Hi ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us both virtually and those who have joined us here in person in Espoo in Finland. My name is David Mulholland, Head of Investor Relations here at Nokia, and joining me is Pekka Lundmark, our President and CEO, Marco Wirén, our Chief Financial Officer, Tommi Uitto, President of Mobile Networks, and Raghav Sahgal, our President of Cloud and Network Services. Before we get started, a quick disclaimer: during this event we will be making forward-looking statements regarding our future business and financial performance, and these st tements are predictions that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may therefore differ materially from the results we currently expect. Factors that could cause such differences can be both external as well as internal operating factors.
We have identified such risks in the Risk Factors section of our annual report on Form 20-F, which is available on our Investor Relations website. Let me take you briefly through the agenda for today. We'll start with an update on the group's strategy from Pekka, and he'll then give a high-level update also on Network Infrastructure and Nokia Technologies. Marco will then provide a financial update. They will have a Q&A session for both Marco and Pekka, and have the chance to address any of your key questions at the group level. Then we'll have an update from Raghav on Cloud and Network Services, along with a short Q&A session. We'll have a short 15-minute break, and then we'll come back for a presentation from Tommi on our Mobile Networks business and another quick Q&A session.
You're also welcome, for those that have joined us in person, to stay for a brief drink, when we finish up at 5:00 P.M. approximately 5:30 P.M. With that, let me hand it over to Pekka for the group update.
Thank you, David, and hey, warmly welcome to Espoo. I'm really glad that you were all able to join us today. Of course, we all know that AT&T has overshadowed the discussion since the last week, and yes, we will be talking about AT&T today, but we have also a lot of other things to talk about. I'll talk about our progress against our six strategy pillars that we launched at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year in pretty challenging market conditions. I'm going to be talking about actions we are taking on our operational model to better position us for opportunities. And then, of course, we will do deep dives, since Federico and Jenni will not be here today.
I will do a quick deep dive on Network Infrastructure and tech, and then, of course, extremely important, we'll have Raghav and Tommi to cover their respective sections. I already mentioned AT&T. One of our key messages there is that, as Tommi will go into more details on this, but AT&T has confirmed to us that this decision was not because of our performance, because of our technology, or the performance of our services. Our understanding is that since these are not the reasons and it was not the relationship either, it is mostly financially driven. But having said that, despite the fact that we have made over the past years, and we'll show you some proof points on that, we have made significant progress on Mobile Networks.
We are not happy with where we are in that business financially, and that means that we will continue to revamp MN's strategy, and that's why Tommi's presentation, where he will go into details as to what we are specifically going to do about mobile network strategies, is going to be extremely important today. Then again, as I said, Raghav will do his deep dive into CNS strategy, and I'll do NI and tech. In 2021, we renewed our company purpose. At Nokia, we create technology that helps the world act together. This has laid a strong foundation, and it continues to be a key part of our identity as Nokia. As you may remember, in the 2021 Capital Markets Day, we also published a financial target, financial profitability target for 2023, and we said that by 2023 we would be targeting 10%-13% comparable operating margin.
So that just as a quick recap, as to what happened in 2021. Today, as part of this new identity, we are enabling digitalization globally. We are providing trusted networks that enable organizations, machines, and devices to connect, communicate, and work in sync and work in sync, of course, creating a more productive, sustainable, and accessible future. A significant motivator is this brand that we have created, and the purpose statement is a significant motivator for our people. We constantly score high when measuring employee pride in working for Nokia. But very importantly, this refreshed brand builds on this shared purpose and establishes a clear position for us as a B2B business-to-business technology innovation leader.
Most importantly, it is now, and we are seeing evidence of that, it is helping to reset how key audiences see us, very much including outside of our traditional CSP market, outside of our traditional CSP market. That's a very important point that I'll be talking more about. This slide here shows where we are today in our four businesses, and this, the way we have put this together is that this is a summary of the financial performance of the four businesses over the last four quarters, over the last 12 months. I'll be talking about today about our operational model and the fact that these four businesses are distinct. Many of them are primarily serving CSPs today, but they have very different product requirements, R&D profiles. They have different cyclicality of markets.
They have very different cash flow profiles, as you will see, and they also have different target margins. Even if we face challenges in one BG, with our renewed operational model that I'll be talking about, we will be making sure that it does not disrupt the performance of the others. The point I would like to make with these numbers here is that, and this may be obvious to some of you, but when we look at the performance of the last 12 months, Network Infrastructure, EUR 1.2 billion operating profit, and Technologies, EUR 1.1 billion operating profit, these representing 38% and 36%, respectively, of the total group operating profit. Mobile Networks, 20%, and Cloud and Network Services, 6%. So really great execution now, especially in Network Infrastructure, and I'll be talking about Nokia Technologies also, of course.
I understand that everybody is expecting that what will happen with the ongoing renewal discussions, but I'll be coming to that in my tech deep dive in a second. But very important to look at these four businesses separately. So then, as many of you remember, we launched six strategy pillars at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in the beginning of this year, and what we will be doing now and then also going forward is to, in a way, summarize our execution against these pillars. And I'll start with the first one, which obviously is grow CSP business faster than the market. Here, really, our R&D investments are showing results. We have significantly strengthened our technology position. We have helped to extend our market position and grow CSP business faster than the market, both in Mobile Networks and in Optical Networks.
Second, we are on track with number two, with expanding the share of enterprise. We are currently around 10% of our sales. We have grown 28% in constant currency year to date, and we expect continued progress in enterprise next year. Then number three, portfolio management and active portfolio renewal. We have taken several steps. We have disposed of VitalQIP and RFS, which was actually disposed of in several different steps. We announced partnership with Red Hat, where we transferred significant R&D resources in our cloud stack development to Red Hat, and now we have a deep strategic partnership with them instead for the cloud stack, extremely well received by our customers.
And then, of course, today's announcement that Tommi will be talking more about, acquisition of Fenix Group to diversify our business or to continue speed up the diversification of our business towards the defense sector, part of our key strategic initiative to be less dependent on a limited number of large service providers in the future. These are some of the things that we have done under number three this year, but I do want to confirm that there are actions underway. We are definitely not yet done with number three.
Then, when it comes to number four, and again, I will do a tech deep dive separately, so I will not go through all the aspects of the tech business now, but I just want to highlight that, the agreements with Samsung and Apple continue to extend the business, and in addition to the Apple and Samsung agreements, we have continued to extend the business to new growth areas, including multimedia, IoT, and automotive, and I will show you some example customers and also some numbers in a second. But then very importantly, number five is new business models. We have developed organically our Network as Code platform, which is our platform for making the network programmable and making network resources available through APIs. Raghav will cover this in his part. We have announced just this week two new deals, one with British Telecom and one with Telia.
We now have six signed deals for the Network as Code platform. We are also positioning ourselves to lead the shift in networking software towards as a service model. This was part of the Telia announcement today. We will be offering our core network as a service to Telia Finland. And then, last but not least, number six, ESG. Of course, the key on the technology side in ESG, which is both an ESG and a product matter, is the energy efficiency and power consumption of our technology, which is continuing to be an extremely important driver, but this is also very much about software. It's about using artificial intelligence and all the data that the network is generating to optimize the power consumption of the network, significant progress there as well.
And I just want to highlight one thing because sometimes we receive questions that is ESG something that you should be focusing on as your strategic cornerstone? Is that good for shareholders, or is it just good for the world? Well, certainly it's good for the world, but I'm suggesting that it is also good for shareholders, and the evidence of that is that currently about 20% of our customers' typical scorecard when they make their vendor decisions is attached to ESG scores, about 20% of customer decision-making criteria. So it is real. Then I want to move on to how we are seeing the industry demand at the moment, and of course, 2023 will go down in history for the magnitude of demand outlook deterioration. That is a fact that nobody can avoid.
Here on the left-hand side, you can see the market TAM development forecast for 2023. The first one is at Q4 2022, then Q1 2023, Q2 2023, and Q3 2023, NI, Mobile Networks, and CNS, and you can see how dramatically the market size expectation for this year has developed during this year, most notably in Mobile Networks and regionally with the biggest impact in North America. However, despite these headwinds, we are pleased we have delivered a relatively, and I emphasize relatively because of course it could always have been better, but relatively resilient performance so far this year. And this is largely to Network Infrastructure, where our profit has been quite resilient relative to the market environment, along with proactive actions to manage costs throughout the year. On the right-hand side, you obviously see the operating profit development by business group. It starts from 2019.
You can see excellent development between 2019 and 2020, 2022, and now a slight deterioration in the last 12 months, topline number. Then moving on to the technology investment side and what we have achieved with the technology investment, we are, of course, committed to R&D, and we continue to be committed to R&D. Here you can see our R&D investment between 2016 and 2022. You may remember that in the fall of 2020, we announced that we will start systematically increasing our R&D, basically for two reasons. Number one was that we were behind competition in 5G. This was three years ago in 2020. And then in 2021, we started to talk more about increased investment in optical networks because that was another area where we also recognized that we had competition to catch up.
As you can see, we have maintained R&D intensity, roughly stable despite the slightly downgoing topline this year, so the total R&D in absolute numbers has come down a little bit from the top where it was in 2022. But the most important point here is really what we have achieved with this, our RAN market share has increased from 23% to 27% in the past two years, and if we zoom into our 5G market share, that has increased from 22% to 29%. Now, of course, AT&T will take that down a little bit, but we will still be way above these levels where we were in 2022 despite AT&T. And then the other thing, which is very important, obviously, is optical networking, where our market share has increased from 15% to 18% during this same time.
But then another way to look at this same picture is, or the same development that what we have achieved with R&D is that when you look at our portfolio from sales point of view, you there are three categories: businesses that deliver below 5% EBIT margin, 5%-10%, and then above 10%. There you can see that the share of higher margin businesses have increased, and now we are in a situation where over 90% of our net sales is generated, is now generating a margin of over 5%, and a third of the business is generating an operating margin of over 10%, up from just 23% in 2021.
