Here in Espoo, Finland, to join our Capital Markets Day 2022. This really is the place to be today, and we're excited to see all of you joining us here in person, and also, welcome you who are joining online this event. This is how we are going to run this event. We are going to have four presentations. We'll start momentarily with President and CEO Pekka Vauramo. He's followed by CFO Eeva Sipilä. These presentations will be back to back. Then we have a first Q&A for them both. After that, we go for a refreshing break for about 10 minutes, and then we go back and start our deep dive into our businesses. We start with aggregates, where we are discussing the business from both equipment and aftermarket side at the same time with three presenters.month
We have after that a Q&A for aggregates theme, and following a break for another 10 minutes. The final presentation discusses minerals again from OE side and aftermarket at the same time, three presenters, followed by Q&A, after which we are ready for closing remarks by President and CEO Pekka Vauramo. We tend to finish at about 5:00 P.M. or a bit earlier. We'll see. As we are recording this event, please make sure in this room that you have your phones in silent mode. If you have any questions about practicalities, reach out to me, or even better option would be to reach out my IR and comms colleagues in the back of the room. With these words, I think we are all set.
Once again, thanks for joining us for our CMD 2022, and it's my pleasure to introduce President and CEO Pekka Vauramo.
Thank you, Juha, and warm welcome from my side to our Capital Markets Day. Really a pleasure to have you here now live after some months and a couple of years of virtually connecting with you. Really pleased to have you here and also welcome to our audience online. I will start off this one. This one I'll go and review our journey more from a strategic angle to start with where we are in that journey and where we are headed. Then Eeva will continue more from a financial angle before we go into the Q&A session. We continue to build industry leader. I'll start off with what we call a strategy one pager.
It basically describes who we are, what we do, where we go, and how do we do things. The heading is our purpose statement. We feel that it's very relevant still in this environment. It talks about sustainability. It talks about the lifestyle that we live on this earth. On the bottom, that covers the how part. There's our values, which we have in place. In the top left corner, we have the mega trends. On the other hand, in the right corner, we have our tier one priorities.
Those priorities that we feel are important, that will take us towards tier one company that we set as our target when we formed Metso Outotec, just about 800 days ago, two years and two months ago. There's also our organization mentioned. It describes the way how we work. We work in a decentralized way, and we continue to work and execute our business through our five businesses. This has remained the same for the past two years. We maybe have changed one word in it, if I remember correctly, but we like to be consistent and these kind of things they need to live over a longer period of time. Merger 800 days ago was day one.
We announced it a year before that one, three years ago, plan to merge Metso Minerals and Outotec. We feel that we've been very successful in it. We were very fast. We utilized the momentum of day one, maybe helped with COVID restrictions. We didn't stop to travel and change our plans that we had made before that one. We just executed them. We were fast. We exceeded our targets both in revenue side and cost side ahead of time. We don't anymore talk about integration as such. We work as one company. The combined offering that we have is showing its strengths in the marketplace. It is a good platform for us to deliver further growth and value.
Building a culture is always a key in a new company. We invest a lot in building a Metso Outotec culture, unique culture. I'll talk about that one a little bit later. Then if we look at the financial return from day one, that's July first, 2020, the TSR, Total Shareholder Return, has exceeded 70% to date. If we compare that one with our competitors or peers that we are normally put against, that is the highest number, by the way, and it's about double to what the average of the others are.
From that perspective, in this timeframe, we have been successful so far, and we have all the reasons to be satisfied on the development so far. We do have now the platform in place, which we want to further grow and then of course continue to deliver improved profitability. We focus more on products instead of projects. That will be the focus in future. Such products which bring healthy aftermarket business, where the sustainability has grown much in importance even in these two years that we've been as a Metso Outotec. It's been important for us for a long time, and it just continues to be the most important guidance for our further development, especially products and our offerings in general.
It is a strategic priority for our customers, so it's better be the same for us as well. We have lived all this time in very volatile environment. We all know the events that are happening still, hopefully COVID being mostly behind us, and all the consequences, inflation just being one of them, and how to live in this kind of inflationary environment. There again, I will give eight points out of ten to my team, how they have managed the business through the inflation. We've been mostly ahead of the curve in that one, and that's visible in our margin development if you look at that one. We continue to fine-tune and adjust our portfolio.
We like to focus on things that we know that are really in the core of us into the future, and that do support the business models which we feel that we can best create value with. About two years ago, I think it was October 2020, when we had a Capital Markets Day, virtual one, at that moment, I recall saying something that, if we could deliver good cash flow for the next year and a half or two, we would be able to pay back some of the expensive debt, and at that moment, we could turn our eyes to the M&A market. If you look at what has happened now, it's exactly like that. We had a healthy cash flow. We paid our debt back.
Our net debt is reasonably low level at this moment, and we do have some firepower should right opportunities arise. We work in a decentralized way, and it means that those five businesses in the middle, we say that all the monies, they are there. They need to find their home in these businesses. Right or wrong, but we practiced this for five years already all together, and I think when we look at legacy companies even longer, maybe from that perspective. But five years this has been the model how we work. We know how this one works.
We know how the numbers come together, our people know how to work, how to act, how to behave in this kind of model, and we feel that this model can still deliver many more things. Some changes have taken place on this one. If you look at the market areas, we have eight of them, and there's one new market area that is Central Asia, which I think officially has its first day today. We used to have Russia there before, and for known reasons, we don't anymore have Russia there, since we are winding down everything that we have ongoing in Russia as we speak. We have also distribution management there, which is mostly, and in fact solely at this moment for our aggregates.
Purpose of that one really is to performance manage our dealers and make sure that they take a balanced view on sales of both equipment and aftermarket offerings. By the way, very good results so far. This has been in place as long as Metso Outotec has been in place, so a little over two years, and really a great journey, of course, combined with everything else that we've been able to successfully implement in the Aggregates segment altogether. We have three reporting segments as you know, Aggregates, Minerals, and Metals.
In this Capital Markets Day, we focus on aggregates and minerals, and as you know, metals is going through a strategic review, and we are able to complete that review during the next few months. We need some more time for that one, but we are getting very close to that one. Therefore, we don't discuss too much about metals in our presentations. In Q&A, feel free, of course, to ask anything relating to that one.
Looking just quickly, what the outlook and environment in these segments are, if you remember when we acquired, well, when we formed Metso Outotec, we had just acquired McCloskey on Metso's side, slightly before that one, and we kind of said that we feel that we should grow at the same time our exposure on aggregates market as we grow our exposure on minerals market. One reason for that one was that we felt that aggregates is counter-cyclical to mineral cyclicality because there's a lot of infrastructure. There tends to be a lot of government spending, which kicks in when the economy in general turns down. We have seen this. I mean, all the stimulus packages during the COVID really boosted that business.
Even though we had a few months where there were practically no new orders coming to our aggregates site in equipment site, the aggregates business came very strongly back after 2, 3, 4 months, and already in the fall, early fall, October 2020, we saw new monthly order bookings that were on record high level, and it continued to be like that for quite some time. Additionally, aggregates business is local business or regional business. We have a couple of price graphs there. It's so local that there's very little market data as such which is regularly published, but there is the U.S. price index, there's price indexing from Japan and from India. Japan is not really that relevant market for us, but India and U.S. are.
You can see how different they are. Indian market pricing has stayed more or less flat, some ups and downs, but U.S. market really strong price development and we see and feel that in our business in aggregates, where North American activity is currently probably highest ever that we have seen and experienced. While other markets, including Europe, we see some softness, even though in Europe things are maybe not quite as soft as we thought still a few weeks ago. We expect the CapEx expenditure to continue to grow at sort of low single-digit pace, which is quite normal for this business. Of course, 2021.
2020 to 2021, there is quite a jump, and that's the recovery from COVID, which was really rapid. When we move into minerals side, that's more of a global. Cycles are global. Our customers, their pricing environment, which naturally come from metal prices, it's a global. Everyone has the same pricing for their products. That's why they're called commodities rather than products. It has different dynamics from aggregates. Yet aggregates and minerals are very synergistic, internally for us from many aspects. There's a product side, production, synergies, as well R&D synergies and aftermarket synergies that we have between these two segments. Therefore, we feel that these two belong close together.
In the mining side, if we look at currently the most important metals for us, copper, gold, iron ore, with iron ore the only exception where the outlook from the price viewpoint is flat. There the focus is shifting more towards pelletizing, more towards steel production itself and more towards decarbonizing the steel production. That's where the next huge investments are going to take place, and that could be very potential for our metals segment, that part of it. We are not expecting huge investments into new mine production, even though there are process improvements that need to be done.
We all know, for example, the tailings handling and management in iron ore mines in some areas needs really urgently to be addressed and that is naturally opportunity for our minerals business. Out of these metals, copper, the demand and supply situation is tight and is also forecasted to continue tight, and that is very supportive for the price levels. Despite of lack of new greenfields, our customers will be in position to invest in debottlenecking in existing operations, expand the productions, and this is what we are currently seeing. We of course hope with that and wish so much that the greenfields could come on stream online because world needs the copper. We need to electrify everything, and everything that's electric requires copper.
We need it in a grid. We also yes, for our cars, we need also more copper, but it's everything that's electric requires copper. Very few substitutes, maybe aluminum in the grid side, but that's about it for copper. These are the biggest volume metals. Interesting part are these battery, so-called battery metals and the new kid on the block is nickel here, which was raw material for stainless steel, but it's now turning into a battery metal and is very interesting at this moment.
Currently, it's the electric vehicles that's driving this demand, and there's so many studies made out of this one, but I think most of them show that there won't be enough of these metals, even though geologically and the mineralogy that exists on the Earth, there's plenty of these metals. But how to exploit them and excavate them in the economical way is the key. We believe the pricing will also or the demand will support pricing of these products and we will see continued investments into these metals. Longer term outlook for both segments we believe is favorable. We see of course humps and bumps on the road going forward.
This business is in no way isolated from a macro and from the economic developments in the world. Maybe we see some smoothing of the bottoms with the mega trends that we have around us. Moving to implementation of our strategy, and I'll just use these tier one priorities what we have as a sort of and comment them. We made a self-assessment on where we are in the journey, and this journey is not how well we.
It's not about how well we've succeeded so far, but let's say how far we've come to what we feel where we could be and where we want to be, at the end of the day, and I'll start from sustainability because I feel that that's where we have really taken major steps forward. We have introduced many things, Planet Positive. We were the first ones amongst our peers and competitors to introduce science-based targets. I think still, we are the only one. I know that the others are also in process.
We are starting our third year with them, and we are reporting this progress to the markets on quarterly basis and this is very well noticed by many of our stakeholders as we move on. We are launching new products, Planet Positive products and some interesting concepts are really arising from that area. We've been on the list of Global 100 most sustainable companies for several years. Highest position was couple of years ago, we were number 8 on that list. Currently, or the latest one that I saw, we were on position 42, if I recall correctly. We didn't drop because of us.
I think that there seems to be rush on that list, and many, for example, financial institutions made inroads or your companies took our position kind of. That just shows how interesting it and how important it is to get listed on these listings and how much effort there is ongoing in by every business to get on them. Our cultural development, I would say that we started slow there. We had COVID. We couldn't travel. We couldn't meet. We were just implementing our integration plan, which was good from the synergies delivery viewpoint. Now that traveling is possible, we are seeing really great steps forward.
We are measuring this, by the way, very frequently that where we are with our culture journey. We measure it quarterly with a tool which is a very agile tool. We just closed the tool this week. I think it was closed on Monday, and Tuesday morning I had results on my cell phone on that one. Very agile tool, one of the best tools that I've ever seen. It's a very expensive tool that we have. 85% of our employees respond to that one. Biggest reason for 15% not doing is that they really don't have the tools or access to company network for whatever reason, but high attendance rate.
We measure it because we want to take action in areas where we need to take action. We're making good inroads. We've improved our engagement score every time, quarter after quarter, and will continue to do so. The area where we have most to gain is customer success, and we feel that it's we only succeed if our customers succeed. If we succeed, but our customers don't, I think it's just a coincidence and it's not on sustainable basis. That's the ambition that we want to deliver. I'll come a little bit back to that one. We clearly with all the challenges in supply chain, for example, I mean that's an area that we need to improve. Then last but not least, financial performance.
With very round figures, we started close to 10% EBITDA levels. We are roughly at the 13% as we go, and we are headed towards 15, so I think that translates to 60% achievement so far. That's some mathematics. The others are more sort of self-assessed based on our own judgment. Our financial targets there as well, I would say that we've delivered three of them. Three of them we still have distance to go with our margin. With the actions in place and with the growth that we have, with the outlook that we have, we do have the potential and this team over there is very much committed to delivering that result.
We haven't changed this, by the way. We moved up a little bit in the investment grading. We are one notch better now off than when we started, and that is because of our stronger and strengthening balance sheet since the merger. Customer success there on the left-hand side, really the important criteria, basic criteria, how customers look at us, how responsive we are, can we deliver, what our quality is. With the supply chain challenges that we have had, we have areas that we need to be prepared to invest in that area as well.
We've seen how fragile the supply chains can be and how difficult the availability of some of the components and how difficult it would be to continue to base supply chains on globalization as we have learned to think about the globalization over the past, say, 15, 20 years. That development needs to be somewhat diverted or backtracked. The way we address these is through partnerships, through digitalization and providing customers products that help them to achieve better results. When talking about sustainability, we also need to look at our own operations and we do target delivering net zero footprint by 2030 and cutting the CO2 emissions by 50% at the end of 2024.
We are already, by the way, below that one, but it's a very tough measurement that because it's an absolute measurement and it's regardless of what level our production is. If our production is on higher level, then of course the CO2 emissions are most likely to be on higher level. We've committed to reduce regardless of that one, our CO2 by 50%, we are well on target achieving that one. On logistics, we have already made quite inroads. It ties back to our warehouse network, our supply principles, how the materials move. We will also make some supply chain investments in order to cut the logistics part. It will also bring some other opportunities for us if we do so.
We are driving our suppliers to commit to science-based targets. We started from ways below 10% of our expenditure or our suppliers behind our supplies below 10% having the science-based targets. Currently, we are somewhere between 13%-15% on our journey. We also report these ones on quarterly basis. By 2025, our goal is to get to 30% of our expenditure on that level. By far the biggest impact we can have with our customers, and this is the handprint story that we have been saying. If we just measure the handprint, we are already net positive.
I mean, the impact that our processes and equipment have when our customers operate them, their reduction of CO2 is way higher than what we produce in our own operations. We've launched the Planet Positive that's just to make it easier for customers, and also our stakeholders easier to track down our development in terms of sales. We do report that number on quarterly basis. It's always a rolling 12-month number prior to reporting. Reporting on the latest number was just over EUR 700 million. I think we started this from about EUR 500 million level. I think less than a year ago, we published the first Planet Positive sales.
Our aim is to grow this one at double the rate that we grow the overall sales number. We created this system really to make it easier to track our development because this area is really lacking standards. We decided to create our own, but we do have external party that makes sure that we stay honest and we stick to the criteria that we have set for that one. Sustainability is naturally integrated in our businesses in all areas. If I needed to pick one out of this one at this moment, I mean, in our consumables business with our upcoming footprint actions, we will enter a recycling of used consumables.
To give you an idea, what it means, from sort of raw material viewpoint, of our consumables, customers cannot use the remaining 40%-50% of the parts, and they are reusable. In metallic mill liners, they are cast items of certain alloy metal, and we can use that same metal, put it back in the furnace, and produce new ones out of that one. That requires that we are close enough to our main customers and have the capability to produce the new. We in our R&D currently in a testing phase, we are doing the same for rubber mill liners, and this is something very unique in the marketplace.
