finland with our method and product development, our operation there, and other way around, they are able to support us, like I mentioned, the mobile water, where the Swedish market is further than Finland. Actually, those three elements, what we are having, so geographical, method, and of course, the customer knowledge as well.
Three areas where it's good to build also the future, because the one aim why we went through the process cleaning, and then we have brought some new services there, that we are close to the customer. It enables us in the future when we are looking the market development and our presence there, that we are already close to customers.
I have to say that Jonas, who is heading our Swedish operations, he really knows the business. I mean, this fall, he was few nights, he was doing high-pressure cleaning himself, so he's an expert, so he really knows what it means to do it well, and what the needs are there, so customer intimacy at the highest level, I would say.
One more. How does inflation affect the growth figures?
That's a good question. I think the future projections are around 2% inflation, also in line with the European Union, or the central bank's target. Obviously, that will, if it turns out to be 2%, that will, of course, drive our sales growth at the same pace. Do you have something to add?
No.
No more from online.
Okay. More questions here? If not, we want to thank you for listening in, and thank you for very good questions, and also thank for Antti and Joni. With this, we'll now go for lunch break. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Thank you.