So this is another way to look at the portfolio, so the share of low margin businesses has decreased, and this is something that we will, of course, continue to work on when we work on the portfolio, both organically and then through different types of arrangements. I was talking about the importance of R&D and technology, and of course, this is not only what our business groups are doing. This is also very much what Bell Labs are doing, and we are now exploring new ways to create value from long-term research at Nokia Bell Labs. The first pathway that you see here is an obvious one. Bell Labs supports our business groups and product roadmaps. That has always been the case. A couple of years ago, we started a new initiative that you can see here.
It is called Internal Incubator, and the target obviously is to commercialize adjacencies and shift internal culture to be more entrepreneurial, and we have several initiatives ongoing here. But now the next step, and this is really an important step, is the journey by creating an external venture studio. We have some really compelling technologies we have developed in areas like next-generation semiconductor technology, optical chip design and packaging along with AI/ML, sensors, and quantum computing, some really exciting developments in quantum computing in Bell Labs, and we believe that a venture studio together with external partners is a compelling route for this. Obviously, these businesses will take time to mature, but we are really excited about the potential.
The partners that we will be working here, AFF, America's Frontier Fund is, actually a nonprofit fund that invests strategic capital in areas critical to U.S. national security, especially technologies such as AI, advanced materials, and quantum science. So that's the first partner. Then the second partner, Roadrunner Venture Studios, provides an environment to seed new companies and is focused on in the fields of energy, clean tech, quantum science, space tech, and advanced manufacturing. And then Celesta Capital is an investor in early disruptive technologies, typically in deep technologies and innovative businesses, and mentors young companies to create long-term value. So this means that we can bring significant capability in startup creation and investment together to help us commercialize innovations from Bell Labs. In addition, we use, of course, technology licensing as an additional pathway for non-strategic assets with interested parties.
So that's the technology section, and I just want to highlight this because we firmly believe that there is much more potential in Bell Labs innovation than what our business groups have typically been able to take advantage of. So next, let's take a look at the mid- to long-term opportunities we see in the markets. We first of all expect continued constrained environment for CSP spending. We expect our CSP TAM to grow at a 2% CAGR between 2023 and 2026. There will be headwinds in North America, but there are share gain opportunities between these years as well. We have won, as we have said many times, and this still holds, we have won about 50% of the geopolitical swap cases in Mobile Networks.
We expect to see more of these opportunities as end users seek more trusted networks, and our access to leading semiconductor technology here is key. It remains to be a fact that in CSP networks, across many of the areas we compete in, Chinese vendors continue to account for typically 20%-30% in markets outside of China and also outside of the U.S. because there their role is very small. In total, if you look across the hardware businesses, Mobile Networks, Network Infrastructure where we compete, the Chinese vendors today have roughly EUR 12 billion in sales, with some EUR 6 billion of that in Europe, and that is something where we definitely see further opportunities to gain share. Then if we look at the enterprise side here, you can see enterprise TAM for the three businesses, 6% CAGR, especially for Network Infrastructure.
This is fairly conservatively estimated. We have not included yet the entire data center switching market in here. We have segmented it further into those parts where we are currently competing, but we have an ambition in NI to gradually address a bigger TAM. This is an important part of our strategy. It is diversification into enterprise where we see significant opportunities and where we continue to grow faster than the market. As I already said, our enterprise and web-scale sales have grown 28% year to date, and now that part accounts for about 10% of group sales on the last 12-month basis. As you can see here, since 2017, we have had a CAGR of 13% in the enterprise and web-scale market, and we continue to see good potential going forward.
The share, which is now 10%, that's the green line here. It was about 5%, in 2017. Then I move to the next topic, which is, which is kind of, from an even more helicopter point of view, that how we see the market, demand drivers, and I apologize, this is a busy slide. I will take you through it. The first point I want to make, is that AI and cloud revolutions will not happen. They will not happen without significant investments in networks with fundamentally improved capabilities. Cloud deployments will extend across a diverse landscape of public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments spanning across geographical regions, and, a very significant part of those deployments will be various network edge components.
We, of course, all have seen the estimates as to how much AI will be driving productivity. Goldman Sachs is saying that 1.5 percentage points on top of, in a way, the normal productivity improvement, 7% increase in global GDP, $7 trillion. Whatever that number is, it is significant. The point I want to make is that network connectivity is critical to enable both the AI and cloud opportunities. We see a number of new bandwidth-heavy applications on the horizon that will really drive future data usage. You can see on this slide some examples on the left, lower left-hand corner, new applications like AI drone surveillance and AR/VR video devices that require bandwidth between 4x-10x compared to, for example, 4K video streaming. With these drivers, we expect network traffic will continue to grow.
In the lower right-hand corner, you see what we call an aggressive scenario. In that scenario, data traffic would grow to 37 ZB per year by 2030. Even in the moderate scenario that we have, this figure would be 30 ZB. And this is not only driven by consumers. There will be a significant growth in enterprise traffic, increased need for reliability and security, which is more demanding for the network. And, as you can see here, enterprise traffic in 2030 is expected to be bigger than total traffic today. And all of this will mean that during the second half of this decade, the networks will have to be completely rebuilt. They will have to be completely rebuilt to be able to cope with this traffic. So now let's move on to the next topic, which is obviously the evolution of our operational model.
Many of you have been part of this journey for several years already, so I'll take the first part fairly quickly. In 2021, as you remember, we streamlined our operational model. We moved away from a matrix P&L, and we created four P&L responsible business groups. That's the model here, in the middle. One can simplify it saying that the old model was an operator. Now we have been a strategic controller. Now we are taking one step further to become a strategic architect. The new model will, of course, as a concrete difference to the previous one, embed sales and go-to-market teams into the businesses. In the 2021-2023 model, the businesses had a common sales organization.
Now we want to enable our businesses to become more agile and faster in decision-making, enabling them to better seize both CSP and new enterprise opportunities. Of course, the way we will do this is that in case there are common customers, the sales lead of one business will also be assigned as key account executive, overall responsible for the relationship management with the customer and for the coordination of cross-business topics. That is extremely important. But the point here is that the businesses will be in a position to control all the operational resources that they need for their execution. We will, in a way, if you will, remove the last point where internal negotiations about priorities, targets, and very importantly, resources was required. This is a major simplification of the organization. But this is not only about sales.
This is about enhancing the strategic autonomy of the businesses, empowering them to assess and make decisions that make the most sense for each business. These businesses will be supported by Nokia's Lean Corporate Center that will, as I said, act as a strategic architect, providing oversight in key areas like target setting, performance management, portfolio development, and, of course, compliance, brand, and so on. The Corporate Center will continue to be involved in long-term research through Nokia Bell Labs. Nokia Bell Labs will not be split into the businesses. It will be part of the Corporate Center. So what we want to do is to accelerate value creation for shareholders in three different ways. First of all, the operational autonomy and responsiveness to customers, sharper sales focus, empowered to make decisions, accelerate our diversification, and very importantly, cut distance to R&D.
When we are removing this in a way, separate layer, we are placing highly empowered teams in front of the customer that have as short distance to the R&D decision-makers as possible. That's the first point. The second point is strategic flexibility. So the BGs will have greater independence to build deeper strategic partnerships, take care of their investment opportunities that support their growth, and actively manage their respective product portfolios. And then number three, which is also important, we are also developing, as part of the financial accountability of the businesses, our reporting to make these businesses more transparent for investors. We will, for example, be reporting cash flow and regional sales split at the BG level from the beginning of next year, again, to increase the visibility to their performance, to you.
The reason why we think this new operational model with increased autonomy for business groups will help to accelerate value creation is, again, very simple. The fact that I mentioned already at the beginning of my presentation, these four BGs are all very different, and here you can see some of their differences in terms of their type of sale. MN is heavy Mobile Networks, is heavily project business. Network Infrastructure, of course, has sometimes projects, but it's more kind of product type of business with faster cycles, significantly larger share of enterprise, web scalers, data centers, etc., part of that. CNS is obviously software business, developing towards network APIs, towards as a service, towards annual recurring revenue business models. And then, of course, Nokia Technologies is a business model of its own.
The cash flow predictability is, of course, something that is extremely important, not only for us in corporate management, but also for investors. This is one of the reasons why we want to increase transparency, because here you can see this is the operating cash flow for the three businesses for the four businesses between 2021 and 2023. Here you can see a big difference, especially in Network Infrastructure. We are looking at a business that is highly profitable, but also with highly predictable and fairly stable cash flows with good conversion. That is fairly different from Mobile Networks, where we are seeing a high degree of cash flow volatility because of the very nature of the business. Tommi will be talking about this in the future.
So these different cash flow profiles, which then obviously are attached to the cost of capital over each business, they are so different that we felt that we had to start providing more transparency. This is also a busy slide, but this summarizes our different position and strategy for each of our four businesses very quickly. Network Infrastructure today, the first line, the green line, it's a technology leader across its portfolio. It's heavily exposed still today to service providers, low teens operating margin. Network Infrastructure tomorrow, it will have grown scale. It will have taken market share. It has expanded more into webscale and enterprise. And after that, target is to be not only leader in CSP, but also in webscale and enterprise data centers, extremely important customer segment, and targeting mid-teens operating margin. 2026 target 12%-15%.
Mobile Networks today, and again, Tommi will go much deeper into this. We have restored our technology competitiveness. We are currently at mid- to high-single-digit operating margin. We are revamping our strategy to align business to market. We are implementing significant cost savings actions to protect profitability. And then, after the 2026 step where we are targeting 6%-9% operating margin, the most important point I want to make is that we are not going to repeat the mistake that we made in early stages of 5G, where we let our competitors to be ahead of us. We will enter the 5G Advanced and 6G era as a leader, and we will be definitely targeting double-digit operating margin in MN. CNS, again, Raghav will go much deeper. We've been doing significant rebalancing of the portfolio. We are early private wireless leader.