We will hear about that one during the months and maybe next year more about how successful we are in that one, but looks promising, that one. Currently, there's no way of recycling those rubber wear liners and that same 40%-50% basically returns. If we can use that one, it's naturally Planet Positive from our viewpoint. Digitalization does have the further potential to go. We have demonstrated that we can digitalize things. What we haven't been able to demonstrate that we can change business models, and our ambition is to change business models. For example, with our digital twin, the Geminex, that will be described later today, what that is and does.
It's a tool where customers can optimize, maximize their recovery rates, and we need to come up with a business model where we are sharing that benefit rather than just selling this product as any other product. More of a service model than product sale. Culture, which we feel is very important. In my view, when we compete, it's the company cultures that compete. Strong culture, we all know that strong culture, if it supports company targets, goals, and ambitions, it is really the powerful tool that basically addresses any concerns that one might have in business before they become issues and problems. That's where we want to aim at. This needs to be integrated in businesses.
Businesses' role is to come up with agenda that's inspiring to people. That's how we can recruit and retain people. We need to have the right leadership in place so that people can see that they have models in the company to follow and they are given the opportunities to develop themselves. We measure this, like I said, on quarterly basis, and we are improving. We are in top quartile of our international benchmark in this area. We aim to top ten 10% position. When we are there, then we know that we have the right things in place. Meanwhile, we continue to invest in that area. I mentioned about that it's for us time to turn our eyes into markets and look at acquisition targets.
Of course, many of you know and we've said that there's nothing really big and huge, but there's plenty of small ones. Bolt-ons can be adjacencies as well, close adjacencies to us. But we prioritize certain things, products with higher aftermarket. That's a clear guidance and commitment from our side. Sustainable offering, automation, digitalization, those are the areas sort of in from the offering viewpoint. But new sort of arising issue is really competitiveness of supply chain, and we will see investments going into that area. That supports also our sustainability ambitions, as I described in the recycling of consumables. With these ones, would like to conclude my part just to summarize that's where we are.
We do have a leading position in what we do in technology and in sustainability. There's no question about that position. We do have a strong platform to grow and create more value, and we are committed of delivering that one. We're committed also to continuously change our business model to make it less volatile, and this means less impact from the project, more products, more standardization. Standardization in a way, but that we still can fulfill the customer needs and the market needs in those areas where we decide to do so. We do continuously self-help, and this is something that we carry from our integration and the synergy work that we did.
We did install a process into this company, way of working, systematics, where we from idea through certain gate approach develop the ideas to action plans, follow the implementation of the actions, and follow the financial results. We use the same process now to do self improvement on annual basis. Our sort of internal ambition, it's not a project that we would announce, but our internal ambition is to work roughly on a number which equals our salary inflation. Might be challenging for next year because numbers will be high, but let's say with the more traditional inflation numbers. That's what we did in this year, by the way. We will do something similar next year. Once we repeat it for the third year, it becomes a part of culture.
With these words, I think it's right time to leave the floor for Eeva to go through the financial. Eeva, please.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to everybody in the room, and welcome to people by their computers. I'll be touching several topics today, complementing what our President and CEO just presented, but really sort of adding maybe from a financial angle a few comments so you can round up your analysis on the Metso Outotec. I'd like to start with this graph illustrating in, I think in a very simple but clear way the Metso Outotec journey. As you well know, it's we've had a journey during sort of somewhat unique and challenging times starting in the middle of middle of COVID and then with various sort of external external sort of would.
Sort of mostly unwanted shocks around us. Nevertheless, I think we were able to start seeing growth in our orders after a few quarters, seeing the customer confidence coming back, and getting the sort of sense that our offering as a combined entity is something that does deliver value to our customers. Now in our business, it typically takes a few more quarters for orders to really become visible in sales. As this time period has been one where I think we've really sort of been challenged throughout by supply chain issues, then obviously, if anything, our sort of the sales growth has been a bit slower to come through from the sort of order booking.
Hence, we've actually sort of delivered a lot of improvement on our profitability without much volume leverage. Only in the past couple of quarters you start to see that impact. Now these are rolling 12-month figures for a reason. You're very well familiar with the quarterly numbers, but this takes away a bit of the noise and hence sort of as a way of looking back, I think is quite good. In our previous Capital Markets Day 2020, we were talking about a starting point at just ahead of 11% adjusted EBITDA margin, and we're now at around 13%.
We'll be talking later in my presentation, but especially in the segment presentations on how we get from 13% to above 15%. What's also important is that we've seen growth and profitability improvement in all our segments. I think so it's kind of a very balanced approach in the sense that we've really been able to sort of fire on all cylinders from what we have. Before I go into more details, I'd like to actually draw your attention to this slide. You heard our President CEO talk a lot about sustainability, how it is very much at the core of our strategy. Obviously then everything we do in finance needs to be in line with that.
We launched the sustainability-linked finance framework earlier this year, and that really is a platform that I think will grow, and we will obviously come up with new ways on how to measure, how to sort of tie more and more the financials and the operational strategies together. Very exciting to be part of this trend and really help develop that in the industry. If I move on to our balance sheet. We have a strong balance sheet. We think we have the means to grow both organically as well as inorganically. You see that EUR 200 million-EUR 300 million euro bonds obviously are the basis for our funding.
Together with some smaller bank loans, they account for more than 60% of our debt. We have invested in liquidity arrangements. It is a very volatile world as we know, and hence the EUR 1.2 billion is a big number, but we've sort of felt that we really want to ensure that we can run our operations and go for the opportunities that our business finds in all circumstances. Maintaining an investment-grade rating is one of our four financial targets. During the two-year journey, we made good success in improving on the credit metrics that are important in the definition of what the rating is.
I think we're now in a sort of comfortable position to really, as I said, support the business and deliver also on the opportunities that may arise. On the tax side, important element for shareholder value creation, this as well. Creating a centralized tax model has been a key focus for us. This very much builds on what we built in Metso a few years back, and now sort of leveraging the full potential of the merged company in this area. As you see from our effective tax rate development, I think we have delivered clear value in this area.
In today's world, tax is also very much about sustainability. We have already today quite a bit of voluntary information in this area for various stakeholders. As we move forward, I do expect that there will be even further sort of requirements, and we're very committed to providing that information as well on our operations. The graph on the right-hand side depicts our last year, so the income taxes paid, so the cash view on taxes for you. Then a couple of topical items this year. Our President and CEO already touched Russia.
Obviously that wind down is something that's consumed a lot of time from us. We haven't taken any business since the start of the war, so it's really been in a sort of wind down mode now for quite some time. We have the benefit of not having real assets in Russia, but at the same time, we have project liabilities sold into Russia from various countries outside. Those are rather complex from a legal point of view to wind down. We basically need to negotiate and terminate them all one by one. This is something that has, as I said, taken time.
Fortunately, I think we've been sort of slowly able to move to a phase where this takes much less of our business time and much more the time of our legal department and our finance department. That, of course, is how it should be. We do expect now towards the end of the year to be in a position where we have winded down the business. Obviously, there is very limited staff anymore, and we'll remain with a small accounting team then going forward. Now, another topical item for this year is cash. This is not an apples to apples comparison, so as I say, pay attention.
The left-hand side is around last year full year numbers, and then the right-hand side is the first half of 2022. Nevertheless, I thought this is actually hopefully an illustrative way to describe to you how sort of what the sort of main elements that have been moving if one starts from the net profit and then works to see sort of where the cash sort of goes. Now in the first half numbers, the EUR 150 million wind down cost that we wrote down is sort of obviously impacts the net profit.
It's back in the change in other liabilities as that mainly will not be a cash cost outside of obviously the restructuring of the organization and these type of things. If we think of where we were sort of end of June, it's added back in that column. Apart from that, I think it's very easy to see the sort of supply chain challenge and that we have been living with. Partly of course, the inventory growth is very much one of growth.
You saw from my first slide, we're starting to really sort of see real growth coming through, and obviously affects the whole area from work in progress to goods in delivery to customers. There's also an inflation element. There is a price element and that in some cases is bigger than the volume impact. We're actually very pleased on how we've been able to manage the AR and AP side in this environment. Obviously, when we know the challenges that are not easy fixes in the supply chain, we need to also make conscious decisions to invest in inventory in order to ensure availability for our customers.
We need to be extra efficient on what comes to all the other elements. AR and AP, obviously a function of our customers doing well may typically makes the AR side better. If you think of the sort of sales growth we've seen, for instance, in the beginning of this year, then that cash flow number is actually a very good number. We have improved actually in sort of days and efficiency. I think as we sort of you know continue in this year, the supply chain challenges do continue. I think they're hopefully not getting worse.
We're seeing some relief, but it is obviously a real issue that will not sort of improve overnight, as well. Obviously we're as our business continues to grow, this will be something which we'll sort of have to take into account in from a financing point of view, hopefully delivering improved margins and to sort of more than compensate for this investment. When it comes to our portfolio, maybe a few topics to touch here. Discontinued operations is not necessarily a very material item, but has created some impact into our earnings per share. Just to help you out on that one.
The recycling business, second half was sold now in June during the second quarter. We originally tried to sell it in one piece. Would have obviously been a faster way to do it, but ended up splitting it and selling it in two to for better shareholder value. Now, the waste to energy business is a even smaller business. This has actually been on sale since Outotec times. Already quite a lengthy process. Not the easiest businesses to sell and hence has really taken a bit longer than expected.
We are sort of now again in sort of discussions which we want to sort of take forward and see that hopefully getting to a solution that would enable then an exit. Certainly there is a business opportunity in this business for somebody who's there in as a focus area. However, good to note that the old legacy projects are something that we'll need to manage in the Metso Outotec context to close them. On metals, we really had quite an extensive amount of work put in in this area throughout this year.
It is already a much more sizable business, much more sizable carve out to consider than anything we have had under discontinued operations. Because it really is a portfolio of technologies, it does require also some sort of specific attention on thinking about where the value is and the potential. As our CEO mentioned, we're sort of well into it, but a few months of work is likely still in our hands. I think for this audience, it's good to note that nevertheless, with the sort of big chunk of the work done, I think the sort of conclusions so far are very much in line with our earlier assumptions.
If anything, we have been positively surprised by how current some of the technologies in the portfolio are. Green steel, hydrogen areas are examples where even during this year a lot is happening and hence those technologies definitely are something valuable in the right hands. Of course, not mature technologies and hence will require investment to really sort of get to where their potential is. From a financial point of view, we delivered on the turnaround.
I think we're in a good position from a Metso Outotec point of view that it's not such a drag as it was in the early days post the merger and contributing in that sense it's shared to the overall, which obviously gives us sort of more options as well from a future point of view. Again, the business profile has and remains different to Metso Outotec core to much of what we will be discussing today. Limited aftermarket opportunity and obviously a very project-driven business, not so much products and modularity as we have in the rest of the businesses.
As said, we'll be coming back to this topic in more detail later on. I think it's time for me to kind of summarize from a group point of view, the main topics around the 15% margin. As said, we've delivered on all four financial targets during the first two years. I think for this audience specifically, the 15% margin roadmap is obviously important. We'll be breaking the journey down in the two segments. Some of the measures are slightly different, but then again, there's a lot of commonality.
If I kind of summarize here on the right, the topics really from a group point of view to help you then pull it together. Aftermarket growth, we will be discussing quite a bit of that. There is real potential on that when we look at sort of what we have experienced in the past as Metso, what we see from peers, what we see from the market environment. Specifically, we have good examples of how we can do a better job in increasing the services captivity. There is a real value to be made both for the customer and for Metso Outotec in this area.
Consumables has been something that actually has sort of gone in the wrong direction in the past 12 months in contrast to our other businesses, for the obvious reasons of that business being directly impacted by the raw material inflation as well as the energy costs. We're happy that we have turned a corner. We have all the time felt that it is more a timing issue, that we need to just have the agility and speed to act on those changes, which clearly, in a way, have been so high that it has been difficult to predict.
Ideally, of course, one would be a bit of a step ahead, but because of some of the external volatility, we've been a bit sort of catching up. We have a value offering for our customers, and our customers are doing well. It is more a timing issue. Hence turning the corner will obviously contribute to the overall group. What's maybe a bit of a new topic on the list is this aftermarket supply chain and procurement.
Not necessarily, it doesn't sound like rocket science, but certainly in today's context and with what we know now versus two years ago, this is something that we've sort of raised much higher on the agenda and have much more sort of detailed concrete work now on our roadmap of actions to really deliver on this front. Potential is there. Fifth, this will not be a new topic for most of you listening. We talked about productization for quite some time, several years. We have very nice progress to show you later on today as well on the success of making this happen.
Of course, that makes it even easier to sort of continue on that journey in the businesses where we see the potential. Very much around sort of efficiency, around sort of just better control on the margins from an execution point of view, also from a sort of risk reduction point of view, as we move forward. Those five are really sort of areas where we have concrete actions. We work with this business improvement concept for quite some time. Well, prior to the merger, then in the early days of merger, these were very much parallel to the synergy hunt and now again when the synergy period is behind us.
This is kind of then gets the full attention in the company. Of course, there is an element of commercial excellence on top of this all in a way then to protect the margins that you're able to gain by being more efficient and smarter in how you approach. From a group point of view, just an obvious note perhaps, but all the portfolio decisions when it comes to M&A or divestments obviously made in line with these financial targets. Financial targets in a way for us are a given. We intend to achieve them, and everything else we do needs to contribute to these targets.
With that, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to conclude with the key investment highlights. At Metso Outotec, we have a leading offering in both aggregates and minerals. We are a leader in sustainability and technology, which I believe makes us more future-proof. We have a strong aftermarket presence and a lot of capability in this company, so that as we sort of continue to focus on growing this business, we really have a good base to build on, but ample opportunity to go even further. Finally, we believe in our financial targets, we believe in our margin targets and are very committed to delivering on that, on the 15%.
As I said, you'll hear more detail in the next two presentations, really then to hopefully give you the same confidence that we have internally. With that, thank you on my behalf, and I think we're ready for the Q&A.
Thank you, Eeva. Thank you, Pekka. Let's start our first Q&A after these two presentations. As a reminder, let's try and keep the questions at this point at about group level, because we are going to deep dive into our businesses after a while. We're also taking questions from the webcast through the chat function. In this room, if you have a question in mind, please raise your hand. We have two microphones and wait for a microphone to arrive and then state your question so that everybody hears that also online. Just to warm you up, I'll take the first question from the webcast actually, and this is by Klas Bergelind.
He asks, Pekka, specifically, to you that Klas says, based on public information, you will be in this role for another 15 months or so. You started decentralization already at Metso when you came to the company. You continued to talk about productization, standardization of especially equipment offering after the merger. Then, during these 800 days since the merger, we've had hopefully temporary headwinds in terms of COVID, inflation, war, et cetera. The question is from Klas that which are the areas you think you are lagging in terms of margin progression towards targets?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks for a good question, Klas. How would I say that I've been during my career part of a journey where I have seen the margin moving from high single digit to first low double digit and then strong double digit. Since that time, we've seen those margins go even higher, starting with two. I know that it was a long journey there as well, and it doesn't happen in a few quarters. It's a long march. We have embarked that march. The key things of that march were summarized on Eeva's slide. I believe in this product business that brings a healthy aftermarket.
Products are things that are created well ahead of the sales compared with the projects. A lot of project delivery is created within the project. Enormous amount of engineering goes into these projects. Big part of that is not reusable. That model is not scalable to the way we want that to be. Therefore, the product and aftermarket journey is important. The scalability means also that the aftermarket will be created while developing the product. I've said this many, many times that this is a journey. The journey doesn't end, but it produces margins step by step towards where we need to be.
All right. Thank you. Joel?
Hi there. It's Joel Spungin from Berenberg. I was wondering, I would just ask if you were to compare your thoughts about the growth potential of your end markets, I guess principally minerals, but also aggregates, your thinking now compared to the last CMD two years ago, are you more confident about the growth outlook? Do you think the market will grow at a higher rate now than you did two years ago? Or are your views unchanged?
Yeah, naturally, the visibility with the macro, the way it is somewhat foggy into the near future. I'm more confident that the long-term demand for metals does exist there. I think we all need to think about our priorities in life in case we want to save this planet. That's why we have the Planet Positive, and I haven't seen any other solutions than electrify things, and that requires more metals, as said so many times.
That gives the growth potential for us, and then it's up to us and our entire team to deliver the offering that is the most relevant, most sustainable, most efficient, and profitable for our customers so our customers succeed, 'cause we believe that we succeed as well if our customers do.
Would you say that's also true on the aggregate side?
Well, it is different dynamics there as well. If we look at all the mega trends that are out there, it's very supportive for our aggregates business as well. If we look at the past, which never is a guarantee of the future, we, as we have learned of that one. The growth, in fact, has been quite steady of the markets in that area. The way how we have executed our aggregates, I think we have taken more than our share of the growth over the past few years, both organically and inorganically.
We've been very successful in bringing McCloskey's and some of the smaller acquisitions into that part of the business. I see a continuation of that one. Maybe some smaller steps sort of inorganically, but organically, definitely.
Thank you.
Sorry, maybe we could take the other mic to this side of the room as well, because it seems that the questions are tilted to the left of, from us. Erkki, go ahead.
Hi, Erkki Vesola from Inderes. Regarding the overall demand or metal demand, do you see that the demand for battery metals will be strong enough to compensate for the impact of the obvious deceleration of the Chinese economy and the recession the Western world is facing? Will global demand growth for copper, lithium, nickel, et cetera, still be in the mid to high single digits going forward in 2023, especially?
Yeah, it's quite difficult clearly to say that how these balances will work. Chinese demand currently is going definitely a sort of short-term or medium-term decline at this moment. At one point, I'm confident that that will turn into growth as well, and it'll change the picture again. We had the graph of EVs, electric vehicles, I mean, was it in three years' time, there's gonna be double the amount of, or double the annual volume of those vehicles coming onto the roads. That's only one area of electrification. There's so many other areas that we need to work on this energy transition that is happening in probably more forcefully now in Europe.
It means that we need to invest in many things, not only in solar and wind and maybe nuclear as well. The grid and everything, the power storages when they do kick in. I think we are going through such a change that nobody really has thought of magnitude of these changes, what they are. I don't have an answer to that one, but I do believe in direction, yes.
Antti.
Yes. Thank you. You mentioned the supply chain competitiveness in two different sections, acquisitions and also the building blocks on profitability. Could you expand a little bit about what concrete actions would that mean? Is this geographical footprint? Is this more in-housing, outsourcing? Please a little bit more clarity on that one.
Eeva, go on.
Yeah, it's a good question. There is an element of insourcing, outsourcing. We have sort of seen with some of the lead times and some of the capacity restraints that actually there would be some value in insourcing certain sort of competencies. I think the bigger chunk is still sort of on how we develop the partner network around us. Now, we've seen clearly that with the challenges on global logistics, for instance, that we have to have a more agile model where sort of the previous model was more driving efficiency from one location globally.
Now we clearly see the sort of limits of that and kind of need to balance that with a more regional approach in certain areas. Because for our customers, availability is key, and it is something that they're also willing to pay for, but we need to be able to offer that. Of course, it comes to sort of our practices of how we work, how integrated we're able to work and share views on demand in a way on how to really sort of mitigate all the sort of unnecessarily sort of lead times in the chain.
When the lead times are long already, then there's a lot of work in the back office side that needs to be more streamlined. Of course, there's that element that we as we want to sort of ensure a sustainable supply chain as well, it will require certain sort of changes to who we work with and how we work as well. Hopefully that.
Yeah, maybe a follow-up on the supply chains. I mean, it's been an obvious profitability headwind in the past year or two. Has it been a head or tailwind regarding your market shares? I mean, how has the competition handled kind of the long delivery times, freight cost? Has that perhaps sheltered you from competition in some product areas, or has it been a challenge?
Well, it's been both. I think certainly for all global players, the global challenges have been exactly the same. I think our footprint with the coverage we have has actually been delivering clearly better. We have won some business just on the reliability angle and kind of the trust that we can and we will deliver. Again, there's areas where we have very local competition who don't have the logistical issues, then obviously we face situations where they actually have been able to be more nimble and agile.
I'd say there's examples of both. Generally, I think our supply footprint has now been sort of tested with the COVID shock and now with the war. I think we're sort of considering all that, we weathered it pretty well, and clearly that sort of balance of having many regional hubs has been a clear winning formula. Also, the fact that we have strong enough organizations in all parts of the globe. Clearly, this has been an absolute must when decisions have to be made very, very quickly.
To that point, then we also need to sort of make certain sort of new decisions with what we know today around that sort of regional view.
Tom.
Yes. Hi, this is Tom Skogman from Carnegie. I have two questions. We'll start with the first one, and they're both about savings that you mentioned in the previous Capital Markets Day. You talked about these business-specific savings that should be around EUR 70 million, if I remember right from the chart you showed there. I'd like to get some kind of an update where we are with this because, I mean, a big part of those should be in the aggregate business as that has enjoyed strong volume benefits as well. It's a bit hard from the outside to know whether these have kind of all come through or whether there should still be some coming.
Yeah. Well, I think you've certainly sort of seen the merits of in Aggregates, where I think one part was the McCloskey synergies and that integration, and the other part was the overall productization and efficiency focus. I think there we are there we're very happy with the success the Aggregates team will come back to that. On the then again, on the consumables side, the sort of outcome of the footprint exercises we have done so far have been partly eaten up by the sort of raw material challenge. So our sort of slowness to react with pricing in that sense sort of keep the margin benefit from those actions.
Now as said, as we kind of have turned that corner, I think that will look a bit better. Right now, you could say that that hasn't fully, on a net basis, delivered on those targets. Then again, on this productization, modularization, again, sort of very nice achievements in the minerals side as well. I don't think we gave an exact number at that point, but I'd say that we're sort of 80% sort of success in that. Then again, we've had bit more headwind than we perhaps were wise enough to see in advance.
That sort of fighting that back means that we're now at 13%, and we still need to do some work to get to 15% rather than that being at 15%.
I mean, analysts love to do EBITDA bridges and so on, and you have these synergy savings of EUR 140 million, and they should all be almost in the minerals division, to my understanding, as there are no synergies in aggregates or metals. The earnings growth has been kind of almost smaller in that division than in the other divisions, despite these synergies. Can you help us to understand and also kind of convince us that savings have not just been lost to customer prices? I mean, you say that it's all only temporary now in consumables, but perhaps you should get a number also on how much better should, you know, the consumables EBITDA be on a 12 months rolling basis if this would not have happened, you know, with-
Yeah.
-inflation.
Should we come back to that after the minerals presentation on that?
You're right. I mean, if you look at how, for example, our aftermarket, which is predominantly the mineral side, behaved during the COVID, I mean, it took us by surprise how long lasting really the downturn, when it finally reached our minerals wasn't specifically in the aftermarket side. The inflationary pressure that we did mostly experience, by the way, in our consumables from three main items, energy, freight charges, and raw materials. They all did hit our consumables. With the hundreds of contracts that we needed to renegotiate with the time delay. Yes, we do have a price tag on the consumables on annual level.
Very roughly, it is pretty close to EUR 40 million. We had the headwind, and like Eeva said, we have turned the corner. That's what we feel at this moment, but couple of more months will tell us if that is the case.
You don't feel that you have lost savings in other kind of parts to customer prices because we don't really see these 140. If you take EUR 40 million away, that's still EUR 100 million, and you have a good volume growth now as well there, so.
Yeah. Like I said, I mean, it's, I gave eight points out of 10. Four of our businesses have been able to respond either through cost actions or through pricing to the inflationary pressures. Some of them have been ahead of the inflation curve, some on par with it, but we've had issues with our consumables.
Finally, just an update on what you see. Do you see any bad signs in demand from the falling metal prices in customer?
In fact, falling metal prices, yes, they have fallen. If you take a very short-term view, you take a view from, let's say, four months or six month view, yes, it's a falling view, but we are still on very high level. If you remember the graphs that I showed on copper, we are on high level. On gold, we are on very high level. Still not on a peak level, but we are on very high level. Iron ore is the only laggard at this moment where we are. We saw extreme peak right after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Nickel price has continued to be on elevated level even after Russia's invasion to Ukraine, it came down a little bit, but it has stayed on higher level for obvious reasons. A lot of supplies coming from Russia to the nickel market. That is where the picture is, and that is still a healthy environment for our customers to continue to invest.
Tomi Railo.
Yes. Tomi Railo from DNB. Also, question on the services and equipment margin. If you could comment, your group margin has expanded, you mentioned, and we have seen it to expand in all businesses. But if you would exclude the impact of consumables since the merger, how has the progress been in the services profitability compared to equipment profitability? Where has the biggest change come from? And also, is it more, has it been more tilted to minerals or aggregates in terms of service profitability?
I think we've seen bigger improvement on the equipment side than in the aftermarket side, even excluding consumables like you asked. Very much really thanks to that sort of modularization of that product approach in a way. Partly, of course, in minerals synergies as well on putting the two offerings together. Of course, the equipment side has had a bit more sort of volume tailwind as well. Of course, it's partly perhaps a bit unfair question, but on this two-year momentum and hence the sort of the opportunity, I would say still is in both in a way.
There is room for equipment business, but there's certainly room for the service business on these value-add services to improve and which we kinda like in a way that then it's not a sort of one thing that we're focused on. We're driving several initiatives and that obviously sort of improves the success probability on driving it through.
Follow-up. Divisionally, aggregates or minerals has still, in a way, potential and maybe.
Sure. Yeah.
The profitability in services is better now than it was in 2019 before the merger?
Yeah, Donna has improved less than equipment.
I think Panu there in the back.
Thank you. It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske Bank. I just wanted to ask on metals and the review. Did I understand correctly that you have not made a decision whether you want to keep it or not, or if you would want to keep parts of that? When do you expect to conclude the review, and if it leads to a transaction, when do you expect that might happen? Finally, have you already seen interest from potential buyers on that asset?
Yes, we will need a few more months and reason for that one. We want to prepare ourselves well for that one because the day we take decision, according to IFRS, we have 12 months time to divest it, and we don't want to make that prematurely before we are ready for that decision. It's gonna take a couple of more months, maybe 3, 4 months, additional months, but then we are ready to conclude that one. Yes, we have prepared, done already some preparation. We've sent teasers out. There are some indications already existing out there, but too early to say anything.
Obviously it's a process that we will then run and then tell when we are ready about that one.
All right. Thanks.
We have a couple of more minutes, and I'll take a few from the chat, from the webcast. First is from Nick Housden, who says that target is obviously 15% EBITDA margin over the cycle, like we have heard. How do you think about the peaks and troughs, so in terms of kind of range, how that kind of margin would you know, behave around that 15? Any thoughts of that?
Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we are not happy if we only deliver the 15% at the peak of a cycle. I don't think we've done enough sort of number crunching to come up with the range. Maybe that is something we could address sometime in future. We are aiming clearly, and obviously portfolio is part of this one, and we are aiming clearly to be in position that in the peak of a cycle, we deliver above that one.
Depending on how flexible we can be, how scalable our business model will be, that more or less tells what we will be at the bottom of a cycle. We've learned many things in this integration. I said about the process that we have put in place. We will use that one always when we have sort of improvement actions in place. We don't hesitate to take those decisions. I go back to COVID savings, which we initiated when the travel restrictions, when it was evident that this is a global pandemic. This was in March, April 2020.
At that time, in Metso side, we had in two weeks time in place 80% of the saving actions. If you recall our second quarter 2020 results, we turned out a quite nice surprise there. That's just as an example that we take fast decisions if need be, and we know what to do.
One more question that needs to be asked in this Q&A from Matteo Di Tomasi. Update on the smelter project in Saudi Arabia.
Yes, we are in final phases of ramping up the production. It's somewhere in the 70% level in furnace one. Over there we have still some work that needs to be done. Some COVID delays in that one. We are working within the provision that we made out there, and there's no real further news of that one. Of course, we hope to conclude and close that part as soon as the timing is right. We still need some more time to complete that part.
All right. Thank you. This concludes the first part of this event. I have plenty of questions here, and don't worry, they will be asked when it is time to discuss minerals and consumables specifically and so forth. So I'll take them up then. We have approximately eight minutes before aggregates presentation starts, so please refresh, take coffee, and we'll be back half past. All right, welcome back from the break. As said, now we are starting our deep dive into our businesses. We start with a presentation about aggregates, and we have three presenters talking about the aggregates from both equipment side and the aftermarket side. So please welcome head of our aggregates equipment business, Markku Simula, head of services, Sami Takaluoma, and head of consumables, Heikki Metsälä.
Hello, good afternoon.
Good afternoon.
Good afternoon from my behalf as well. Welcome to the aggregates business segment presentation. We'll talk about value for diverse customer base or diverse customers, and we have plenty of customers in our industry. We have thousands of customers that we are serving. First, we'll dive a little bit into the history and our position in the market. The graph on the left describes our growth over the last few years. Our growth has been actually 14% CAGR since 2016, and also about 14% since the beginning of that timescale, so since 2019. Aggregate segment business has been growing consistently already for quite many years.
It's been organic growth, and it's been acquisition growth, both in there. Like you can see that we have been growing faster than our main competitors have been growing. On the right side, you can see our kind of comparable size. In the graph or in the bars with the red, you can see the aggregates business size, aggregate segment, so including crushing, screening businesses, capital, as well as aftermarket. Our number being from 2021 about EUR 1,200, you know, EUR 1.2 billion, which is more than the next three combined globally. We are truly in our aggregates business, we are by far the number 1. We are
By the way, if you look at the total, crushing and screening, taking both the mining side as well as the aggregate side, we are still bigger than the next three combined. We are really in good position for our aggregate segment. Looking at the development during the last few years. If you remember, McCloskey acquisition was happening at the end of the third quarter of 2019. Fourth quarter of 2019 was the first quarter included in our figures.
Our growth has been consistent since that, and maybe to focus more on the profitability here. If we look at the long-term development, kind of taking a little bit further than that, 2019. If you look starting from 2016, at that time, our big improvement during this timeframe has actually come from capital businesses, which you were kind of referring to in earlier questions from Eeva. If you compare the 2016 timeframe, at that time, the capital business was low single-digit business on average for previous years. In the last CMD presentation about two years ago, we were talking that it's high single-digit business on the capital side.
Today we have actually been already for quite some time on double-digit business on the capital business. On the aftermarket businesses, Eeva was saying that the capital side has been improving more, that's on the aggregate side, roughly the improvement over the kind of longer period of time. If we look at, take a little bit shorter look what are the recent developments, what are really the things that are currently in our business impacting the profitability side. First, I'll call the proactive backlog management.