Private wireless market will grow significantly between today and 2030. We are currently in mid-single-digit margin, actually, or mid- to high-single-digit margin, as you have seen. Tomorrow in 2026, we are targeting significant growth in terms of SaaS and annual recurring revenue in terms of the business. Then going forward in the longer term, we are targeting mid-teens operating margin because, again, this is a software business. The portfolio cleanup is not yet fully complete. This is part of the margin expansion target that we have going forward, from here. Then Nokia Technologies, we are nearing the end of the smartphone renewal cycle. We have a promising traction in new areas. We are currently now at a run rate of EUR 150 million in the new growth areas. About a year ago, we were at EUR 100 million.
And then, of course, tech of tomorrow, completion of smartphone renewal cycle, leader in licensing to consumer electronics, multimedia, and auto and IoT. When we talk about the second half of this decade, absolutely targeting a leadership position in 6G patents. The 2026 target is operating profit of at least EUR 1.1 billion. Now, as Tommi and Raghav are going deeper into MN and CNS, I will do a very quick deep dive now into network infrastructure and tech. I start with network infrastructure. Of course, this is something that we are actually pretty proud of. Federico and his team, they have done a really great job. This business, as you can see on the left-hand side here, net sales grew from EUR 7 billion level to around EUR 9 billion in 2022. 2022 was somewhat an exception here because there was significant catch-up sales from the semiconductor shortages.
In 2022, customers actually purchased more than they built. In 2023, they are purchasing a little bit less than they built because they are consuming a lot of inventory. But we continue to believe in the positive trajectory of this business despite the slight dip now in the top line on the last 12-month basis. But the interesting thing here is that this is part of where Federico and his team have done an excellent job is that when you look at the profitability development and especially gross margin development from 35%-38% now in the last 12 months, and then operating margin development from around 7% to now close to 14% on last 12-month basis, this is fantastic development. And of course, operating profit was only slightly above EUR 400 million in 2020, and we are at EUR 1.2 billion now for the last 12 months.
This is significant development, which must be paid a lot of attention to. Now you have all seen that there has been a slowdown in demand in the second half of 2023, most notably in our IP and Fixed Networks businesses. We said with our Q3 results that the outlook for net sales remained challenging, but that we were starting to see some early signs that we could see improving order intake trends. As it now seems in NI, it actually seems to be true that Q3 was the low point in orders. Now we are seeing clear improvement in orders in the fourth quarter, exactly as we were expecting after Q3. Of course, there is then a cycle from orders to delivery, a couple of quarters, some cases even three quarters.
So it will take time before all of this will come through in top line. But it currently looks promising, and we do expect to see our NI business return to growth in 2024. We have supportive drivers across each of the business units within NI. In fixed networks, the appetite for fiber build remains. I actually think, yes, sorry. This is the slide I wanted to go to now, that in fixed networks, the appetite for fiber build remains strong with less than 40% of the homes globally, excluding China, connected with fiber. And we also now see many of the government funding programs, such as the BEAD program, starting to support the outlook as well.
So based on what we see today in fixed networks, we expect to start seeing some benefit from the programs, like BEAD into the second half of 2024 and therefore support the demand outlook overall, for fixed networks. In IP networks, the second point here, we continue to see good support from a strong product cycle with FP5 and also our recently launched FPcx products, which are both ramping. And very importantly, we have signed recent orders that will support our growth in the enterprise and web scale segment in 2024. All of that has not yet been disclosed, what those customers are, but we are seeing a promising trend there. Then the third business in NI, optical networks, we have been pleased with the progress of both PSE-V and PSE-6s generations, products based on these, silicon generations and network processor generations.
We see further opportunities to gain market share with that scale that is really helping us to improve. The scale is then improving the profitability of the business towards our longer-term double-digit aspiration. So overall, good development in optical networks supported by the silicon investment that we have made. And then last but not least, in submarine networks, the business remains well supported by order backlog. That order backlog easily covers our sales targets for 2024, and we do not see the appetite for subsea cables slowing down. So in fact, we have been actively engaged with and also winning our fair share of the roughly EUR 7 billion pipeline that we see for new submarine cable deals. And all of this would, of course, support net sales all the way through 2027 to 2028.
To look slightly longer term and revisit some of our assumptions, I believe our NI business still has a pretty bright future ahead of it. We are particularly focused on the growth opportunities we see in both fixed and IP networks with growing markets and opportunities to gain share while maintaining the strong margins we already have of mid- and high-teens, respectively, in fixed and IP networks. That's where we are currently. While in optical networks, as I said, we see good momentum that can drive growth, and we believe improved scale will take us from the low single-digit operating margin we had last year to a double-digit margin in the future.
And then finally, our submarine networks business, as I said, it's supported by a strong backlog, strong pipeline of new opportunities, and there our target continues to be to improve profitability to high single-digit operating margin. And then as the last item, a quick update on Nokia Technologies here. First of all, as you very well know, we have made significant progress with the smartphone renewal cycle, and we are also expanding our licensing coverage into new growth areas since Jenni Lukander's update at the New York Stock Exchange last year. Over the past 12 months, of course, we have concluded patent license agreements with Apple and Samsung, the world's two leading smartphone players, covering the use of Nokia's fundamental inventions in 5G and other technologies in their devices. Both of these deals, Apple and Samsung, provide long-term stability for our licensing business.
They are one of the longest deals, licensing deals that we have made in our history. And most importantly, these were both concluded without need to resort to litigation, which, of course, highlights once again the strength of our industry-leading patent portfolio. As we said when we announced the Apple agreement, we expect to recognize the revenue related to this new agreement starting in January 2024. In addition to Apple and Samsung, we also signed a litigation-free agreement with Huawei last December, and renewal negotiations continue with certain other smartphone companies and, of course, including Oppo and Vivo. We are in intensive negotiations with Oppo and Vivo. There are no news today, but we hope that we would find a solution fairly soon.
To date, courts in Germany, the U.K., Brazil, and the Netherlands have all ruled in our favor, confirming the strength of our portfolio and also confirming that our offers are fair. Recently, there was a new ruling in China. Chongqing Court in China ruled on rates expressing their local view and confirming Oppo's obligation to pay to Nokia and also confirming their obligation to pay us for the past revenues for the period during which they have used our technology without a license. So with everything that we are seeing, we remain confident of our position in the overall dispute and are hoping to resolve the matter soon. Once again, as you very well know, our current guidance of largely stable operating profit in 2023 for Nokia Technologies, it assumes that we would close these disputes.
So that said, we will continue to prioritize protecting the value of our intellectual property over achieving certain timelines. So that's where we are with those. Then another very important point is, of course, the new growth areas. And there we continue to make good progress, in areas of connected vehicles, IoT, consumer electronics, and multimedia. And as you can see from this chart, we concluded 18 consumer electronics deals in 2022 and 2023, including an agreement with the leading fitness company and with Roku, the leading TV streaming TV streaming company. 12 IoT agreements in areas such as point of sale payment, smart meters, and medtech. And we added 35 new automotive licenses via the Avanci patent pool. These automotive licenses include 5G agreements with BMW, Mercedes, and Hyundai. And based on our current consumer electronics and IoT pipelines, I'm confident other deals will follow in the coming months.
You may remember that when Jenni spoke at the New York Stock Exchange last year, she quantified the financial contribution from the licensing, growth areas for the first time, describing how net sales from these areas was negligible in 2018 and had grown to over EUR 100 million in the previous 12 months. Today, I can provide an update. And as I already said, I'm pleased to say that net sales from our new growth areas have risen to EUR 150 million over the past 12 months. This is a great achievement by the team with the prospect of future revenue growth in these areas in the coming years. So Nokia Technologies' current annual revenue run rate is about EUR 1 billion, and our expectation is that we will return to EUR 1.4 billion-EUR 1.5 billion we achieved in Q2 2021 before some agreements began to expire.
As you can see from the chart, completion of the smartphone license renewal cycle and continued progress in new growth areas such as the ones that I mentioned should offset previous smartphone market share changes, the expiry of other smartphone agreements, and the decline in our brand licensing revenue. As we have said, there can always be volatility in the business year to year, depending on how quickly we are able to progress with renewals and signing new agreements. Now, before I conclude and hand over to Marco, I want to very quickly touch on our long-term, long-term targets, which we confirmed today. You have seen this morning that we have updated our 2026 operating margin target to at least 13% from the prior at least 14%.
I remain confident that we can achieve the 14% longer term, and we are making steady progress, as I said, in NI, CNS, and tech. However, for understandable reasons, with the additional headwinds in MN that we are now facing in MN, we feel that it is prudent to lower the 2026 target to 13%. As you saw, the MN target for 2026 is now 6%-9%. Earlier, we said that we would be targeting double-digit already in 2026. And we, of course, want to continue to grow faster than the market and to see our cash conversion improve to 55%-85% from comparable operating profit. So with that, I will now hand over to Marco.
Thank you, Pekka. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of you as well from my side, depending where you are in the world.
I will spend my time slot on the most important priorities that I have as a CFO and those areas that we believe that we should work on right now. Starting with the progress that we've done, Pekka mentioned already that we've done very good progress in many areas, and we're extremely pleased with those as well. I just would like to highlight a couple of these areas, and one of those is actually the very good strengthening of our balance sheet. You can see here as well on the left-hand side, the different areas. Thanks to the strengthened balance sheet, we actually have been able to reinstate the dividend that we started in last year, and we continued actually with increase this year. At the same time, we actually also initiated a share buyback program of EUR 600 million that we actually recently concluded.
Just like we said before, dividend is something that is recurring, while what comes to the share buybacks, those are more a one-off action when we see that we have excess cash. Looking forward now and those priorities that I mentioned, I will mention three areas first. Of course, the first one is accelerating the shareholder value creation. Here I believe that the evolution of our operational model that we are working with is definitely improving our ability to create more shareholder value, but also giving more clarity on the potential of each of the businesses for you. The second one is protecting the profitability. Here one of the main actions that we have done recently is, of course, the cost-cutting program that we introduced in the context of quarter three report as well.