Proactive backlog management for us is actually something that we started about a year ago when the demand after COVID started to really rapidly increase, and at the same time, the global logistics started to go with kind of almost belly up in a sense that there was a shortage of almost everything. The demand was just unbelievable at that time. What we started to do is that we actually started to allocate our capacity to our markets and to our distributors.
Instead of allowing everybody to just place orders, plenty of orders to us, we said that, "Okay, we know, we don't know how many machines we are able to make, nine months down the road, but we do know how many machines we can do three months down the road or six months down the road." We sold only those machines. We took orders only for those machines. Our distributors were sending us more orders, but we didn't recognize those orders. We didn't book them until we knew when we are able to deliver those machines.
This of course proved to be very, very good method when the inflation hit in. Early this year we started to see that, okay, the cost is rising really rapidly, and we are kind of facing really a lot of inflation cost increases coming almost every week from our suppliers. At that time we decided, okay, now we can also set our pricing according to the kind of short-term or when we book the order, we also confirm the pricing of that order. We didn't book orders for nine months down the road or 12 months down the road. We were booking orders for the next 3 months, next 6 months. If distributors were sending us more orders, we didn't book them and we didn't price them.
Only at the time when we knew that the material is coming in, we knew when it's coming in, how much of parts is coming in, how much of engines or whatever crushers we had in our inventory or coming into our inventory. We also knew the pricing of those. We were actually able to
Price the machines properly to the customer. We were actually pretty safely operating on this, let's say, with our backlog management. Pricing commercial excellence, I think, we've been very successful on that area in the aggregates business. We have also introduced high-performing distribution network like Pekka was already referring to. We are very happy how we have been kind of developing the management skills of our own organization and our cooperation with the distributors, and also expand our distribution network globally. I'll come back to it later on, but we are also extremely happy with our McCloskey acquisition and the integration and the benefits and synergies that we've been able to make with that.
I'll come back to that a bit later on. Maybe a few words on the aftermarket.
Thank you, Markku. Still continuing a bit on the McCloskey and the multi-brand side of it. From aftermarket perspective, we've been able to grow this business quite nicely as well. The relative growth on these multi-brands has been actually higher than on the Metso Outotec. We're really happy to see those synergies and efficiencies coming through on the aftermarket perspective as well. Where the focus has been for us heavily is the productization of our aftermarket solutions. The key here for us is that we want to see the improvement in our financial performance. We've seen it already. The key for us is to create easy to buy, easy to sell solutions that we are efficient to execute and provide tangible value for our customers.
We've been highly successful in putting together these offerings, and we expect it to see even further business performance in the future out of these as well. Thank you.
Let's focus a little bit on what's happening in the different regions in the world. If I look at the world right now, it's much more regional than it was, or the way that we are looking at the world is much more regionally than it was, maybe just half a year ago, one year ago, or two years ago.
It's obvious that the world has changed, and it's obvious that we have to look at the world regionally. We have to be able to serve our customers regionally. We have to be able to make sure that our capabilities are there regionally existing. First, if we start from North America, that's our biggest market. We are number one at the market, and our market share in North America is 36% of the total aggregates crushing and screening market. It's also has been a growth market. What will happen in the future, nobody knows, so far it's been growth market, and still we are seeing very good demand on North American market.
The world is very unstable, so kind of predicting what will happen in the next quarters or next year, nobody knows. At this moment, it's clearly the best market, and it's also a very high price market, so we get good profitability on our North American market. Europe. Since February, we have seen that the customers in our European continent have been starting to be a lot more cautious in their investment decisions and we have a lot of smaller customers, so it's basically they are buying the machines from their back pocket. When you are buying from your own back pocket, then you're really conscious when do you want to spend the money.
It's not whether you will spend it, half a year down the road or one year down the road, but if you're uncertain right now how the business is going to be, then you are a bit cautious on how to spend the money. In Europe, we are also number 1, and our market share in Europe is about 27%. China, we are number 2 in China market, and our market share in the Chinese market is around 4%. There is a lot of small suppliers in China, so-called mid-market suppliers. We also have our mid-market capabilities there, but still the market is very large. China as a total has been a bit kind of twofold.
There are certain customers that are actually buying a lot right now, but there is a lot of customers also that are very hesitating to invest right at this moment. It's actually somewhat related to government policies, that government is kind of closing smaller quarries and putting permits or giving permits for huge super quarries. The super quarry side, we see a lot of demand for big crushers, and then on the smaller crushers, on the smaller quarries, we see that they are actually not buying that much at this moment. India has been kind of flat for several years already. We are number three in the Indian market, and our market share is around 10%.
Again, there is several local suppliers in the Indian market as well. All the rest of the world, we are number one. One of our strengths is actually that we are present everywhere in the world. We have our distribution network covering just about every corner of the world. Our market share in the kind of rest of the world is about 8%. If we look at how much out of our own sales is coming from these different regions, 37% of our sales come from North America, and that's, like we said already, clearly we are number one. We are selling there our Metso Outotec machines. We have several different brands that we are going out to the customers with.
We are selling the McCloskey machines and Lippmann machines. Those would be the main products in the North American market. Europe, 34% of our sales within the last 12 months. India, 7%, China, 6%, and rest of Asia-Pacific, 6%, South America, 5%, and rest of the world, including Russia, is 5%. You can see that Russia is not maybe, has not been that significant for us in the past. I think Russia has never been more than about 3, 4, 5% in our business. Of course, naturally, we are winding down our activities in Russia like all of us are doing.
Short term, we are leveraging our number one position in North America, and long term, we do see that Asia, China, India, rest of Asia is areas where we see the long-term potential for our growth. Short term, our focus is making sure that we capture the business in North America. Really important.
As that recap was clearly indicating, we feel that we are well on track to deliver the growth and also the profitability, and we have already started to do that. We set to ourselves as an aggregate segment the target that we will grow faster than the market and we will move towards the 15% EBITDA. We are keeping the same going forward. We want to continue to grow faster than the market and then going even beyond the 15% is now what we are aiming for. How we have been able to do this success so far and continuing to do going forward is that we have the market-driven brand portfolio, which is then giving us also the product leadership position.
Adding that to the competitive aftermarket offering. For the aftermarket offering especially, also including the capital equipment, adding the digital user experience, will enable us to grow even faster across the brands that we have. As mentioned, we have already leveraged a lot of the synergies across the brands and we will continue to identify more of those possibilities and opportunities, creating more efficiency for our own operations in many ways, and this way also then building the commercial excellence out there in the different marketplaces.
If we dive into the customers, like mentioned already at the title of the presentation, we have a very, very diverse customer base. We have multinational civil contractors, we have large quarry producers, we have mid-market quarries, and we have small local family-owned contractor businesses. Kind of father and the son, and maybe the mom as well in the business. Really, really wide scale of different type of customers. Both Pekka and Eeva were mentioning about product and aftermarket business and our business is actually product and aftermarket business.
I was checking that last year, this year, if you look at how our aggregates business is divided, capital is about, kind of, or aftermarket is about 33, 34 percent thereabout right now, and then capital is the rest. If you take the capital business, and I was checking that how big portion of the capital business is actually projects, kind of project deliveries to our customers, and it's actually few percent it is. 3% of the total aggregates sales volume is project deliveries. That's why you don't see announcements, press releases that we took a big project in aggregates. We don't sell big projects. We sell products to our distributors, and we deliver those to customers.
Occasionally, we have some big projects, but not really a lot of them. Our equipment portfolio. We are carrying several brands, and we are going out to the customers with several distribution channels. Each brand has their own distribution channel. We have our kind of a flagship Metso Outotec brand, which is a very wide offering for premium customers and kind of price point very high. We have Saalasti acquisition, or we acquired in 2014, we acquired 75% of the company and then two years ago, we acquired the remaining 25, so we fully own Saalasti today. Jonsson acquisition in 2018, McCloskey acquisition in 2019. Lippmann actually came as part of McCloskey. McCloskey just had acquired kind of two months earlier than we acquired McCloskey, they had acquired Lippmann.
Tesab acquisition a few months ago. Several different product offerings targeting different customer value propositions. We have very different customer segments or customer types. We actually have different value propositions for those customers. On aftermarket.
Yes, the same applies. It's very productized offering that we have in the aftermarket, both spare parts, wear parts, and then the service part. Understanding the diversity of the customer base means that we also need to have a different kind of product offering based on the customer needs. It's definitely totally different kind of customer need in mid-market in China than the large premium quarry somewhere else. By doing that, and at the same time then leveraging the synergies of being a global company with all these brands in our portfolio is giving us the possibilities to look for the best optimum way of organizing the supply chains, suppliers, and so forth. Having that like a self-help possibility for ourselves when supporting all of these customers in different segments.
Talking about serving the customers. In aggregates, we are doing a big part of our business through our world-class distribution network. This is, as mentioned already a few times today, something that we took really professionally from the beginning of the Metso Outotec, and the distribution management office has been established, creating new ways of operating, new ways of working and leading and managing the distributors. That strategy has been successful so far. We have more than 250 world-class distributors all over the world in the right places. Throughout these two years now, we have grown the aftermarket sales by 46% through the distributors.
In addition to that also that when we have developed the online tools for our distributors, so we have seen that the growth of the online orders is even higher. It's in 50% level in these two years. Looking at what we want to achieve through the distribution is that we want to have the high-performing partners who want to work with us to help their customers in their responsibility area. There we have had a good success, as mentioned. We have covered the world as we have decided that we want to cover from the coverage point of view.
at the same time, we have been working as a Metso Outotec to really be the most easiest and efficient OEM that our distributors are working with, creating them the possibilities to be successful with their customers, our customers. One lever that we need to have there is the easy-to-sell
Sustainable products and solutions. That we don't overcomplicate things, but we have these products, and as mentioned many times today, in our portfolio, so that they are easy to sell and also very easy to buy by our customers. That combined with our this distribution management office concept, this is a very strong growth platform going forward as well. There we are looking for adding new channels and or continue to protect the offering. What that means is the digital end user experience and distributor experience with Metso Outotec will be increased and enhanced going forward, and that will create new channels also for us to reach our customers and support the end customers directly.
Expanding the scope, especially in the aftermarket side with the new products will be also key to success in continuing the growth journey that we are heading.
Good. Continuing on the sustainability topic. This is a big topic in the world, as we all know. We all live in the same planet, and for us, this means actions towards our customers and towards to us, ourselves in that sense. We truly believe that this is the license to operate practice. We all, both us as Metso Outotec, as well as our customers, we need to run sustainable operations in the future, and that's our license to operate towards our society as well in that sense. How we are then doing this, we are looking at the customer benefits.
On the handprint side we have, for example, electrification program of our equipment. We are looking at designs where we embed health and well-being, making sure the designs of the equipment and parts are built in a way that they can safely be installed, there's no exposure to users when they're using the equipment. Then we have something like used wear parts return program, as Pekka was referring to in his opening statement. I'll come back to you on that one a bit more. It contributes both to our handprint as well as our footprint. We are committed to these net zero factories, so reducing our own emissions, working heavily on that front to make sure that our own operations are net zero by 2030. At the same time, we are engaging our suppliers.
We are committing them to the science-based targets, encouraging them to join the journey. Definitely we want to be an all-around sustainable partner for our customers, and a sustainable supplier for our customers.
Thank you. If you look at our number one topic in sustainability from equipment point of view, it's electrification. Today, of the products or the capacity that we supply to our customers already, about 50% is electrified already by today. We have three different product categories, stationary equipment, which is fully electrified, wheel-mounted equipment which is fully electrified already, and then we have track-mounted electric or track-mounted machines, which is roughly about 15% electrified today.
A few months ago, we were announcing that we have a major R&D program, EUR 20 million being invested in electrifying these track-mounted equipment. By far, the biggest R&D effort is happening on electrifying those track-mounted equipment. Here we have some good case examples from India. How we can run sustainable operations, how our customers can run sustainably. First of all, you can see that the customers have opted for electric-powered units in this case. Electric-powered plants, which they can use renewable energy to power those plants, making sure that we can offset the emissions on that side. That's of course the customer's decision, what kind of power they use, but the electric equipment enables the utilization of renewable energy. Simultaneously, they have gone for a Lifecycle Services contract with Metso Outotec.
As part of this lifecycle service contract, we have a used wear parts return program. We take back those, what we call scrap liners, used liners, return them back to our foundry, use them as prime raw material. For us, it's the right alloy for our operations, and this has multiple benefits. First of all, you can see the emission benefits, the environmental benefits to our globe. CO2 emissions, air pollution, water usage, water pollution, they all go down. These are measured targets that we have or measured numbers from our operations. Simultaneously, this prime raw material, it's really good for us. It stabilizes our cost structure, it's high quality for our production, and it reduces the exposure to external world, when it comes to raw material purchases for us.
It stabilizes our internal, our procurement side as well when it comes to raw materials. We referred a bit to our productization of aftermarket solutions. Of course, where this all starts is that we help our customers and we are their partner when they select the equipment that they would operate with. It all starts from the fact that we understand what our customers are aiming for. Whether they go for a stationary plant, semi-mobile, mobile plant. Our equipment team helps these, our customers to make the right selection of equipment.
Of course, for all of our customers, we make sure that we have our high-quality spare and wear parts and technical support available at the convenient time in a fast response time close by, and that's why we have our extensive network out there in the world. We have these solutions where we can help our customers to reach their targets better. We can say we have productized services that if customers are really looking for uptime improvement, uptime guarantees, we have solutions that enable them to get guaranteed uptime hours out of their equipment. We also have solutions that if the customer is looking for maximum capacity out of their production, we can help them in their journey to get to that capacity, what they are striving for.
Lastly, the most furthest, we have committed to performance. This means we look at also the quality aspects of it, the balance between the different end products that the customers are producing, committing ourselves to the journey with our customers to reach those performance targets. These are really good and the customers really appreciate these commercial solutions. It's also efficient for us to sell these because we can execute them in an efficient manner since they are well-productized, and it provides a clear benefit to us and our customers.
Let's add one more element for the sustainability and the captive game, and that's the digital offering that is driving the growth and definitely improves the captive on the aftermarket side. We are dividing this into three segments here now in this presentation. Start is the intelligent crushers and digital offering. That is, the core of every crushing plant is the crusher and by having the intelligent crusher in a portfolio will secure the market leadership in this core technology, also going forward.
There are few products inside this offering, for example, the advanced automation, where we are increasing the element of the automation in the machine level and then also getting a much more accurate in the machine vision type of products helping a lot of understanding what is happening with one equipment. Going forward to the fleet management offering, the target there is to improve the customer experience significantly and then by doing that, growing the aftermarket. I will talk about more in the next slide about the fleet management. Just mentioning that the flagship there is the Metso Outotec Metrics system and then, for example, the remote control that enables the sustainable, safe operation of the fleet and equipment.
Finally, again, talking about the different customer needs and customers. For the quarry type of customers, very essential is to get the process and operations optimized. Our offering on this field is leveraging not only the intelligence of the crushers and the fleets, but also then the big data that we have when we are operating in all over the world and collecting this data to our databases. Helping then the customers to optimize their processes the best possible way. Quarry AI is our plant-level automation system in use and equipment health and maintenance is essential in the quarry types when they are sometimes 24/7 operations, so they do share something like mining type of needs also, these customers.