I will mention that a little bit more in a couple of slides forward. The third one, of course, is generating sustainable cash flows. As you've seen, 2023 has been a quite challenging year because of the investments we have to do in working capital. But we are extremely confident that we will get back to those target levels that we have aimed for, just like what Pekka mentioned. Now, I will actually go a little bit deeper on these three different areas, but also I will give you a little bit of insight into our solid balance sheet and financial position. Then I will conclude my presentation with the preliminary assumptions for 2024. First, what comes to shareholder value creation. Of course, from the CFO point of view, what I can impact is the cash generation and margin expansions.
These are extremely important value creation drivers in addition to the technology leadership position. Of course, I don't do the R&D by myself or my organization, but what we can do is actually secure that we can allocate enough resources and money into R&D activities so that we can create this technology leadership position. And by that, we believe that with the technology leadership position, you can gain better market position, market shares, and by that also higher margins. And if just going back to one of those areas that Pekka already mentioned, Optical Networks is a very good example of this. In 2021, in one of those normal ongoing activities that we have, which is portfolio management, we had deep discussions about analysis on Optical Networks, what should we do about that.
We actually concluded after thorough reviews that we can actually be technology leaders in Optical Networks as well. So that's why we doubled down on R&D in this area. We were extremely pleased to announce earlier this year in March that we actually are a technology leader in optical as well. If you just look at the development in optical, we're actually gaining market share, and also we've seen improvements in the operating margin development. Then, of course, what comes to the cash generation side, this is extremely important that we have a sharp focus on that. Of course, we have seen the heavy development and deployment of India 5G, and this has been tying up more working capital from our side. But we are now seeing that it's starting to normalize more, and that will, of course, ease our capital requirements in that area.
We have set very clear targets when it comes to network capital on each business as well. Then I just want to lastly mention also that the transparency that we want to create even more so that we will give you more information about each of the businesses in the new evolution of the operational model. Cash flow is one of those areas that we want to continue to open up for you so you have easier to actually value of each of the businesses going forward. Then the second item was to secure profitability. Just giving you a very short insight into that, we target EUR 800 million-EUR 1,200 million cost savings. There's a big range, but we believe that it depends totally how the market is evolving and what actions should we take.
We are prepared to do all the way to EUR 1,200 if needed, but now we plan for EUR 800. That is what is the basic assumption from our side. We believe that the organization that we will have after these three years will be sized about 72,000-77,000 employees. Just continuing here, we want to move quite fast. Already in 2024, our ambition is that we will have in-year savings of EUR 400 million. All these savings that we are talking about, the targets and ambition levels, these are gross savings. Of course, the net saving ambition is definitely there, and we aim to have net savings. The level of net savings each year is dependent on what are the inflation levels, but also how the variable pay is developing year by year.
If you look at the savings and where they are coming from, about 70% is coming from OpEx. But I just want to be extremely clear here. When it comes to R&D, we want to protect our R&D output and capacity so that we will not risk anything on the R&D output side. You might see some savings on the R&D side as well, but it's not on the output side. It is more in that we can do things more efficiently in R&D side as well. If you look at the different areas we were doing, of course, Mobile Networks is the largest area where we see the savings. It's about 60%. And then we see some savings in CNS and a small amount in NI as well.
When it comes to cash and the charges, when it comes to the savings program, those go pretty much hand in hand as well. Now turning to cash flow. As you can see, in 2023, our cash flow conversion rate is expected to be lower than what we've seen in the past couple of years. This is basically coming from that you can see also in the middle chart here that conversion ratios have been not developing that favorably in the past year. There's two reasons behind this. The first one is that we have inventories, and the second is receivables. When it comes to inventories, I already mentioned India. Definitely, we had to secure that we can deliver based on the extremely rapid deployment pace that Indian customers had. Remember also that we gained huge market share in India.
We got a Reliance deal, which was 100% Samsung, and now we got a big chunk of that. So we have to prepare ourselves that we can be able to deliver based on that rapid requirements that our customers had. Then, of course, we had supply chain issues last year, and we had to secure that we have enough inventory to be able to deliver to all of our customers. We couldn't rely on the delivery dates, and that's why we have to have some buffers. Then, of course, this year we've seen inventory digestion, and we've seen also a lower demand than what we expected. And all of these together have resulted that our inventory levels have been elevated. When it comes to receivables, India again is one reason.
In addition to that, we also see that we have some overdues in our receivable balances, and we're working heavily on those to secure that we can reduce those overdues. Our target is that we will get back to more normal levels when it comes to these two rotation days as soon as possible. We have also, in each of the businesses, very specific net working capital targets and actions for those. I just want to remind you as well that when it comes to this year's guidance for free cash flow, it assumes that we conclude the OPPO and Vivo deals as well. Then a couple of words about our solid financial position and also the capital allocation. Earlier this year in March, we actually renewed our cash management policy.
So earlier we had a target of total cash should be about at least 30% of net sales. Now we've refined that the new target is at the net cash basis, and the net cash should be about 10%-15% of the total net sales. As I mentioned, that we are tidying up network capital this year in different areas, but we see that it's now starting to actually reversing already in quarter four and step by step going forward. We do have some purchase commitments when it comes to semiconductor side still for next year, and we have to honor those because we signed those deals in 2022 to secure that we would have access to semiconductor supply. When it comes to our dividend policy, it's very clear we target recurring and over time increasing dividend as well. So the policy is unchanged.
Our ambition is that our dividend should be sustainable over the industrial cycle as well. Then I mentioned already the EUR 600 million share buyback program that we had, and we just concluded that recently. When it comes to dividend, I understand this is very important and interesting for many of you to understand how we are seeing the dividend going forward. Of course, this is a board of directors that will propose that to the AGM, and it depends totally on how we see the outlook going forward when it comes to cash generation and overall financial position. But considering that we have a very good net cash position and we see the potential improvements in cash generation as well, so let's see what the board is proposing. In the quarter four report, you will see that as well.
Just looking at the debt portfolio, you can see that it's quite an undemanding profile in our debt portfolio. We have a very good cash position, and we basically have not that big issues when it comes to liquidity. If you look at the right-hand side, you can see that we have two investment grade ratings, and we are quite pleased with that. Of course, the ambition is that we will get the third one as well from the Moody's. Looking at the balance sheet, you can see that we have a very good position when it comes to balance sheet, and we see also additional opportunities when it comes to creating value from the balance sheet, not only because of the good cash position, but also the fact that we have over EUR 4 billion surplus in our pension funds.
And of course, the regulatory is quite complex when it comes to pension funds, but we are assessing a different number of scenarios around this as well. And this is not necessarily a short-term topic, but let's see how this is evolving. And it is definitely a benefit to having this big surplus in your pensions. In addition to that, you can see here as well, we have the NGP and one venture funds. And the book asset value is about EUR 760 million today. And if you look at the past, we have had pretty good returns on these investments, and not only money-wise, but also if you look at the licensing opportunities, partnerships, and technology insights that we get from these companies in these different funds. So we are extremely pleased with those investments that we've done. And then going into preliminary assumptions.
I just want to say that when it comes to the group formal full-year guidance, we will give that in the context of quarter four report in January. These are now more what assumptions we see as of today on the different businesses. If we start with Network Infrastructure, you can see here that we see, just like Pekka said, that perhaps quarter three was the low point in order intake, and there's early indications of improvement in that area. On IP side, we've recently won also Webscaler contracts. In Fixed Networks, we will benefit out of these state-supported broadband programs. You have the BEAD in the U.S., but also in the European Union, you have also programs to support buildup of the broadband program in Europe. Just like Pekka said, don't expect this to come immediately in the beginning of 2024.
Most likely, we'll see those benefits starting to flow through our P&L in the second half of next year. And then optical, I mentioned earlier, we have definitely a momentum there considering the technology position that we have and with the latest silicons that we have developed. ASN, also the pipeline, shows very good potential in that business unit. So our plan is to return to growth, and all of these business units are actually contributing to that as well. So it's very nice to see this very good traction that we are moving into. Then when it comes to the mobile networks, we expect actually that top line will decline next year.
Of course, this is based on the challenging environment that we are seeing and India's normalizing, but also the fact that we will start seeing some impacts from the AT&T contract as well. I'm very pleased to see as well that mobile networks were quite fast to take actions and securing that in-year savings are very good next year to mitigate this kind of development. When it comes to CNS, we see modest growth in 5G core deployments, and also we see some growth opportunities in enterprise sectors. Operating margin is expected to be stable to slightly increasing. The last, Nokia Tech. Of course, technology business area is totally dependent on what we are doing with the open negotiations that we have in the renewal cycle in the smartphone area.
If we would conclude this year, we assume that operating profit will remain above EUR 1 billion next year. But of course, if we don't sign this year but we sign them next year, then of course we will get the catch-up payments as well, and that will, of course, impact next year's operating profit. So with that, let me turn back to Pekka, and Pekka will conclude a summary of the presentation. Thanks.
Yeah, thanks, Marco. I'll be very brief because then we want to go to Q&A. So just very quickly, three points to sum up the presentations today. First of all, we are proud of the progress we have made in recent years. We have transitioned from providing an end-to-end portfolio to a technology leader across our businesses.
We have increased spending on R&D to over EUR 4 billion, and that has significantly improved our product competitiveness since 2020. And we continue to benefit from Bell Labs as a world-leading research organization bringing true innovation. These investments are clearly paying off. Then we have taken significant steps in streamlining our operating model. That's the number two point here that we believe will enable us to accelerate value creation going forward. We are increasing operational autonomy of the businesses that will result in more agility in business groups that can adapt to fast-moving markets. Increased strategic flexibility will ensure each BG is able to make the decisions that best fit their particular markets. And very importantly, the improved financial accountability will lead to more efficient use of resources and full visibility and transparency to the performance of each business.
Then I want to end with highlighting that we have a market-leading business in Network Infrastructure, well placed to return to growth in 2024 as all units in NI have solid demand drivers, as I explained. Our investment in silicon in NI is driving our differentiation. Our network processors are clearly industry-leading. So we are balancing investment with margin progress, and then, of course, further scale will drive margin expansion. So with that, I hand over to David for the Q&A.