Let's go for the fleet management solutions, optimizing the performance. We have more than 500 customers currently connected to the Metso Outotec Metrics system. That means close to 2,000 unique equipment that is connected to our Metso Outotec Metrics. What is the target here for the customers? It's simple. Maximum output with the minimum effort, optimizing the operations within the fleet, enables customers to get the efficiency and the profits out of the fleet that they are owning. Remote control, I was mentioning that one, it's easy to operate, but also safety aspect. This means that the mobile equipment can be operated, for example, from the excavator cockpit, by the remote model, not needing to go for the risk zones of the machine close by.
Also, of course, making it very easy to operate even two equipment at the same time by one operator. Ensuring availability and also giving us the possibility to support our customers. The higher uptime is directly linked to the profitability of the customers in many ways. That means that we can then also earn money from the relationship. When we combine this fleet management solution, the digital offering with our so-called traditional offerings or the products that we have, this supports significantly the growth. Aftermarket captivity goes without saying, having customers connected to us, getting the support from us will leverage a lot the aftermarket part of the captivity.
Having information and data helps us also in the equipment sales and especially having the proactive sales approach towards the customers with the help of the digital tool and data that we have. This is one big lever for our journey onwards as well.
How do we get to 15% EBITDA? There are three topics here: commercial, aftermarket, and internal efficiency. Commercial excellence, I think we already have been discussing about that quite a bit. It's about our sales channel. It's about how we manage our distribution. It's about tools, it's about processes. Pricing management, I think we have a very strong position in our pricing. We have different products for different price points as well. Product leadership, being so much bigger than the next competitor, I think we have the muscle to develop the products to be leader in the products.
If I look at the internal efficiency, supply network, sourcing network, cost competitive locations, logistics efficiencies, very big topics already mentioned in the earlier presentations. Maybe one thing to highlight that we have a major investment ongoing in our India facility in order to expand our low cost production. That was announced, I think it was November last year, and we are in good process of building that and should be in operation early next year. On standardization of the products. First of all, we don't really like to sell too much specials. We like to sell standard products. When you are dealing with or when you have a distribution network, distribution network is really dealing with standard products. That's where it's efficient.
That's where the lead times are fast and customer on-time delivery is good. We'd like to standardize even more our products. At the time when we are developing this electric portfolio with our major R&D investments, we are actually also modularizing our offering at the same time, which then gives us a lot of benefits going forward. Probably the benefits will show on long terms or not this year or next year, but it's more like five years down the road, six, seven years down the road, we should see a lot of benefits coming out of that.
Of course, when we have these multiple acquisitions that we've been working on, there is a lot of procurement opportunities, cost opportunities and many kinds of opportunities to find leverages there as well.
Yeah. On the aftermarket capacity side. Basically we want to be easy partner to do business with. We wanna be accessible and responsive to our customers and to our distributors as well. We want to have the complete range of solutions and products available to cater each and every customer needs out there. That's why we have these different products, and we have the different channels. We are expanding our reach continuously. We have multiple brands, we have multiple sales channels, and we want to make sure that our products and services are accessible and available for all of the potential customer base out there. If we look at a bit what I was referring to the McCloskey and how well the aftermarket business has developed since the acquisition of McCloskey.
We have as you can see on the trend, there has been a healthy 50% growth on our aftermarket business. How did we do this? If we look at it in Metso Outotec brand, we have the highest share of aftermarket in relation to the equipment sales. We took the knowhow, the experience, practices of Metso Outotec brand and implemented the core of that to McCloskey. We are doing the same things for the other multi-brands. We have that accumulated knowhow, that knowledge how to run aftermarket business in a more efficient way. We can also utilize the synergies across it in our procurement, our manufacturing and so on, and distribution as well. That helps us to take full advantage of this one. The key for us at the same time is the platform.
We build on the brand promise, the brand customer experience that is there, and we tailor our products to suit that one. That expands our reach and enables us to serve different customer categories and segments within the aggregates.
I've been talking about this, or we've been talking about this, cross-brand synergies. Here is an example or actually a kind of a summary of cross-brand synergies. Last year, we had a bit more than EUR 70 million synergy sales, more sales because of these synergies. We are taking our spare parts, wear parts, and selling those through these McCloskey units on Saalasti, these sub-channels as well. We are taking our Metso Outotec crushers and installing those crushers into the mobile units of these other brands, and then having better crushers and actually getting higher price for the machines when selling with better crushers. We also have complete products. We are taking complete products that we are then rebranding into different colors and selling through different sales channels as well.
Through different distribution networks. Last year, we were gaining about EUR 12 million on bottom line impact out of these synergies coming in here. I'm sure that this will continue to go forward in the future. By the way, so far by 2021, actually majority of that growth has been on capital side. The aftermarket side will grow when the installed base is growing. Aftermarket growth is kind of few years behind the capital growth always. That there is kind of aftermarket opportunities still waits there to be gained. A customer example of these rebranding or cross-branding.
Once we acquired McCloskey, one of the major sales synergy actions that we had was to take part of the McCloskey offering, machines that they had in offering, but our kind of main brand, Metso Outotec brand did not have. We took those products and rebranded those to the Metso Outotec channel as well. We're selling kind of same products through two different channels to the customers. There are so many customers that, kind of, we just increase our reach with the products by doing that. With this, we started from zero in 2019, and in last year we made EUR 35 million worth of sales with this new track offering, so new product family that we established by the rebranding. Really successful.
Our target was actually much lower than that, so it was a very positive surprise at how much we were able to generate business. Actually we could have made even more if our availability would have been better. The opportunity is still there to grow. Good. Time to go for wrap up. Basically what we want to say here is that we do continue to deliver growth and higher margins in the aggregates. We feel that we have the right means to do it, and definitely we want to utilize and leverage our efficiency and our multi-brand synergies to do that.
Expanding the aftermarket business stays in the center of the agenda. We see that we have still room to grow in the aftermarket area, and adding the digital enablers to that equation will also then create the efficiency of those operations and helping us to deliver the margins.
We drive sustainability, sustainable growth with our electrification program. We will reach our targets. We will grow faster than the market is growing, and we will be more than 15% in EBITDA. That's our very good target. By the way, we have a great team to achieve that.
True. Good.
Good. Thank you, gentlemen, for the presentation. Let's kick off with the aggregates Q&A session. I think Erkki Vesola has a question at least. Let me first take one from the webcast, a quick one from Magnus Kruber of UBS. What would be the leading indicator or indicators you are looking to try and estimate the demand in North American market in the future?
The leading indicators are our distributor inventory is a good leading indicator. We are following how distributor inventories are developing. So far, if you see that distributors are hesitating to fulfill the inventory once they have sold the machines out, that's a very bad signal. A second bad or another type of a bad signal is that if distributors are fulfilling their inventory, but it builds up and it doesn't kind of start to move out to the customer. That's maybe number one indicator. Of course, we are following closely what the kind of soft signals are coming from the market as well.
Anything that you could follow from the kind of public domain?
Very difficult to see in the public domain any kind of clear short-term indicators. Long-term indicators would be the investments happening in the infrastructure. Our business is basically based on building roads, building dams, building railroads, building airports. When there is big investments, then it means big machine sales for us.
All right. Thank you. Erkki.
Hi, it's Erkki from Inderes again. My question was actually partially already answered, but still coming back to the North American market. We know that the interest rates are rising there, and of course, all the construction material prices are sky-high. Do you see any early indications from your customers, kind of project cancellations or postponements that would impact your direct customer volumes and investment demand?
So far we haven't seen indicators like that. In Europe we do, but in North America, we really don't see those type of indicators. Like I said, many of our customers, first customers, kind of distributors' customers, they are small operators. They are really looking at their own pocket and kind of next project down the road. It's very down to earth kind of a business. It's not long-term strategic planning. It's kind of what's happening right now and next week.
Okay, thanks.
Tom here.
Yes, this is Tom Skogman from Carnegie. I'm very happy to see the kind of service growth in McCloskey. The fact is still that the service share used to be much higher in the aggregates business. First of all, have you changed anything in the way you do the bookkeeping? Should we kind of think that, you know, the whole business could reach the old good share of kind of aftermarket activities? Or is there something structurally, you know, how they are sold or the type of products that suggest that you cannot reach that with after all these acquisitions?
There's nothing changes that we have done as such. What has changed is that we have, for example, the McCloskey brand now in the portfolio. What is the difference is that when you have a fully mobile unit type of offering, the customers' spend on aftermarket is totally different as a share of capital equipment and the services than when we look at the traditional quarries where the legacy Metso was also strong in share of the portfolio. Now we are much more in the mobile side, and therefore our target is to be out there in 35-40% share of the aftermarket. Currently we are in the 35 as said. Not far away from where we believe that the good lies.
as I mentioned, we have room to grow in the services.
Maybe I'll add on that a little bit. If you look at the traditional Metso Outotec business, we have a huge installed base. We have a very capable service network. We have a lot of kind of processes and procedures and capabilities in place for many, many years. With that, the service intensity is somewhere 40% thereabout. When we acquired all of these acquisitions, their service level was around 10%. So it takes years before that 10% grows up. It will probably never reach quite 40%, but it will. It should be somewhere around 30% levels.
Is the reason that the-
From mic.
Is the reason that in the quarries, it's like, you know, products that you install, and then you modernize them, but they're there forever as long as the quarry is there. You know, the mobile equipment is kind of you replace them and you change the diesel engine, and so they have a lifetime of seven years or so instead of 40 years in quarries. Is that how we should understand?
You are very correct. There's also a big difference if you looked at the how many hours is utilized or used the equipment per year, for example. In the contract segment, there is not 24/7 type of operations with the customer, so there's less hours there. There might be more sales in unit of equipment, but then they don't utilize the hours so much, which is always quite a direct link of the services and consumables, especially with the produced tons. The quarries do operate 24/7, a lot of hours, and there is a need for refurbishment, overhauling, and more of that type of services as well in the quarry type of business.
Then the service margin. You were very kind of outspoken about the equipment margin. On the service side, when you merge kind of service organizations, I mean, they're very strong operating leverage benefits. It sounds like given, you know, you stated what the equipment margin is. It sounds like the service margin has not really improved so far, at least that much, you know, from adding much more volume to it. Can you open up a bit about that?
I think we need to split here once again the consumables and the other part of the services, which is then more spare parts and the field service. Consumables have had their challenges as a business. When I look at the spare parts, then there is no that kind of issues visible. There is an improvement also in the margins and also in the business volumes looking at the last 12 months in the aggregate segment.
Okay, thanks.
I was just wondering if I could ask about the numbers you gave around connectivity. I think you said, I can't remember the exact numbers, maybe 2,000 units that were connected, something. Could you sort of put that into some sort of context? Like how much is that? How much is the penetration of connectivity so far? How much further could you go with that?
We have an installed base that can have a. It can be delivered 30 years ago and still existing. There is not so much upgrade type of business in the aggregates segment that the customers would like to get a very old installed base, still working, to be upgraded for the connectivity level. That number is good when we look at the deliveries that we have done since we started to install that very actively to our portfolio. It's very high in that sense. But when we look at the whole installed base, it's like a fraction because it's only the new installed base that have this opposite.
Of the bit that you have done it on, I mean, you can see that there is a material benefit in terms of the.
Yeah.
relationship with the customer, the aftermarket capture and so on and so forth.
Correct. Ever increasing, of course, when we get more and more the data and then we can connect the algorithms to understand better and so forth. That's happening.
Okay, thank you. Then just maybe a slightly different topic. I'm just curious about, you know, everyone's worried about a downturn and what happens, and obviously, we don't know what's gonna happen in the next couple of years. Maybe sort of you look at the history of the business going back to sort of previous periods of financial crisis or whatever it might be. What kind of sort of level of slowdown have you seen? And do customers cancel orders? Is there anything that stops them doing that? I mean, what sort of levels of cancellation do you see in a downturn?
I was talking about the backlog management, and actually, that backlog management helps us a lot in that situation. We don't book orders one year down the road. That would be the risky part of the backlog if there would be really long backlog. That's one thing. Looking back, first part of your question, looking back at the history that what has happened in the previous recessions or financial turmoil, our business, especially the capital side, maybe not so much on the aftermarket side, but the capital side is very fast to react to any market changes.
If there is uncertainty or turmoil or something happening, then our distributors, our customers, they react almost immediately, and they kind of hold on to their investment. We see it quite quickly. Earlier, we have seen 2008. I wasn't actually at that time in the business, but at that time, there was a lot of cancellations as well. In the kind of last crisis, I guess COVID was the last crisis. There, we didn't actually see that many cancellations. There were some, but. When COVID really started to hit, that spring was really awful for us. We didn't get any orders. Zero, nada, nothing coming in. It was really terrifying for a couple of months.
If you look at the backlog, most of the backlog was still moving. It didn't actually impact, but it. The uncertainty impacted the new orders, not to be willing to take new orders. Then when it goes up, it goes very fast up as well. The business, when it starts to go up, when COVID was starting to kind of. When I was looking at my colleagues, they were not even seeing the downturn from COVID-19, when I was already seeing that the upturn coming after the COVID-19. It kind of fast in both ways. In our current situation, I wouldn't expect any major cancellation orders. Backlog is pretty safe to deliver.
Yeah. If I look at it from the aftermarket perspective, so we are for our fast-moving items, it's not an issue because the market keeps going all the time. But we are keeping an eye on the slow-moving items, making sure that we don't overstock that on that side. We kind of keep a healthy level on that side, making sure that the slow-moving items, we don't pile up too much.
Just to clarify on the comment you made about not taking orders on a longer lead time, trying to keep it, that the strategy is now gonna be to keep it like that.
Yeah. That's what it looks like because it's been so beneficial in this turmoil period. I think we will be continuing with that strategy also going forward. It might be that we extend it a little bit when our visibility to core structures and availability of the parts extends. We wouldn't book orders for stuff that we have kind of no visibility on our side.
Thank you.
Yeah, maybe a follow-up on the previous question and especially relating to Europe. If you think about the market kind of since the COVID-19 first shock, I mean, how would you describe the levels that we have been? Has it been mostly just a pent-up demand being fulfilled, or is it, prior to February, has the market been at the extraordinary high level? Also kind of how dramatic do you think the slowdown now that you are seeing is? I mean, it's a broad question, but just based on your history and the cyclicality in European business, where what should we expect now?
Long question and difficult to answer as well. If you look at the kind of after COVID, the ramp-up of orders was truly extraordinary. It was far beyond our capability to deliver, and that's why we started these new procedures. That was still continuing at the time when war broke down. When the war broke down, we saw immediately. I was actually expecting that it would be a very rapid drop of orders. We saw a softening. We didn't see a rapid drop of orders. It was not like the COVID came in, that everything disappeared completely. It was softening. North America was continuing pretty normal, but the European level has been lower.
Now, if I look at kind of current speed of orders or the first half of this year or maybe the second quarter of this year, the orders there were not far from last year in terms of euros. If you look at the European orders, it was not far from last year, maybe a little bit lower than last year European or kind of orders. But then, of course, we had a major price increase in between. So euros don't tell everything. But if you look at the actual machines, then we are probably, say, in Europe, maybe 15% below last year in the number of machines at this moment. But it's kind of a. It's not nowhere near as bad as I was expecting it, actually.
To go forward, I have very little wisdom on saying how this is going to develop going forward. We'll see. Wait and see. We are fast to react anyway.
Okay. Second question on the profitability, I mean, you're happy with your backlog management and pricing, I guess. You have had tremendous growth on the equipment volumes and euros as well. I mean, you're lagging the 15% target, and it has been kind of flatlining in the past couple of quarters. Could you just quantify the lagging parts? How much is that kind of external headwinds and something that you could address yourself?
There might be a little bit of external headwinds and things that are impacting currencies, currency hedgings, and things that have been impacting. I'm really confident on going forward. We are heading right on that direction. I have no doubt about that.
Thank you.
I'll take a couple of questions, online. First, in aggregates aftermarket, can you a little bit break down the shares of consumables, spare parts, and other services, in this segment?
50/50 between spare parts and wear parts, basically.
Very little other services.
Yeah.
if at all.
Especially when we are doing it to the distribution. Distribution is taking that part of the business.
Exactly. Continuing from that question from Debashis, Société Générale, how much of the installed base you are serving is your own versus serving other OEMs' equipment?
Well, for consumables products, we don't specifically care whose installed base is it. Majority of the business comes to our own installed base, but we do serve our third-party equipment as well. The percentage is not that big, but we have the capabilities to do it, and we have been growing that part of the business as well. We are talking about single digits when it comes to third-party installed base.
In the rest of the aftermarket, so spare parts and field service. The main focus has been in the own installed base so far and now looking for the opportunities for helping the customers broader.
About business in China and Asia Pacific, how much of those sales are manufactured in Europe?
Not a lot. Most of the products delivered to China are actually made in China. Today, actually, I would say probably even beyond 90% is manufactured in China, which is delivered in China, at least on the capital side. Then same in most parts in Asia that the products are primarily coming from our India facilities to most of Asia. Maybe there are some countries where we deliver some products also from Europe, but most of it coming from local supply.
Yeah, from consumables perspective, Chinese market is served inside China, so we have suppliers inside China to supply that market. Rest of Asia-Pacific, we supply either from China or India.
All right. Magnus Kruber from UBS asks about consumables margin and Heikki Metsälä. You happen to be here.
Yes.
Let's ask about that. Magnus asks, you know, where sort of are you now because, you know, company has been flagging some pressures.
Yeah.
in consumables and what you are targeting.
I'm not gonna give explicit numbers on that one, but let's put it this way that on the aggregates segment, if we talk about consumables margins, we have, of course, had our share of headwind coming from the energy and logistics, and logistics is a big part, especially on the aggregates segment. Here, the aggregates products are more standardized, so for us, our inventories have been buffering the impact. This is why it shows up in the segment numbers as well.
Let's put it this way, that we are, you know, we have been in the low double digit, barely double digit now, and we should be strong double digit in the consumables overall in the future.
Good stuff. Any more questions? Yes, Panu.
Yes, thanks. I just wanted to ask on the demand drivers. You said that infrastructure investment is the key, but I wonder what kind of correlation have you had for the non-infrastructure construction in your demand, or what have you seen, like housing and the other segments?
Naturally, there is some correlation, but it's rather minor part of our total business, so it's really the main infrastructure projects that are driving our demand. Housing, of course, there is concrete in there, so sand and there is aggregates below the house. But as a kind of a total amount compared to the kind of highway building, it's rather insignificant from our demand.
This is the same across markets?
I would say so, yes.
All right. Thanks.
All right. We have been discussing aggregates for 60 minutes now, so it's time for a break. Thank you, gentlemen, for your discussion and presentation. We'll have a break for 10 minutes, so we'll be back 20 minutes to the hour for minerals.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
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All right. Welcome back, once again, from the break. We are continuing our segment presentations, now it's time to discuss minerals. We also in this presentation have three gentlemen on the stage. Sami and Heikki will continue, and they will be joined by head of our minerals equipment business, Markku Teräsvasara.
Okay. Good afternoon on my behalf as well.
Hello again.
Hello again from my side as well.
Welcome to the Minerals journey for profitable growth and customer success. Minerals was one of the segments where we had biggest integration when we were combining our two companies. That was through both on capital side, but also on aftermarket side, apart from Consumables. You will hear more about the combination. As we see it, we combined two sizable businesses which were already performing quite okay. What we knew already then was that they actually complement each other in a very good way. In our case, it gave us a very strong portfolio and platform to build on. In our case, 1 + 1 definitely equals more than two.
Let's look at a little bit on market sentiment first, and then also reflect our achievements, what have we done so far. Then going towards industry trends, customer challenges, and of course, how do we help our customers to succeed? Because that's one of the purpose that we have. We all like to succeed ourselves, but we can only do it if our customers are successful, like Pekka said earlier. I'm sure that towards the end of the presentation, you are interested to hear how is our journey towards this 20% adjusted EBIT target, EBITDA target that we have. First, about minerals market sentiment, and that was also covered already, by the previous presenters.
Market activity is strong, mostly driven by copper, gold and battery metals. Combining copper and gold for minerals, that is good half of our business. Of course, as a newcomer, we have battery market very active. Not so many greenfield, but the brownfield market is active. Even though metal prices have been trending a bit down, but they are historically on a good level and definitely supporting investment. Of course, as a disclaimer, we all know about the volatility that exists. This is also very cyclical business where decisions are done quickly, and investments may be put on hold if the wrong signals emerge.
As a company, as a mineral segment business, we are definitely well-positioned. We have done the homework for the last 2+ years, combined our portfolios, worked on a product positioning and already starting aligning our new product R&D, so that it fits the customer's challenges, it supports the customer's challenge, but also creates opportunities, more opportunities for aftermarket. Sustainability has also been one of the driving forces. We mentioned these Planet Positive orders and sales that we have had since last year, a way of measuring how environmentally friendly our products and services are when we sell them.
Of course, sales is a little bit lagging behind, but on the order side, more than 50% of orders on the mineral side are already Planet Positive orders. I think it's—What is also encouraging, and among those orders, we also have the products that has highest sales margins. In that sense, I think. As said, we are well-positioned to capture the brownfield investment growth, complement that with sustainable and digital solution, and then definitely make sure that our aftermarket gets more opportunities. What we have, what have we achieved since the merger? We have had COVID, we have had Russia.
Maybe for minerals, the Russia impact is bigger than for the average Metso Outotec business. We have typically had some 10%-15% of orders coming from Russia. This year, we stopped our business. Basically, we are winding down existing contracts, but we have not taken any new orders since the war begun. Still, I think the order intake is developing very well. Remember this 10%-15%, we have been able to fully compensate that from the growth from other markets and other market areas. We are actually on the orders side, we are on our way to our full-year target that we set to ourself originally.
On the sales side, sales is also catching nicely with the backlog, with the increased backlog. However, there, we don't have time to fully replace the losses that we have in Russia this year. Of course, going forward, that impact will diminish. We still have been able to capture, as you will see later, say synergies of combining the two portfolios, but there are more opportunities to capture, we can discuss later. Heikki, what can we say about cost inflation?
Yeah. I'm still gonna go from the aftermarket perspective back to this, synergies. The synergy business that we have achieved since the merger is now creating cumulative business opportunities on the aftermarket side. We get the installed base, and we get to serve the aftermarket, and that builds up with the synergies. We are really confident on that front. Of course, now cost inflation, big topic, we've all heard a lot about it already. It is true that we have been facing headwind on that side. Now we have taken the necessary actions, the pricing action. It was a lot of tedious work to get the prices up to the level that we offset the cost impact to us, and also a lot of contract negotiations that we've been undergoing. We do feel that we have now matched it.
The coming sales, we expect to be on a better level in that sense, in terms of profitability. We are accelerating our aftermarket business. Our aftermarket order growth has been picking up really nicely, and we now see that the sales growth is picking up speed really well as well. We have plenty of initiatives on the commercial excellence, productization, supply chain, and manufacturing side. There's a lot of self-help initiatives that will help us to gain margin uplift on what we are doing. There, the key is those self-help initiatives that we are doing. As said, we have had really strong order growth in the minerals segment, especially in the last 12 months. The graph on the left is now comparing our order booking in the minerals segment to our competitors and peers.
As we can see, we started to be well on par with the speed and then now accelerating even faster than most other peers in the game. This order intake that we have been taking, it's a part of our strategy. We want to focus on the products and projects in the capital side as well, where the aftermarket captivity and intensity is the highest. Where we are today when looking at the sales split of the last twelve months on the right-hand graph, again, comparing to other players in the field. We see that our split currently is little bit less than 60% of the aftermarket and 42% of the capital.
We ideally want to have this share to be more on a 35-65 or 30-70 level as well. Now what we see is that those orders taken and the sales happening at the moment, they are creating very nice installed base out there in the marketplace for aftermarket businesses to pick up going forward then.
Good. We are, of course, heading towards our 20% adjusted EBITDA target. Our targets remain the same. We wanna grow faster than the market, and we want to reach our adjusted EBITDA target of 20%. If we look at our performance today, on the growth side of it, we are doing well. We are growing faster than the market. That we have well covered at this stage. Of course, we've all heard we have had some challenges on our profitability performance, but we truly believe that we have the right actions, we have the right tools at our disposal to go towards that 20% adjusted EBITDA. The margin drivers, we're gonna go through in more detail in the coming slides. If we look at it, we want to have leading offering and customer value.
Premium products where we can have premium margins as well. That's in the core of it. We have those Planet Positive products. We have those leading offering, the best-in-class technologies at our disposal. At the same time, the commercial excellence, efficiency improvement. We still have a lot of work to be done in our internal operations. How do we conduct the business, so we have that self-help potential to take us and provide us an additional margin uplift.
Let's have a brief look at the industry trends and challenges that our customers are dealing with at the moment. I think the list is well known by everyone. We definitely need to find ways to reduce the energy consumption in minerals processing. We come soon to that on what Metso Outotec, what we have done, in that area.
Water is already a critical resource in many areas where basically mining competes with society, other society, agriculture. Definitely, all the technologies where you use less water, less fresh water, recycle more, maybe even have a process where you don't need water at all, they are coming to levels. Reliability is very much on both equipment R&D side, but also on visualization to make sure that our plants and products perform as they expect to do. We continuously install more and more capacity to our equipment. Of course, to get that capacity out, we need to make sure that also the control systems develop accordingly.
Agility, I think one good example of that is that we have developed over the years these modular containerized products. Basically, we can put a hydrometallurgical plant or part of a concentrator plant in the normal sea container and transport that easily, stack them together at the mine site, and then we have a very quick installation of the performing process. Of course, sustainability, as you mentioned already, we want to be sustainable partners to our customers. Let's look at this a bit more in detail. This picture illustrates a concentrator plant, a typical one, and then on the right side of it, you also see a hydrometallurgical plant. This slide can actually be discussed in various levels.
You can talk about customer challenges because you see the process flow. We can talk about our installed base and the synergies that we have and aftermarket opportunity. We also can discuss our portfolio priorities and development actions. But let's if we start from our position and portfolio, on the right-hand corner, upper corner on each box, you have our position on the marketplace. So where it is one, then we are the biggest supplier in that particular equipment operation. That is what I mentioned earlier about perfect combination because crushing Outotec did not have and of course hydrometallurgy was coming from that side.
Both companies was fairly well-positioned on the grinding side, and then towards the wet processing that was more in Outotec hands. Basically, putting the two portfolios together created one portfolio which is definitely the strongest on the market. In many of the areas, in most of the areas, we are actually the biggest supplier. If we are not the biggest, we are definitely in top three. We also talk about aftermarket intensity. In that, if you look at this picture, the most aftermarket intensive areas are grinding, crushing, slurry handling, and filtration. Also screening is quite big. If you look at the top two, they are grinding and crushing, and we are number one in those areas.
You will see it later in our R&D priority works. We are strong in areas which actually generate good aftermarket business. We do want to still have the full plant capability, even though as a company, we want to focus on productization and designing, delivering, selling equipment with significant aftermarket opportunity. We want to keep the process knowledge that we have in-house, to make sure that we have the capabilities to advise customers on the best possible concentrator plant process or the hydrometallurgical plant process. When we are doing it, we actually quite often then guarantee also that we are able to deliver the main proprietary equipment for that particular flow.
There is less competition if you can do it, but our ambition is not to deliver more than those equipments and then making sure that we help our customers to run the process accordingly. One of the developments on this space is in digital area, we call it Geminex. That's a digital twin. We come to that in the next slide, but I want to introduce it already here because if you look at the process as it is run today, in most of the cases still, our customers are running their concentrator plant based on averages. So they assume that ore is always the same. It has the same structure, same content, same metallurgical chemistry.
We know from the practice that it is not the case. There actually are quite huge variations of incoming material. Over the years, we have developed different ways of putting hundreds of sensors, analyzers to our process, which we use to gather information. We have also had equipment-level automation to make sure that these individual equipment operations perform as they should be. The latest development actually is this Geminex, where we have combined all the information that we get from those sensors, from those individual equipment operations, and then created an umbrella program on top of it. That is a model that is based on our so-called HSC modeling simulation tool that we have had in the company for many years.
Now with all that information gathered under one umbrella, we can actually then have a system that is a predictive simulation for the process, which supports customer in their online decision-making based on complete oversight for the whole process. Basically, you can work on the process or the blends or the production assets and make sure that they are all optimized. Of course, the bigger benefits is there for the customer. They will increase their revenue, they can reduce their working capital, and they can also reduce or improve the operating margin by using less resources in the area where they have overused them in the past. That also opens us a good opportunity to introduce new type of selling models or pricing models.
Here, of course, the first thing we like to talk with our customers is profit sharing, some sort of profit sharing model, where we get part of the benefit that our customers will receive. Definitely an interesting area, was recently launched. We have already agreed to deliver that to two clients or actually three, and they are quite good pipeline building up for this Geminex going forward. Later on, I think, aftermarket, both Sami and Heikki will greatly benefit from the information that will come out of that system.
That's true. The digital mining offering is really something that we continuously keep on developing, Geminex being one of the good example of that. We believe that that will be a strong lever for the business growth and also the premium value. Worthwhile mentioning here that it's not a coincidence that you see this Planet Positive stamp logo on these slides. Like any other R&D project in Metso Outotec, the same applies for the digital. There needs to be a positive impact for the planet in every R&D project that we have, including the digital one that we have many ongoing. Mainly here in the digital, we are looking for the hand print part, helping the customers to reduce their footprint.
It's starting from those very important equipment in the process. Intelligent equipment plays a big role. Once again, they are the core of the digitalization and giving the data input then for the further use in different various offerings that we have been creating. Process and operations optimization is what the demand is highest from the customers at the moment, and that's what we are answering with our development work. Geminex mentioned here that added with our Lifecycle Services concept, when we are helping the customers in various needs that they have to optimize their own operations in the process. Then we also have internal efficiency gains from the digital tools and especially the data that we get.
Knowing what is needed and when and where will help us to optimize our own supply operations, for example. In our own manufacturing units, we are using the digital tools for optimizing the production and you know, creating the highest possible efficiency out of the situation.
Let's look back at the product development and when we design our new products, as we mentioned already earlier, we look at a couple of things. Of course, first of all, solving customer problems. It needs to benefit our customers and help them in solving their challenges. We also want to have it Planet Positive. All the new development that we do have Planet Positive criteria. It includes digitalization and full flow sheet capability, as mentioned. Also, we look at the productization and building a product range that supports aftermarket development in a good way.