Thank you, Pekka. And thank you, Marco, for the presentations. We'll just shuffle things on the stage for a few seconds, but we will take questions both from those in the room and those dialed in on the webcast.
If you have questions in the room, please feel free to raise your hand now, and Alexey or Paula will find you if you could highlight who you are and what firm you're from for those in the room. But Alexey, why don't we go to you first?
Hi. Thanks for the presentations. Felix Henriksson from Nordea. Can you share your thoughts about the pricing discipline in the RAN market at the moment, especially when it comes to the recent O-RAN announcement from AT&T and Deutsche Telekom? Has price been an increasingly decisive factor on these deals?
Can I suggest that I provide a quick answer, and then since Tommi will be doing a deep dive on exactly that, we may want to come back to that question? I mean, hey, look, the RAN market has always been highly competitive when it comes to pricing.
I do not believe that it will ever change. It will continue that way. And that also means that because you are looking at a market where you have high R&D and then highly competitive prices, it is a volatile market, which is different in terms of its very nature compared to the other businesses where we are in. Why this autonomy for the businesses is important. The price competitiveness in deals, this is not only a feature of the recent AT&T deal. It has been there always, and I believe it will always continue to be there. And if we go to Sami for the next question, and just as Pekka mentioned, if you could focus questions on more group topics, if it's more M&A specific, there will be a session with Tommi later.
Yeah, okay. Thanks.
Sami Sarkamies, Danske Bank. Good update.
Just curious, what has changed since you reported third-quarter results? If we think about the business plan, it's quite clear that the loss of AT&T alone explains the margin reduction from 14%-13% by 2026. Of course, a lot has happened. And yeah, I mean, losing AT&T deal hurts. I mean, it's a fact that we cannot get away from. But then we also, sometimes you lose deals, and if you lose large deals, it hurts even more. But we need to remember that we have also won a significant amount of new deals, and we continue to win new deals. And I just want to highlight the Deutsche Telekom deal that we announced today, a significant return to a network that is the largest in Europe and that we have been out of since 2017.
Tommi will provide much more color into that deal and then also actually provide a list of new customers that we have won. Really, what has changed after Q3? Of course, the AT&T is the biggest single item that has changed. Looking at the other announcements, there is a long list of announcements. CNS has made significant progress now on the programmable network APIs that we have developed completely organically, now six deals. BT and Telia announced this week, acquisition of Fenix announced today, Marco's further diversification into non-CSP businesses. Even more so, I would say now when we are seeing the volatility of the mobile networks business, it highlights the importance of the strategic autonomy for the businesses so that they can also be managed, if you will, separately.
Again, this is not at all to say that we would have lost faith in M&A, but I guess what we are asking investors now to take on M&A is to take a mid- to long-term view and look at the period between 2025 and 2030, where we plan to be clearly a leader in 5G Advanced and then the route towards 6G. Nothing in this AT&T thing changes our ambition level in that. But this is a separate question, for example, from the significant potential that we are seeing in Network Infrastructure.
Thanks. Jonah, next row, Alexey.
Thank you. Emilie Munen from Carnegie. Pekka and Marco, could you please help me understand how you see that you are going to achieve the 13% operating margin target by 2026? To me, it looks pretty high. I'd like to understand, is it by price? Is it just cost-cutting measures?
How do you achieve that?
Well, it is a combination, of course. But actually, we opened up that a little bit. We gave kind of an idea that what it would require from the different businesses to get there. And it is pretty straightforward math when you take those margin targets and then certain volume assumptions. And we believe that it is entirely doable. But of course, it would not be possible without the cost-cutting actions that we are taking. But so if I understand correctly, you believe that by having a larger scale, you can improve the margins for the different business areas. Of course, scale is always important because we are in a business where you have a high share of R&D.
But actually, Tommi will be talking about specifically this in Mobile Networks because what he's doing is that he's lowering the required net sales that are needed to achieve double-digit margin. We are currently in Mobile Networks. We need roughly EUR 11.5 billion top line to get to double-digit profitability. Tommi's target is to lower that to EUR 10 billion and create a cost structure and a margin structure for M&A that a EUR 10 billion business would be able to achieve double-digit profitability. Thank you.
Paula, if you want to go to Alex.
Hi. Thank you. Just a quick question of detail on Network Infrastructure. So pretty good growth that you're projecting for next year mid-single digit. I would have expected a little bit of an operating leverage there. Do you have any specific margin headwinds? Because otherwise, I think 100 basis points upward would make sense. Thank you.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, we want to be prudent in what we say at this stage because we will provide a firmer guidance platform in connection with Q4. There is a product mix issue there because part of the resiliency this year in margin comes from the fact that the volumes in lower margin products in NI have actually declined more. And now when the market starts picking up, what typically then happens is that lower margin items such as the CPE products in fixed wireless access and then the ONTs, optical network terminals, which are the home boxes for passive optical networks, fiber-to-the-home connections, they start ramping up in terms of volume first, and they are lower margin products. So that probably explains part of what you are observing.
And Fonte, Joker. Yes.
Thank you. Simon Granath with ABG.
And Pekka, you mentioned that in NI you note that operators bought more than they built in 2022 while it's the other way around in 2023. When do you expect that we sort of reach the equilibrium here? And I know that you mentioned that in Q3, orders look to have dropped. And then as a follow-up question on that, how big contribution is the BEAD program in the TAM CAGR that you see going forward? And also a connection to that, how much do you bake in in terms of contribution from BEAD in 2024?
Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, first of all, we estimate that up to 10% of the BEAD funding will turn into our addressable market. So that gives you an idea. And it is a fact that most of it will go to civil works and digging and fiber and so on.
Marko, do you want to comment the first part of the question?
Yeah. What was the first one? Could you repeat that, Simon?
Equilibrium.
When do we reach the equilibrium? Oh, yeah. Inventory. What comes to the inventory levels. Just to be clear as well, that when it comes to NI, we saw that pre-purchase meant an inventory buildup more in the fixed networks and part of the fixed network side only. So the other areas, we didn't see that so much. I would say that it should come now in the beginning of this year and first half of this year. And this was specifically actually in the ONT side. And this is one reason also why we saw that ONT has come down in sales. But also remember that these are quite customer-specific. So it's not that the wide customer base have huge inventories.
It could be some specific customers that have that situation. So that's why it doesn't cover the whole market. In the big picture, we expect that it will be much less of an issue next year, but there can still be customer-specific situations, as Marco said. Go ahead.
Thank you. Joachim Gunell from DNB Markets. Thank you for having us today. So can you just provide the reasoning behind providing a fairly broad interval in the cost-out programs and what different scenarios you envision to commit to either part of those ranges?
Yeah, I can take that one. And the reason is that we don't quite know exactly how the market is evolving and what that will bring an impact for us as well. And that's why we said that we plan now for the EUR 800 million cost-saving program.
But if we would see that market will also have challenging environment and development in 2025, 2026, we are prepared to launch more. So we have identified more actions and opportunities in that program. And just to follow up on that, with regards to mobile networks being the largest part of that cost-out program, would you say that market development when it comes then to mobile networks is the beam-swing factor with regards to EUR 800 versus EUR 1.2 billion?
Yeah. I would say the beauty of our new operational model is that each of the businesses always look at their own markets because those markets are evolving differently. So whatever we see in different businesses, how they see the market development, then they actually reinitiate more actions on the cost-out program.
But I guess it is fair to say that your assumption that M&A would be the biggest swing factor in wherever we will land there, that is not that far from the truth.
Yeah. Thank you.
Go ahead, Andrew.
Thank you. Andrew Gardiner from Citi. I was interested in understanding a bit more about the analysis you showed us. I think it was on one of your slides, Pekka, about the relatively small amount of revenue that is sort of low margin. I think it was less than 5% margin. It's a relatively small part of your business. Is that analysis done on a sort of per-customer basis or per sort of product type or technology basis? How did you get to that?
It is done, I mean, not on a customer level. It is by the business, but it zooms deeper than on a business group level.
It goes one or two levels below the BG level. It's one level below the business group level.
Okay. I mean, does that suggest that there are certain products that you could continue to exit as part of sort of just as opposed to continuing to try and to shave sort of cost out across the company? Are there still areas that you might be able to exit or divest that you could see chunkier savings come through?
I just referred to the strategy cornerstone number three, which is active portfolio management. I actually think I believe I answered partially your question when I said that that work will continue.
Okay. Thank you.
I'll maybe just take a couple of questions we've had from the webcast. One from Daniel Djurberg.
In the discussion we have around moving from a strategic controller to strategic architect, do we see any areas where that might actually add cost to the business in terms of SG&A and R&D? Even just from a theoretical point of view, obviously, it could create, in theory, some duplication of roles across the organization.
Yeah. Of course, in theory, you could see some duplication. But I believe that the net is the other way around, that this will be a way to save cost because we'd remove this significant duplication that we have started to see between things that BGs are doing and then the sales organization was doing. So this is a major simplification. Any points you want to add, Marco?
Yeah. I just want to point out as well that the reason for doing this simplification wasn't actually cost-driven.
It was more other reasons that we found it more appropriate to have more accountable business groups instead. So that was the main purpose why we changed what comes to sales organization. But of course, then you might get some benefits out of that as well. And then Artem in the room. Artem, Paula?
Yes. Artem Beletski from SEB. Maybe one question regarding to your balance sheet situation and this 10%-15% net cash-to-sales target. Is it fair to assume that you are planning to take or start taking actions in coming years or maybe some communication in accordance with Q4? And just relating to just looking at these net pension assets of EUR 4 billion, is it possible to unlock values there?
Yeah. Thank you.
One reason that we put the new cash management policy in place is that that's what we believe that we should have to be able to have enough resources for our business and also tackle those interquarter and between-quarters volatility that we see in a cash position. The ambition is that if we are outside of that range, then we can take actions as well if we are above, just like we did with the EUR 600 million one-off share buyback program while dividends are a more recurring way to do it.
Then the pension.