Mentioned on those areas, if you look at the lineup here for the new products that we have already launched during Metso Outotec time, the first four ones are on high consumption aftermarket intensity area, which by the way, also consumes a big part of the global electricity. It has been said that crushing and grinding combined consume some 5% of the global electricity or energy. Definitely when we try to help our customers to reduce their electricity bill, we look at in-pit crushing and conveying, and then we look at various ways to grind the rock in more environmental friendly, consuming less energy. Then screens are also supporting that way.
you go to the other end of the process, you have tailings, concentrates also an area where we can help our customers to increase water recycling. We take the water
Purify it and put it back to the process. Geminex, we already talked about. Maybe the one odd thing here in the middle list is Concorde Cell, but actually also improving customer efficiency greatly because that is flotation technology that helps our customers to capture fine particles that typically in the past went to the tailings pond. In some of the applications, our customers actually, for the same investment, they can get up to 10% more metal with minimum investment. Of course we call that also very Planet Positive and very sustainable.
Okay, let's talk a little bit more about the aftermarket services and consumables and the growth that we are looking. Captivity is very important key success factors in increasing the growth. How we are doing it is that we are the innovative leader, so we are bringing new products to the market. By new products you get the captivity and then you have a chance to keep the customer in your service portfolio going forward. We have field service experts, more than 3,000 globally, close to the customers, some of them working all the time at the customer site. This is of course one very good way of increasing the captivity and leveraging that expert footprint that we have out there.
Expanding and continuing to create the captive business models that we have been doing already quite some time, but adding new elements and creating more value through those business models. Basically, it's optimizing the operations, both the customer operations and our own operations, to be able to serve with the best value, and then working with the Lifecycle Services concept further with the customers. Now we will open up a little bit more about these concepts. How we are doing it by optimizing the customer's performance and then creating the best total cost of ownership over the lifecycle.
We talk about customer success, and this is a big topic for us. You've seen it from Pekka's presentation. You've seen us talking about it all the time. What is customer success? What, you know, how do we start? Basically, when we start thinking about our products and solutions, we start from what is the customer gaining out of this? What is the customer benefit? What is the target that they are trying to achieve? And how is our product or solution serving that need and that target? And we have, you know, there's basically three large high-level targets. We want to lower their risk, reduce their operating cost, and increase their production output. This is where we start. When we look at our products, this is where how we think.
On the lowering, risk-lowering side of it, we have commercial risk, safety risk, environmental risk, and that equals license to operate. You know, mining industry, we need to have the license to operate. We need to be sustainable in the future, and we can help our customers to lower those risks. Reducing operating cost, we have multiple ways of doing it. We can help them lower their energy consumption. We can reduce their maintenance need, optimize their operational labor, and we can decrease water and chemical usages. The additives that Mark was referring to, for example, with Geminex in this case. We can help them to increase their production output. We can optimize the throughput on equipment level, on a sub-process level, on a flow sheet level in that sense.
We can increase the uptime, get the most out of the machines, make them run as much as they can on an annual basis. We can help them to maximize their recovery rate, make the most out of the material that they are processing, and give them the best possible overall equipment effectiveness.
As we are digitizing our products in the capital equipment and creating the solutions around them, that means also that our customers need to adapt to this new world. To support that, we have this very wide footprint of our field service experts out there. They are also now digitized. That was largely thanks to COVID for speeding up that work, that we are able to deliver the global knowledge to the front line, very close to the customer through our field service experts. The demand for this is increasing all the time as there is an age challenge also in the customer's own operations, including the fact that there is more digitalized processes to be run, and also the maintenance part gets in that direction.
What we also have is 140+ service locations throughout the world. They are selected so that they are close to the customer hubs, so that we can serve several customers. We are adding to this portfolio service locations as needed. Currently, we are building one in Pilbara region in Australia. On top of that, we have three performance centers. They are located in Chile, Finland, and China. They are remote monitoring centers, 24/7, keeping an eye on the customer operation and being then on alert to support and help them, what the demand is that they might be having a problem or they want to adjust a certain direction.
Again, here we have a great synergy with the Geminex type of tool helping us as well to be able to support our customers through the performance centers. There is a target to have more features brought to the frontline for the digital field service people or field service people with the digital tools. That's what we are doing constantly, adding more features to the equipment that they are having with them and thus again, creating the global knowledge to be available for our customers easily. We are keeping a good eye on the competence development. We have a certification program for our own people to be specified for certain technologies or certain parts of the processes. By certification, we guarantee the quality of our support people close to the customer.
As in everywhere what we do, field service is the one where we have a huge risk element. We are working at the customer site. We are working with the moving parts and so on. Zero harm is definitely the one that we have as a target. There will be no injuries happening in the future. There was a mention in Pekka's talk about the M&A. Happy to have this slide here now, just now in September. We have added to the Metso Outotec family one company, Global Physical Asset Management, technology provider based in Canada. Mainly serving today, before joining Metso Outotec, the North American market.
They have a very good and interesting technology for digital inspections and especially for the large industrial gears used in the grinding mills. There's more than 8,000 grinding mills globally, which can now be, as part of Metso Outotec, the synergy tool to globalize usage of this technology. The real trick here is that with this digitized inspection compared to the conventional version that even Metso Outotec was using before, having this technology now in our company. The new technology is 60% faster, and this will significantly reduce the shutdown time for the customers and creating a huge added value for the customer productivity. In Metso Outotec, we are looking this technology, and we have already identified that we can find synergies for other products than just the grinding mills.
Currently, we are developing this one to be available also for the crushing solutions going forward. This is quite a typical acquisition target. It's based on one region or one country, and then the globalization and leveraging other product synergies is happening through Metso Outotec.
Good. I wanna talk about Lifecycle Services, which is one of our core strategic targets. This is something where we want to add our business on. Contractual business, Lifecycle Services contract is something that we are striving to increase all the time. What we can see today, we have already more than 400 Lifecycle Services contracts globally in the minerals segment. Our sales growth within the past 24 months has been more than 50% through these contracts. If we look at combined aggregates and minerals, we have more than 120 contracts where we have scrap return programs, what I was discussing more on the aggregate segment side, where we have take-back programs of used parts in that sense. What does this mean to Metso Outotec in that sense?
For us, it secures and improves our profitability, enables us to manage our prices, and enables us to manage the availability of our parts to our customers. We can have long-term customer relationships, predictable business coming through these contracts. We have productized offerings that we are efficient at executing in that sense. We have contract models and revenue models that we have built that benefit both parties, us and our customers, in that sense. Of course, what does the customer get out of it? Usually, what we aim to go for is the operational efficiencies. That's the key usually what the customers are aiming for. On top of it, they get the improved sustainability, they get lower risks, longer part lives, more resource-efficient operations, fewer shorter shutdowns, meaning more uptime to their plants in that case.
Next up, we have actually a good example on what these Lifecycle Services contracts for can be. This is a productized Metso Outotec Lifecycle Services contract for grinding mills in this case. You can see what is included in it on the left-hand side, but the customer benefits are clear, what the customer has achieved in this case. What they have gained is more than 120% improvement in wear life of these parts. 61% reduction in maintenance hours needed for this particular equipment. 46% less downtime related to their liner replacements. The customer benefits are obvious in this case. What we can see then from Metso Outotec's perspective, the contract has been built in a way that we have aligned our incentives together with our customers, creating a win-win scenario.
We win together, we succeed together in this case. As you can see, it's almost eight years that we've been running this type of contract. The additional benefits for us in Metso Outotec is that this is predictable business. We know when the demand is rising. That enables us to utilize our supply chain more efficiently. We can use our manufacturing locations, utilize them at maximum levels because we can then offset the peaks and valleys coming from the erratic demand outside of the contracts in that sense. The good thing here is that we have that Metso Outotec installed base of 8,000+ mills. We can use this to go after that installed base, and actually, this particular concept, we can go after our third-party equipment as well. It's not limited to our own installed base.
I think we are approaching the last session of our presentation before the Q&A. A few examples of the commercial excellence and efficiency improvements that we have done in Minerals segment, and also looking at the journey as said towards 20%. Of course, I think market is volatile, particularly recently with COVID and logistics constraints, material price increases, electrification, energy going more expensive. We have had to look at how do we mitigate that in our operations. We have decided to split that in two areas. One is on a commercial side, and the other one is to secure deliveries because both have been a challenge.
I think it's also good to understand and mention that we have actually two quite different type of business portfolios. We have more product delivery, project delivery type of cases where it's engineered or configured to order. We have pure parts business manufactured to stock and having a price list items. They have slightly different strategies in mitigating the risk but also some similarities. Of course, when it comes to these engineer to order, configure to order type of things, there we are protected by our suppliers' proposals.
We always make sure that the validity of our own offer is at least as long as our suppliers are giving us and very strict on also giving customers all the lead times. On price list items, but also on equipment items, we have worked with frequent price checks and also made increases where we need it, and then very much focusing also on terms and conditions that protect us against this volatility, price change points, indices and so on in the contract to make sure that we are not the one absorbing possible cost increase. It has worked quite well for the time being. I think it's quite a robust system that we have put in place.
On the other side, we have delivery constraints. There, of course, the way to mitigate that is to somewhat increase the inventory and put it into places where we know that it will be consumed and needed. We have quite successfully pre-booked production slots with our suppliers and agreed that they keep some capacity for us in case we come back with an order, and often we do. Regionalization is an important topic because of this increased logistics cost and somewhat uneven cost for actually cost increases in manufacturing. I was last week visiting our new Central Asia market area in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, like Pekka mentioned. That's a landlocked area.
Their logistics have very much been supplied through Russia because of the old Soviet Union structure. Now, those channels are basically blocked. They can get things through Turkey and Iran, or they can get things through China. There, of course, it is important that we, together with our customers, make sure that we can support them in a good way going forward. One option there is, of course, use alternative suppliers so that we find local partners that can help us in certain scopes. Then make sure that this rerouting conscious and management is done in a good way.
Okay. Efficiency. That we need and that will benefit both us and our customers. We have selected here now three areas where we are working for to create more efficiency. Starting by the commercial excellence part. We need to know our customers. That's the starting point. We are in Minerals segment in direct sales model, which means that, you know, there's Metso Outotec people in the front line selling to the customers and taking care of the needs. What we then need to have is the correct productized offering, creating the right user experience, customer experience for each of the customers based on what they need. Having that productized will help to create the efficiency. Goes without saying that efficiency is created through standardization.
That's the programs that we are running across all the three business areas here. Digitalization will yield the efficiency as well in the commercial side. Seamless cooperation across the organizations. It might be interesting, but we are helping also our customer sites to communicate better between different parts of the organization. That will also help the seamless cooperation and efficiency created through there. Of course, without saying that, of course, we all need to be fully aligned that we are doing the same things. Contract management that Markku was referring to, that's very essential. Contract is a good thing because it helps us and the customer to have the same language.
When they are created with the correct terms and conditions and also utilizing the management excellence in the contracts will help the efficiency to come through for both us and the customers.
When we talk about supply chain optimization. First of all, we want to balance out all the time our in-house manufacturing versus our external capacity. We wanna max out the utilization, get the maximum benefit of our internal operations, and use the external capacity for the peak loads and giving them the excess capacity that we cannot manufacture in-house in that sense, where we have in-house manufacturing. Production and sourcing regionalization. As we've heard, geopolitics are playing a role, and we don't wanna have one mega factory, one source in the globe. We wanna regionalize our production and sourcing more and more and gain benefits out of that. Faster lead times to our customer, better service to our customers in that sense. We wanna have optimized logistics network.
Logistics is extremely expensive today, so we have plenty of potential to get more out of that one, shorter lead time, shorter delivery routes, reduced costs out of that one. We wanna create predictability and consistency throughout our sales and operation planning that helps us to optimize our supply chain.
Last but not least, sustainability, quality, and safety are also means to improve efficiency. As a company, we have this net zero target by 2030. And as we have learned, of course, we as a company need to reduce our energy consumption, we consume less water and make sure that we treat our waste in an efficient way. I think better gain or more gain we can achieve at our customers by providing them better products as we have done and going to do. Focus very much on recycling. I think, consumable example is very great, taking back mill liners and reusing them. Of course, focusing on zero defects and zero harm.
As we have told in many words, safety is not an area where we want to make compromises. Definitely an area to focus on. Time to wrap up. How do we continue on our journey towards 20%? We need to make sure that we have the leading offering. As you have heard already, that's basically responding to customer challenges and making our customers successful. We do that by Planet Positive technologies and visualization mostly, and making sure that we can help them with the full flow sheet coverage, but of course also by standardization, productization, and investing in the products and product development that creates aftermarket opportunities.
As we self-assessed, the customer success was the area that we can improve the most out of our top priorities, and that is essential for us to move towards the 20%. Understanding the customers, being able to create the customer value through our own products and offerings and operations is key to success. Having the captivity through, for example, the life cycle contracts will be key to success in the customer value part.
On the commercial and excellence and efficiency side, we continue our work on our self-help initiatives that will provide the improvement in our competitiveness and help us to reach our profitability targets in the future. Thank you for listening in on our minerals presentation.
Thank you.
Good.
Thank you, gentlemen, and now it's time for minerals Q&A. Please raise your hands if you have questions. I'll take one from the webcast. As a starter, Magnus Kruber, UBS, asks about Geminex. How are you going to monetize that, and what would kind of the business model around it look like?
That is still partly under development, but as I already mentioned, I think we like to go away from this traditional units pricing model and be actually sharing the benefits with our customers. We can do that on initial phase on process performance improvements. When they save energy, when they save water, when they need to use less additives in flotation, for example, all that can be monetized and then discussed whether we can be part of that. Of course then great opportunities will come from aftermarket and service side where we can definitely benefit from the information that the system produces.
400 Lifecycle Services contracts already, so definitely Geminex will play a role as well there going forward.
Good. Joel?
Can I just start by asking on the Lifecycle Services contract again? Could you just maybe put it into context, like what the sort of penetration is versus the group or versus the division, and what you think the opportunity could be? I mean, how many could 400, you know, be 5, 10 times bigger? You know, if you could put some bit more detail around, that'd be helpful.
We are targeting that from the aftermarket perspective. We are looking at currently it produces like 30% of our revenue in that sense, and we are aiming to surpass 50% in the coming strategy period on it. Significant revenue model for us.
There's maybe one interesting number more, that's 95%, and that's the renewal rate of the contract. Customers do see the value, and they want to continue, typically expanded scope.
You'd expect that 400 to accelerate quite significantly?
Yes.
Okay. The other thing I wanted to ask was just, I think you've said that with the new equipment that. Did you say that all the new equipment is now characterized as part of the Planet Positive range? Is that right, Ivan?
What I said is that we when we make engineering or design for a new product, we go through the criteria and make sure that we take them into consideration. It may be so that not all the products, if it's a minor upgrade of an existing product, maybe it doesn't qualify. At least you need to go through the checklist all the time to make sure if it can be done, we will do it.
You get superior pricing on Planet Positive products?
It depends on the product, but I think among those products that we have about 100 or so they are definitely the products that have highest margins.
Okay. Thank you.
Hi, Erkki from Inderes, could you please provide us a ballpark figure or a range for the price increases made, both in equipment and in spares and wears so far this year? When should we expect that this will start to be visible in your sales?
Who wants to start?
If you start from the equipment side first, we'll continue.
Because I think we are clearly seeing the profitability improving. I think that is clear. How big part of that is coming from price increases, how big part of that is coming from efficiency improvements, or the execution excellence that we have in our projects. I think we have an idea of that, but maybe nothing that we should be sharing. However, what I can say that there is significant improvement in profitability of the CapEx business. Big part of that, the part of that is definitely pricing.
In the aftermarket, starting maybe from the spare parts that I know, now it's month number 9, and there is six price increases done, 2022. It's more like reflecting all the time what happens and then pushing the price increases in starting already actually end of last year. Visible already when they are inventory-based products and then more visible later when actually implemented for the sales and the lead time comes through.