Yeah. When it comes to pensions, just like I said, that we are assessing different options there as well. But it's not a short-term action. It will take some time before we can see anything there.
I think we have one question back in the room.
Yes. I actually have two questions, if I may.
The first one is on your sales organization. I can understand the benefit of having the better accountability. But when it comes to speaking to the customers, I wonder, how does it differ compared to before? Like in the past, maybe with AT&T, you might have one account manager that speaks on behalf of all the four divisions. And now you have individual account managers for each division. And I just want to compare it to if you look at the old structure, what were the benefit synergies versus the drawbacks? That's question one.
Okay. So actually, especially when you talk about larger customers, not that much will change, at least from customers' point of view. The reality is that we already today, when it comes to larger customers, we have an account team that has three departments: Mobile Networks, Network Infrastructure, and CNS.
There is one overall lead for the customer. Now, the practical differences, and this goes back to shortening the distance between the account team and then the business decision-makers. Currently, the account team, if we take well, you mentioned AT&T. Let's take that as an example. Currently, the account team reports to Region Americas. Region Americas reports to the head of Customer Experience in the leadership team, who reports to me. Now, in the future, the account team, those three departments in the account team will report directly to the respective businesses that they represent. But one of the account leads will be assigned also in the future, as today, to be the overall account head being responsible for overall relationship management with the customer and being responsible for the coordination of all cross-business topics. So for customers, not that much will change.
But we hope and believe, of course, that over time, this will make us faster, more agile, and customers will see that we will be able to react faster to their needs and the various discussions that we're having with them because also the formal reporting will now go directly to the business decision-makers rather than taking a route through region heads and then customer experience and then to me.
Great.
I will squeeze one last question in from the webcast, and then we'll welcome Raghav up. But obviously, with the structure that you've announced, Pekka, do you think that if you put this in place a few years ago, you could have avoided and mobile networks would have been closer to the customer? Do you think that would have enabled you to avoid the decision that AT&T has taken?
Oh, of course, this is all very, very theoretical.
I have a hard time seeing that this would have had anything to do with that decision because, again, it was financially driven, and it was not about the way how we managed. At least we believe, and customers told us there was nothing to do with the way we managed the relationship with the customer. But maybe one additional point on that and then also to your question that what will change in the new model. I fundamentally believe that sales needs to be close to the business decision-making. The issue we have had in the current model is that when sales reports through a different line, a business leader, Tommi, Raghav, and so on, they have always had the possibility to complain that sales is not doing this or that. Now, they will not have that excuse anymore.
But also, I believe that accountability and responsibility beat synergies any day.
Great. Thank you very much, everyone. As mentioned, we'll have additional Q&A sessions with both Raghav and Tommi. But thank you, Pekka. Thank you, Marco. With that, I welcome Raghav to the stage for the next presentation.
Thank you, David. And welcome to everybody. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you might be. I'll give you a quick update on CNS. But I think what is very interesting to actually see what's happening in the industry right now, the ecosystem on the consumer side continues to develop. And on the enterprise side, actually, the digitalization is still not at the levels it needs to be. Kind of COVID kind of drove some of that digitalization, but that is still 30% digitalized in the industrial sector.
And as if you look at all this value that is being actually created, I think 5G provides us an enormous pivot and an opportunity to actually connect these networks and become part of this ecosystem. And as the CSP market is actually experiencing some growth challenges, I think that actually creates the opportunity to actually unleash the potential of the network and connect it to the digital ecosystem and become a part of an ecosystem where value creation becomes an integral part of how we evolve as an industry. What I will do is, for those of you who are not familiar with our business, I'm going to give you a quick overview, and I'm going to take a very simple analogy and think about building a highway, actually, between New York and Boston. It's a new information highway.
I'll kind of try to relate it as to how that highway gets built and how information exchange actually happens to give you a view as to how CNS operates. Our business is all about software and solutions. This is where network meets the cloud and into the digital ecosystem. That's what I will talk about. Before I get into that, I thought what I would do is to give you a quick snapshot in terms of how our business is organized within CNS in itself. We're actually into five business groups. The fifth one is actually a new incubation, which is actually called network monetization. But we have these four business groups that are really running, which is core networks, business applications, cloud and cognitive services, and the enterprise edge campus opportunities.
Each one of those, as you can see down below, gives you a representation of what they represent in our business in itself. One of the newest incubations is at the top end, which is the network monetization piece, which is what I'll delve into a little bit later, which will kind of give you a view as to how we will connect this network into this ecosystem that is where value is being created. Actually, based on Gartner, 82% of the value of the 5G ecosystem is actually developing in this higher-level ecosystem that we have to connect to. Participating in that is going to become crucial.
So for context, just to give you a sense in terms of the performance of CNS over the last three years, it kind of gives you on the sales growth side, it's been relatively flat in aggregate, both in our growth as well as our legacy businesses. And I'll delve into that a little bit. On the gross margin side, we've seen actually expanding gross margins. And on an aggregate basis, that continues to rise. And from an operating profit, when we started out in 2021, after 2020, which was unfortunately not a profitable year, we started to make progress. And we've had stable operating profit in recent years. And we are having that as we continue to invest in three very critical areas. One is private wireless. The other is SaaS. And the third one is really on the monetization layer.
So we continue to invest into these three new value creation engines. To give you an analogy, here's how I want to try to make it as simple as possible. For those who obviously understand our business, this might be a little bit trivial, but I think it will give you a good picture as to how this software enables the value creation on top of the networks. You're obviously familiar with Mobile Networks and the Network Infrastructure business. You can think of them as building very, very fast information highways on which network traffic flows.
As you start to think about core networks on top of that, what core networks really does is really adds the lanes and lane markers and traffic lights to be able to prioritize actually how that traffic is routed and optimized and delivered to the other side. So it's a very important function that sits on top of the network. On top of that, we have other business applications that run things like analytics, automation, as well as security. And analytics is kind of a what it does is really it senses how the traffic is moving, and it actually tweaks the red lights to be able to deliver a better experience to the consumer. And that is a very important piece. So it has to constantly sense what's happening in the network.
On the digital automation side, what we try to make sure is these traffic flows are truly planned and there are lanes established where there are such high-performance lanes or fast-track lanes through which traffic can flow at a much faster pace as and when needed for those consumers or enterprises that need that ability. And then there's the security side of it, which is how do you make sure that in these highways or in these areas, that things like traffic lights, toll booths, others are not compromised affecting the flow of traffic? And so all of the traffic that is moving, all of the infrastructure that has been established is secure and running properly at all times. And then as you go over that and you've started to manage this information highway or this network, the next step really is how do you monetize in this space?
The analogy would be is you can start offering subscriptions for remote control of these vehicles. This is how you start to create value on top of that network by participating in the ecosystem that is building. The next layer is that how do you deliver some of these services? That's where SaaS comes in, where you can actually continue to maintain the network and the software or the highways without having to change anything. It's constantly updated in a way that it always remains available as and when required. Then you obviously have to try to manage this entire infrastructure where you are bringing people who are building roads and facilities and so on and so forth. You need to manage this entire infrastructure. This is where our cloud and cognitive services come into play.
This is where you take the network, which is a very powerful network, and then you actually operationalize that network and connect it to the ecosystem to create value. That is the CNS journey in terms of the software and the capabilities that it brings on top of the network. Now, there's one other piece which is extremely important, which is the enterprise space. We've talked about enterprise and private networks. This is where you can really actually look at how a particular enterprise needs its own private roads to be able to manage its own private infrastructure. This is an area which is probably the fastest evolving. I'll get into this in a little bit later in the presentation. The value of all this infrastructure is the experience that it brings for citizens and the commerce that it enables. That's what's important.
And in our world, that means that software actually connects the network and cloud into the digital ecosystem. And that's how value creation actually occurs. So this is the story of CNS. Let's start talking about our investment for growth. If somebody can move the slide, please. Thank you. CNS is operating in a very, very fast-changing market. And I expect that acceleration will actually continue into the future in this ever-changing landscape. Not so long ago, the market was really all about connectivity and consumers. And 4G and 5G rollouts are actually changing that very much to not just connectivity, but actually delivering capability of the network in addition to connectivity.
When I talk about capability, I'm talking about not just providing a way to connect, but actually taking new types of capabilities that 5G networks should enable, quality of service, insights, very specific information about consumers and enterprises, and rendering that into the ecosystem so that you can start monetizing those capabilities. And today, if you look at just whereabouts the 5G capabilities and the 4G capabilities are being provided, you can start to look at things like ultra-low-latency massive IoT systems where machine densification, these are kinds of things that we have to solve for in the industrial metaverse. And these are just starting to become available. So this is very early in the cycle where value creation is starting to accelerate. And network functions also are moving to the cloud.
And quite frankly, SaaS, which has developed in the IT space for a very, very long time, has started to enter the world of networks. And we believe that this is an area that we are pioneering as we go forward. So all of the things that are accelerating right now are things like artificial intelligence, automation. Pekka talked about APIs for 5G monetization. Data was the new oil. API is the new currency as we go forward. So understanding these technologies and business models that are dramatically changing in our industry, the question is, how are we capitalizing on this market opportunities? What are we doing in this space? Back in 2021, we said we were going to focus on five key segments. This was the statement we made in 2021. What were those? 5G Core. It was private wireless. It was digital operations.
It was AI analytics, machine learning. And it was security. These were the five key growth segments that we believed were going to be critical in the future of value creation. And since then, we've launched new products in those segments and have actually taken share. And as Pekka talked about, we also continue to look at other areas where we have to do active portfolio management. And we've talked about some of those where we've entered a relationship with Red Hat and our cloud infrastructure and partnering with them and also sold off VitalQIP as a investment because it was not core to our strategy. Finally, I said we would digitize and simplify in terms of how we execute. And this is something from an operational model perspective. Pekka talked about it.