Yeah. That's talking about the aftermarket from the consumables perspective. There's not one number because it is quite a versatile way how we conduct our business. I can say that the impact is double-digit on the growth side, what has come from the price increases.
Would this also, the double digit also go for you two guys?
It depends how you define double digit.
Well, consumables is the most impacted by all the raw material costs and logistics and energy costs. That's why we can say it's a two-part number there.
In our case, we also have one additional driver, and that was partly discussed in the beginning. That's of course the portfolio. When you position your products of the two ranges in a new way, you can actually a little bit increase the sales margin of the whole portfolio.
Okay. I can live with that. Thanks. Yeah. DNB, a follow-up. I think we got a little bit of indication of around 15% price increase in aggregates presentation. Double digit, I assume it's somewhere close to 15%, or should it be higher or lower for the minerals business?
How do we look at the whole segment? That's difficult, but I would say that 15 is not a bad number.
Then maybe just a wider follow-up. How does it actually work and when you compare yourself and price increases to your competitors and competition out there, do you feel that others are raising in a similar pace? Is someone low or making lower price increases, someone higher? How do you follow up and how do you think you are performing?
Yeah. Typically, when you are a market leader, so you are also then the price leader, especially when the price increases start, and that we did see in the beginning. Interestingly enough, there was so much happening in the volatility of the world that the pushback was not there from the customers. There was like a clear understanding that what's happening, and of course, we did also a good job to explain that what are the reasons behind for these price increases. Then the others have followed up afterwards.
Yeah. Definitely what we see usually happening is that we set the price, we make the first move, and our competitors will follow.
Yeah. Question on the aftermarket intensity and kind of service share, and you would like to be closer to 70% where some of your peers are today. Is that doable with your current equipment offering and portfolio or are kind of those M&A actions to strengthen the aftermarket intensive equipment portfolio needed in that regard?
Yeah. I think the M&A, of course, that's one of the strategic target that we want to with those increase the share. Also we need to remember that it's not always bad when we are in the good cycle and there's a good amount of capital equipment orders, as I was explaining, that we do enjoy the luxury of getting the new installed base in there that will then help for us going forward.
Target being 60%-70% is like what we are having there. Our current portfolio is having capabilities for offering us that possibility.
Yeah, I wanted to clarify one thing 'cause you mentioned that you wanna increase the share of those lifetime agreements. Is that kind of cannibalizing part of the transactional consumable business that is included in those, or is that kind of on top which would kind of take you there?
That does happen as well, that we take sometimes transactional business, convert that into those contractual businesses. That's part of it. We do wanna combine that when we deliver new equipment, we would have a Lifecycle Services contract to begin with the equipment. Once it's installed, we would secure the business for us for the coming years immediately.
Okay. The last question from me is on the consumable business, and that's the most energy-intensive stuff that you do, and you have the in-house foundry. If you look at five years down the road, what's your geographical footprint? Is there any changes to in-housing, outsourcing? How should we think about that?
Well, we are constantly evaluating, and we have been conducting a footprint review on this one, and we are constantly evaluating what is the best. We want to be closer to our customers, so we potentially will make some moves on that one, but it's under constant evaluation for us.
I'll continue with the energy theme and ask this from Heikki because you are the biggest energy user.
Yeah, I consume the energy, yes.
... of our team. Could you please tell us, asks Magnus Kruber or says Magnus, that how much of your production is in Europe, and how are you trying to mitigate the higher energy bill?
Yeah
that we are seeing at the moment?
Well, if we look at I have two supply chains. I have metallic and rubber and Poly-Met. Metallic supply chain with the foundries is the energy-intensive supply chain that I have. I have one foundry in Europe, in Czech Republic, but that is the smallest of the foundries that I operate today. In that sense, it's less than 15% or let's say 10%-13% of our production in Europe, what we have in the foundry. On the rubber and Poly-Met energy, it's not as big of a deal in that sense, so it doesn't play as big of the part in the cost structure as it does on the metallic parts.
Mitigation.
Mitigation actions. Well, of course, we offset the cost increases that we see there. You know, we have been all the time investing into new technologies as much as possible. We also want to convert that where the energy prices are extremely high. We convert into products where we do see energy playing a smaller portion on it. We have more, let's say, bulk products that we can produce where energy is a big portion of it, and then we have more kind of specialized products where energy is less of an issue there. We use those which are expensive locations to produce those special parts.
Klas from Citi has a follow-up on this theme. You know, you have probably introduced or included escalation clauses in your contracts, et cetera. Where we are in that journey in terms of you know, catching up to the inflation, can you kind of describe that journey and your position right now?
Yeah. Contractual business, of course, we have price adjustment clauses, and we've been now strengthening those. That was what I was referring to as part of the contractual negotiations. We have been making them more frequent. In the past, we had longer intervals between the price adjustments. Now we've been renegotiating all of our contracts to have maximum six months, usually three months, notice or, you know, period of price checks, and that allows us to conduct our business in a right manner on that.
You think the worst is behind you?
Worst is behind us. You know, we've stabilized a bit more, especially on the raw material side. Logistics has stabilized. Energy, Europe is a challenge for us. Rest of the world in terms of energy is not as challenging for us.
All right. Any questions? Panu there in the back.
Thank you. It's Panu Laitinmäki from Danske Bank. I just wanted to ask about your revenue exposure to different metals or minerals. If you think that copper is the biggest, and then gold and iron ore and so on, how do you expect this to change in the, let's say, next 3-5 years? The battery metals probably will increase and iron ore go down or whatever. Does it have any implications on your business and like margins? Do they use different kind of equipment in different kind of mines? How do you see this playing out, and does it help you, or is it like drag on the margins or any comments on that? Thanks.
No, I think it's a good question. These tend to fluctuate a bit year over year. Even looking long term, I think gold, sorry, copper, iron ore, and gold have been the biggest ones in area. Now iron ore is somewhat down, and that has been replaced by the battery metals, including nickel. I think the portfolio we have is capable of serving all the markets. If you look at where, for example, where we have the biggest product range and cover biggest part of the value chain, that is in copper.
When the future of the copper looks good, then it typically looks good for Metso Outotec as well. We have good coverage in lithium and cobalt as well, and nickel.
Okay, thanks. Couple of questions about offering from the webcast. First from Debashis from Société Générale. How would you assess your position in the HPGR, high pressure grinding roll market against competitors and its, let's say, opportunities going forward?
We have a good product. We cannot claim to be the market leader in that area. I think we are the upcoming company. We have recently won quite a many HRC deals. We have new products to introduce continuously, and the products that we actually have delivered, they are performing well.
Definitely an area where Metso Outotec will be a bigger player.
Yes. Another one. Couple of people have asked about water in a mining process. How much of your product Planet Positive portfolio contributes to water-related challenges? Following that, what are your opportunities in an environment where regulations around tailings management are getting tougher?
Water, how we see the water efficiency, it was briefly touched during the presentation. You can develop processes which consume less water or no water at all, or you can recycle the water you use very efficiently. I think the latter one is more common in practice. Our processes are very water efficient, and we have always liked to keep in-house the knowledge how to purify the water because in particular in flotation, typically what happens is that harmful particles will accumulate, and they will impact the flotation performance. If you cannot take them out or clean the water at a sufficient degree then your flotation performance will be less.
We have been doing that quite some time, and I would say that we are well advanced in the area. Then of course tailings, the last part of it, we have our filters. We are known for our filter portfolio both for concentrates but also for tailings and actually working on that.
Question from Max Yates, Morgan Stanley, about Planet Positive product portfolio. How big part of those products are incremental in terms of being brand new and maybe, you know, expanding addressable market? Or are we talking about just, you know, updating kind of old legacy offering, if you will?
No, they. Of course they are all within the same process area that we are typically serving. Mostly talking about concentrate plant environment, or hydrometallurgical plant environment. Exactly, what was the first part of the question?
How big part of the Planet Positive portfolio would be kind of expanding the offering or going into-
I don't think that I.
addressable market.
I can say that number straight away. I don't have it. Sometimes you make a modification on upgrade and that makes it already Planet Positive. Then you have examples like Concorde we mentioned, which is a new innovation, new development, and that is 100% new. I think the rest is somewhere in between.
In aftermarket services, we do see that there's a new expanded market with the upgrades to make existing equipment to be more Planet Positive. So it's like a new business in that sense. All right. Antti.
Yeah, question on kind of your end-to-end offering and that strategy. If you think about mine investments, there's the client choosing the equipment provider, and you don't want to make turnkeys, so there's a project house in between. What's the benefit of having a wide offering if the project house decides to just pick and choose the best for a certain technology? You have a wide offering, can you be the best in all of those technologies that you have? Or is it the benefit of having the wide offering enough to compensate?
Both yes and no. If you look at the structure of our equipment sales, a big part, I think you are on the right track. Big part is going to EPCs. Somewhat it varies again from year to year, but it's more than half of the equipment sales goes to EPC houses, and they typically buy equipments, not necessarily the whole flowsheet from one supplier. However, customers are starting to demand of these things. The EPC companies will have to accommodate whatever customer requirements are coming on this area. I think gradually even that part will go.
The other significant part of our business, again, varying a bit from year to year between, let's say, 20%-35% is where we actually deliver the full flowsheet for a customer, and then it's fully up to us to deliver a Planet Positive flowsheet and make sure that the customer get full benefit out of it. The balance, remaining balance is pure equipment sales directly to customers without having any EPC in between. We can do it in all areas.
I assume there's no exclusivity with the EPC houses. I mean, I'm just wondering why do you kind of win business? Is it your aftermarket capabilities? Is it your technologies? What's usually kind of turning the direction to you?
Of course, it varies from case by case, but we have a very strong and competitive product range to start with. The other thing is also that how involved the end client is in decision-making. They quite often have an opinion on what kind of process they would like to have, who would be the technology supplier. Maybe not everything coming from one company, but we are quite often selected for a big part of that process. I'm sure one dimension in that is our good and well a good coverage on aftermarket. Okay. Last one from me. Permitting, I think this is something that you've been talking about that the permitting times have been prolonged quite a lot.
From your perspective, what's the biggest pain point for your mining clients on where you can help the most regarding just getting those times shorter?
I don't know how much we can help in permitting, again by providing them with technologies that are easier to get a license for or approval for. We can help them in implementation time when it's time and there we come back to this modularized containerized product where once there's a go-ahead, we can actually help them to construct the plant in a very quick way.
Okay. Thank you.
Yes, this is Tom from Carnegie. I wonder about pumps, first of all. When you presented the merger, there was a big hope that you could increase your market shares a lot in pumps, but I've not really heard any update. What has happened?
That was part of the big flow sheet. I think we have over the couple of last years, it started already before the merger. Over the last couple of years, we have actually raised ourself from being number four to being number two. Of course, we still have a significant way to catch the number one, but we are working on it and pumps is definitely one of the areas where we like to have significant growth.
You put out a lot of kind of positives that now the margin will improve a lot in all the parts. Do you see any kind of negatives that will hold back the positive development you are painting?
Well, looking at it from the aftermarket perspective at the moment, our customers are running the equipment quite heavily. We don't see a big dark skies in the aftermarket side. The customers will continue. The demand of metals is out there. I think it's more about is there any kind of a downturn on the equipment kind of demand that is. On the aftermarket, demand is definitely out there. Yeah, on the equipment, we don't see and of course, I think you all are experienced in this segment and know that this is a quite volatile industry, so sometimes it's almost like stop-and-go, like 2008 or 2014 and so on. We have a lot of brownfield in our proposal portfolio.
Nothing indicates that market would be disappearing. Of course, the one disclaimer always is that when and if things happen, the first thing is not that you see your number of proposals or the value going down, it's just that the decision time becomes longer and longer and longer. As I said, still the outlook both on short-term, but particularly on long term is good.
These 20% should be seen as a kind of over the cycle rather than peak ambition.
Of course, reaching 20% in a market downturn is more challenging than reaching it in the normal conditions.
I mean, the margin is not really where you want it to be still. You have done some smaller bolt-on acquisitions. Is it still perhaps not time to do something larger? When you do something larger, you know, when that time comes, what direction would you go in that flow sheet picture? I mean, where do you find products where you don't have already too high market shares, where the service content is very high?
There are areas that we like to do and I think we discussed those through already which typically we would be looking at products with significant aftermarket opportunity. I think we touched base on those in our presentations. You mentioned pumps, I think not a bad area to look into and continue to grow. There are other areas as well where we see that we still have land to conquer.
Yeah. Then perhaps just, I mean, especially you, Markku, have been very long, you know, in the mining business. I don't know how long you other guys have been. You have seen many cycles. I mean, it's just interesting to hear you, and of course, also Pekka, he has been also a long time in the industry. Now metal prices coming down from a very high level, but what is kind of the normal kind of thing happening? Because now we have not had a greenfield cycle. What has happened in other kind of cycles when metal prices come down to smaller brownfields? Has the kind of the breaking been kind of less severe in brownfields and so on?
Can you open up a bit what you have seen in earlier cycles also?
I think mining is a cyclical business and if you look at I think my experience goes back to before 2004—or 2003, where the mega cycle started. Before that, there was quite a long flat period. Then it started basically 80-year long mega cycle, which in between we had Lehman Brothers 2008, maybe had a half a year, nine months impact, and then it continued to go up. Then when it turned down 2013, we thought that the market will never be this big again. Now we have passed that level already a long time ago.
I think it's the industry needs or the society needs more metals. The deposits are getting weaker and weaker and more complicated to excavate and process. Definitely, I see that this industry need to invest even more to be able to supply the world with the metals that is required. Then in between there will always be surprises. I think also a lot of psychology plays in short term.
If you take, for instance, the Lehman Brothers crisis, it's easy to understand that everybody stopped all greenfield projects, et cetera, with very long payback times. It's a very different kind of situation now when the business is coming from brownfield investments, you know, with shorter payback times. What happened to, you know, how severely was the break in those types of businesses? Because we only saw the headline figures kind of coming down harshly, of course, but I realize a lot of that came from greenfields.
On the equipment investment side, we live very much on the backlog. Of course, even if you momentarily have less orders, the backlog will continue to generate revenue. You have a certain buffer and actually you also have time to react. On the aftermarket side, it's very much on how much the assets are utilized. As long as they are running the assets, producing metals, the aftermarket will have good market.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Time flies when you have fun, and we're getting close to 5 P.M., so we need to end this session. Before we go, thanks, gentlemen, for your presentation. Before we go, I'll ask President and CEO Pekka Vauramo to make his final remarks.
Thank you.
Okay, long day coming to an end. Hopefully, the program has been interesting. I will use the next 4-5 minutes to conclude this session very shortly and briefly. I have only one message: We remain committed to delivering that 15%. I mean, it's clear this team has actions in place. Everyone knows what we need to do. We're not changing that target. Once we touch that target, we are not afraid of raising the bar higher. We'll definitely do that one. Earlier or the first question that was I mean, it was hinting that I may have 15 months to go. My personal ambition is to deliver that 15 before I go. That's my personal ambition to do so.
I may wish a little bit more normality from a Santa Claus this Christmas. I may need that one, but quite frankly, we haven't seen a normality since the merger. We've all been through very different times that we couldn't expect, didn't expect. Good companies deliver also during those days. It's not an excuse that would be applicable to overall. We'll keep you posted and updated. Next review point on our journey towards 15 will be on October twenty-eighth when we publish our third quarter results. Until then, all the best and thanks for joining this day and safe journey back homes wherever you came from. Thank you.