We have become much more because selling software and selling other components in our business, there is a different sales cycle. There's a different domain expertise that you have to have. And that creates a deeper level of accountability and knowledge that you bring to your customers. And we've been successful to get that done. So today, we're really reaping the benefits of these market changes. We are focused on 5G core SA, which is AI-driven automation. And if you look at what is happening actually in the 5G SA space, only 15%-20% of the CSPs that are in the world have actually deployed are fully deployed in 5G SA. That is about 40 operators. And we have 17 of them. So we have 40% of the 5G SA market.
We've also been awarded over 50 new customers in that space that we are working on, but we are not live. This is above the 17 that we have. Plus, on the enterprise side, we have 125 new 5G SA networks, meaning we are probably well, not probably. We are clearly a leader in this space in private networks as we deploy 5G. Just about every analyst has confirmed our leadership position in the private wireless space. If you think about SaaS, this was new in our industry. In fact, we were one of the first to actually launch SaaS at the beginning of last year in the United States with a U.S. operator. But as we launched SaaS in 2022, today, we have eight services that we work through SaaS. We have 31 customers that have started to use SaaS with us.
And we actually have our first 5G Core as a service that we announced today with Telia. And this is a big, big move because that has never been deployed as SaaS before. And while this is in the SaaS model, ARR is the metric that we use to drive and measure our performance. It's still modest and small because we are just in the second year of its evolution. But it is something that is starting to rapidly grow that we will see over the coming years. And more importantly, a lot of our private wireless business is also as a service model as we deploy in private wireless as well. So what's next? How do we gain and maintain technology leadership? And these are in three specific areas. One is going Beyond Connectivity. We started in private wireless to win in the enterprise connectivity space.
But in 2022, we launched what is called the Mission Critical Industrial E dge, which is called the MXIE platform. What this platform does is an edge platform that brings an ecosystem of devices, applications, and access types together. Because when you are in an enterprise, connectivity is not the only thing that they're looking for. You have to bring an ecosystem together for them. And that's where value creation starts to happen. And this is where we have. I'll talk a little bit more about it later. Next is Network as Code. And again, this is fundamentally the biggest challenge that the CSPs are facing. How do we monetize as we move into 5G? And we have started to solve this problem as we start to look at advanced 4G and 5G and 5G Advanced APIs that are monetizable. And we'll discuss that as well.
Finally, we're also investing into something new, which is not just AI, but something called observability. This is super critical because if you want to drive autonomous operations in the network and drive extreme automation there, which is going to be very necessary in the 5G era, you have to combine AI with observability. This is the ability where if you can't sense the network, it is impossible to automate it and secure it. These are concepts that we are bringing into our industry. As you can tell, I think the bet that we made three years ago, the five pillars that we had decided, we continue to reconfirm that these are the very pillars that are going to be critical as we go forward in terms of value creation. If you start looking at investing for growth in CNS, I'm pretty optimistic.
The slides are not moving. They seem to be stuck in some way. As we transition and quantify as to why I'm optimistic of the future, we know that the CSP market on an aggregate is only growing at 3%. This is on an aggregate basis. We continue to prioritize, as you can see on the chart right now, the growth segments that we had selected and other segments which obviously are not growing as much. This is to do with some of the legacy portfolio. One of the key metrics that we've been able to establish is that 60% of our business right now in CNS is coming from the five growth segments. When we were in 2021, I think it was around 37%-40%. We continue to grow in that particular space extremely well.
If you look at private wireless, it is actually growing even more rapidly. It has an 18% CAGR on the private wireless space. But we break up private wireless into two segments. One is campus. And that's actually growing at 22%. And this is to do with campuses like mines, ports, manufacturing. These are the areas. And then there is the wide area networking piece, which is public sector, utilities, railroads, etc., which is growing at actually 9%. And there are obviously new opportunities that are also starting to emerge, which is where we talk about SaaS going beyond connectivity, Network as Code. These are actually growing at even a faster pace of almost 34% CAGR between 2023 and 2026.
If you look at individually, you see beyond connectivity growing at 29%, SaaS growing at 20%, and Network as Code actually growing at 188%. But yes, these are nascent markets. But this is where value creation will occur, which will connect that network into the digital ecosystem. So there's plenty of opportunity here for CNS in a very difficult CSP market. But we believe this difficulty and the advent of 5G is actually the opportunity to make this happen. So now I want to transition as to the opportunities to give you an opportunity to actually give color on some of these segments, these fast-growing segments that we are in. So if you look at core, as I talked about earlier, we continue to create new monetizable opportunities because the core is what starts to expose the network.
That's where the exposure starts to happen from the network that physically is built to the APIs that get generated. In AI and analytics, I think this is an area where we have strong demand for things like energy savings. Energy is a big topic here in Europe, in anywhere else. And it's one of the biggest spends that our customers actually have in their own environments. And customers like Telefónica, Safaricom, Globe in the Philippines, they're actually seeing using our analytics capabilities almost up to 30% savings that they can actually bring on the energy side in their networks. And this actually lowers carbon footprint as well. In digital operations, which is really around automation, we're starting to resolve over 40% of the network incidents without human intervention. And this reduces not only cost, but it also gives subscriber satisfaction.
This is something that Analysys Mason has ranked us number one for in the industry. Companies like STC in Saudi Arabia, Telstra in Australia are starting to implement these solutions. Finally, in security, which is a key part, and this is looking at the entire network security, we launched what is called Cybersecurity Dome, which provides automated security on a proactive basis to determine extended detection and response to anomalies that may be seen in the network in itself. Again, once again here, we were actually ranked by GigaOm as a leader in the market in the security space. How do these customers' benefits actually translate into real value for CNS? First of all, these opportunities will not only create top line for us, but it's going to create top line for us by taking share in the marketplace.
We actually expect to grow almost 1x-1.5x in these specific five growth areas that we have in action. In the areas of 5G SA, as I mentioned to you, we've already established over additional 50 wins that we are actually implementing. Actually, once you deploy the core networks, you have the pull-through of bringing automation and slicing and all these other capabilities as a pull-through in terms of what you can bring in. There are also strategic relationships that continue to build with our customers. Actually, one of the things that we track is how much of our growth segment portfolio is actually sitting with our customers. And more products means stickier and stronger relationships. And between 2021 and 2023, we saw almost 55% increase in the portion of customers with three or more of our growth segment products.
This is a strong testament in terms of what is securing our longer-term growth objectives. The second area is what we talked about was private wireless. One of the key things that private wireless will actually bring is productivity improvements. To give you an example of this, if you look at Puerto Bahía in Colombia, they're tracking 20,000 vehicles with solutions that we are providing and with a local partner, Claro, which is an operator there. This is how we are bringing joint value to the industrials in creating more and more value together. One of the biggest areas that enterprises look for, industrials look at, is actually worker safety. It's the number one reason that they are bringing in digital automation over and above productivity.
I think this is another area we're leading in mines, ports, railroads, where we have been providing systems to be able to increase worker safety as we go forward. The other area is actually around industrial automation. A good example of this is Arçelik in Turkey. It's a plant where they use AGVs in their manufacturing process. They've been able to see almost 25% improvement in the efficiency of using these AGVs inside, with reducing energy consumption. That brings a lot of value in terms of productivity. Then there's the reduced cost and complexity. There's Wi-Fi around in a lot of these industrials. Sometimes Wi-Fi is not adequate enough to drive the use cases that are necessary.
And actually, what we've seen is the customer actually getting a 10x benefit on the number of 4G, 5G cells that they can put to the number of Wi-Fi routers that have to be put in order to be able to get the same level of capabilities. And this is a dramatic cost drop as well as reduced complexity in building those networks to really drive better use case development. All of these are extremely attractive for our enterprise customer base. And this is how value is getting created. And this is how we bring on our edge platform this ecosystem together to be able to create these use cases. And for us, it's also equally attractive. If you look at how that business for us is evolving, today our pipeline has a book-to-build ratio of 1.6. This is the rate at which we are growing.
That gives us tremendous confidence that we have the ability, while the market is growing 20% or 22%, that we have the ability to grow at 25%-30% in this market. We're seeing evidence of that. This is also one of the good views of this as well, is because the campus deals are as a service infrastructure deals, it gives us a much more predictable revenue stream as we go forward. That's an important aspect. While the wide area networking deals are larger deals, they are usually done over 5-10 years. They have a much more lumpier top line in terms of how you bring them in. Once you win enough of it, it creates more stability going in the following years.
And one of the areas that we were very, very clear about is that as we go after the enterprise space, one of the biggest ways that we will draw on coverage is through partnerships. And today, almost 60% of our business is through indirect channels. And partner development for our enterprise business is a very strong go-to-market proposition that we're implementing not only in my business in CNS, but across all businesses within Nokia. Next, if you look at beyond connectivity, and I talked a little bit about this, I think this is an area where when you bring an ecosystem together and when you control the edge of bringing the ecosystem together, you have the ability on that edge to bring third-party applications.
When you bring third-party applications, just like you do on your Apple phone, you have an ecosystem that is building and you have the platform edge. Then every time an application comes onto your platform, you have the ability to monetize on third-party applications as well. That is something we've started to do. We've got over 20 partners now established on the industrials that are actually running on our edge. And these are things like Litmus, Siemens, Crosser, Atos. And every time these things come onto our edge, we're able to monetize them. We also continue to work on things like drones, networks for inspection. This is another area that is evolving pretty fast. There is a very interesting use case developing in digital twinning technology. We see this as a big thing in the industrial side. It's fast developing.
In fact, a good example of this is a very large port in the United States that I can't, unfortunately, name. It actually uses digital twinning technology on our edge platform to actually manage that port in itself. And this is how we are creating leadership position. If you start to look at technology leadership in AI, actually, we recently launched the only OT generative AI compliance solution in the market. And this is a huge step forward. And one of the other things that we've also been able to do is that we believe that when you create an edge platform, there are going to be many use cases in the enterprise, many, many use cases. Some will use 5G, some will use 4G, some will use Wi-Fi, some will use Bluetooth.
What we have built in our mission-critical industrial edge is the ability to bring this ecosystem together and connect to any access type, be it 5G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LoRa fixed capabilities. And this is how value creation actually occurs. So this all actually starts to have an increasing top line impact and a positive margin impact on our business. And this is what we are really excited about, is the growth not only on the CSP side, but on the enterprise side, but we also have the ability to go through partners, which are indirect channels, but also the CSP. It enables new revenue streams for them. So we have an ability to work on both sides, creating this new value going after enterprises. Finally, a couple of last areas. One is SaaS. SaaS, we are two years into the journey. We're still progressing. We're still learning.
Our customers are also learning how to put these critical network functions as a SaaS. And actually, what is interesting to see is that to deploy a core inside a network used to take three months. And today, within three hours using SaaS, we can actually deploy core. That's the advantage of putting it on SaaS. And it also reduces the number of integration times to deploy other solutions as well. And this provides a short-term cost reduction of almost 60% for our customers. And the advantage of SaaS is that you do a lot of risk mitigation of rolling out services much faster without having to go through the whole deployment cycle. And so you can faster deploy, phase your investments, and these are the benefits the customer gets. What is the benefit that we get?
We are still early, but we are looking to actually drive top line on what is called the triple, triple, double. And this is following industry standard benchmarks where we expect that by the end of 2023, we will actually reach double-digit ARR, which will be very much in line with how the industry, as customers got into SaaS, started to achieve that. And this will obviously, as you start to scale, the margins will improve on this. And we believe that once we reach maturity on our SaaS business, we will be generating operating margins of greater than 25% in this particular domain. So we are seen as a disruptor here and innovator by not only customers and analysts, but even with our employees. So this is an exciting space that we continue to march on.
And finally, [the goal] is to talk about the API world, which is what we call Network as Code. How do you deliver the entire network as a piece of object or a code that a 19-year-old digital developer can actually consume into their applications? And once you become part of that application, every time that application is used, you monetize. And that is the journey of this. And this is where we are taking advanced 4G and 5G capabilities and making it available in a very simple way to the API developer. And we've launched this platform. We started this incubation in 2022. We launched the platform 12 months later in September of this year. And the journey has started. And as Pekka talked about, we've now added six customers in that particular journey. And that journey continues on as we go forward into 2024.
So what is the benefit to us? I think the first benefit is obviously we become the aggregator and we connect to the marketplace. And as such, we get direct revenue out of that. And by solving this 5G monetization piece, if we can solve this at scale, it also creates additional investments on 5GSA and slicing capabilities that the industry is talking about because now they can slice the network and deliver specific value to an enterprise or a consumer who wants that. And then, as we all know, one of the key reasons of how the hyperscalers made money was it was the platform economy that they created. And our journey in Network as Code is to create that platform economics, which will actually produce the returns once you become the link between the ecosystem and the network.
So just looking at long-term aspirations and trying to close in, I think the way I would like to summarize this, that we expect beyond connectivity to almost become half of our enterprise campus revenue business by the end of this decade. We believe that that's where the ecosystem comes together, and that's what our aspirations are. If you start looking at Network as Code, we expect contributions of almost over 25% of the total revenue on advanced 4G and 5G, but not CPaaS. That was the legacy, old legacy capabilities. And it was actually a very low margin business, and very few actually made money in that business. And these revenues have actually begun, but they're still very, very early. But we believe this is what's going to scale at a very, very fast pace over the coming years.
SaaS and enterprise as a service across infrastructure, platform, and software, what we call this is Cloud ARR. This will almost represent half of our enterprise business by the end of the decade. That is a much more predictable revenue stream that we will be able to drive. So really, these are the areas where we believe CNS, where the network really meets the cloud and software and brings this in terms of the ecosystem together. So before I close, I just want to talk about three key areas of technology that we continue to invest in to drive technology leadership. The first is observability, which I talked about. Observability is extremely important to be able to work in this new cloud-native world, to be able to understand and dynamically track performance and capabilities as we go forward.
Then there's the other evolution that is happening. We're creating the edge, but really nobody has been able to solve the real-time edge problem like we have using MXIE. And MXIE will be further extended actually to drive micro edge where actually on the devices itself, the edge devices, you will be able to run algorithms and do compute right at the edge to be able to deliver certain use cases. And this is where we believe the next value creation will happen. And finally, I think you've all seen all the hype around AI and generative AI. And we've incorporated this into our portfolio as well. And actually, what you do is you combine this generative AI with observability. And that's what creates autonomous operations as we go forward.
So not only are we deploying these in our products, but also we are actually putting it in places like documentation and marketing and making AI and generative AI pervasive, but using it very responsibly because that's one of the challenges of the generative AI is how do you make sure that you use it responsibly. So I want to summarize and close the presentation and summarize it on five key topics. In the target growth segments, the five segments that we talked about that we chose in 2021, and we continue to focus on those, we are growing faster than the market and taking market share. Enterprise and beyond connectivity, these are big opportunities for us. We have a unique leadership position. We have a market leadership position. The beyond connectivity is growing.
What we are doing in expanding into platform economics, which is where we believe new value creation will occur. And then we talked about SaaS and Network as Code. And we are seeing these as new business models that we see adoption growing. And while, again, we are seeing this is early, we're seeing good traction, as I talked about, some of the numbers of 31 customers in SaaS, six in Network as Code, and so on and so forth. ESG is obviously a big focus, as Pekka talked about it. And I think one of the key areas that we're trying to make sure is that all the software that we build drives and addresses the ESG aspects of what our customers are looking for. And finally, we will continue to assess the portfolio. Somebody asked the question earlier.
That is a constant thing that we continue to do, is to make sure that in a portfolio that either we are one or two, or we find a way to get to that or try to make other decisions around it. And with that, I just want to conclude my remarks and happy to take any Q&A. So thank you very much.
Thank you, Raghav. And I think we'll start the Q&A. I'll take one quickly from the webcast that I've already seen, which is just Raghav. Obviously, we had targeted back in the capital markets day in 2021 for the CNS margin to rise to 8%-11%. And the commentary we've given this morning is obviously 7%-10% for 2026.
Can you possibly just talk about the journey, I guess, some of the investments you've made that have kind of led to that situation we see today?
Yeah, sure. So from a margin perspective, I think margin development has been actually quite good. But there are areas of investment that we have deliberately chosen to invest into organically. Network as Code is an organic investment. We have other options, but this is the option that we took because we believe it's a more prudent option in terms of where we want to monetize and where we want to drive. So that's a particular area that we started to invest into. As we talked about private wireless, this is a key area of growth for us and one of the areas where we have established market leadership. And we were very clear that we wanted to, again, continue to organically invest in that particular area. And finally, SaaS. And these are areas that we continue to invest in while holding stable operating margin as we go forward.
And once we have a SaaS journey is usually a five- to seven-year journey when the initial stages you actually invest. And then once you start to get scale, and that's when you get the hockey stick in terms of growth in operating margins. So we see these as investment areas, which we've added on as we've gone through our journey. And we believe that the guidance that we have given going forward is something that we will be able to. In addition to that, I think there are legacy businesses that we do also have that we continue to be very prudent on. There are some businesses that are declining, 2G, 3G. These are declining businesses as new technology comes around. And there are other businesses that we've also taken out, which is things like cloud infrastructure and others, which we have been consciously doing as well.
So there you have it.
Thanks, Raghav. Sami, do you want to go ahead?
I was talking with Danske Bank. I have a general question regarding the business plan for CNS. It's not looking that straightforward because you are assuming 30% of the cost measures. But then on the other hand, you should be sort of investing for future growth. You're actually faced with pretty interesting growth opportunities. So do you think the balance is right between short-term efficiency and those long-term growth bets?
I think so. First of all, we have to be very prudent where we are investing. We've made a very clear decision of the five investment areas. We continue to execute on those. I believe that we needed to be efficient. As such, we had called that out in 2021, that we had to drive for efficiency. So we're bringing more automation in the way we were structured from an R&D perspective and services perspective, which is quite heavy in our business. We looked at how do we move to better synergize our R&D in terms of location, centers, and so on and so forth, and bringing automation in.
So I think that some of that is a very natural process that we had to our product development intensity and our services intensity was not at the benchmark levels where we were when we started the business in 2021. And those were natural steps that we're taking. So I believe those are prudent steps that we should be taking. And we will continue to make those very highly efficient. But at the same time, I think we've also taken the investments and put it in the key areas and making sure, for example, in managed services, we were very, very clear that we had to manage to profitability, not in terms of growth, because that was a business that was not performing extremely well. So I think our portfolio management has been very good and very clear.
And we have been reinvesting, obviously, investments back into the business, into the growth areas as well. So we believe that the measures that we're taking in terms of taking cost out is a natural progression of bringing more automation so we can serve and deliver our services in a much more effective way, consolidating R&D, which also was a cost that we were actually incurring in the past. And so those things were natural cost out areas that we had to do. And we have to keep improving our product development and services intensity. So I don't think that any one of those is constraining us at this point in time. I think we're pretty clear and prudent in terms of how we're managing the capital allocation towards our growth businesses while taking cost out.
Thanks. I'll maybe take another question from the webcast. Obviously, we've seen an announcement this week around last week around an operator consolidating to fewer vendors, as we've talked about a few times today. Do you see any impact, or is there any we talk about programmable networks into the future? How do you see the impact of programmability versus a mobile network that typically would have multiple vendors? Is this a dynamic that cares about how many vendors there are in the network?
No, first of all, I want to be extremely clear is that we work in a highly competitive environment. We invest into technology leadership. If you look at, we have a very, very strong presence in the United States with all the major operators around in the U.S. When you start thinking about also the stickiness that we have with them, as I mentioned, we have now a 55% increase in terms of the portfolio that are being used by these operators. So I think the stickiness is becoming so we're not at this point in time, we're not that we don't see the impact there. But if you look at whether they have a single vendor, dual vendor, triple vendor, in a software world, you have to be agnostic to the network and the components underneath that.
It has to be agnostic because you will have various permutations and combinations of components that actually sit in a network. And the very nature of building best-in-class software, it has to be able to adapt to any kind of infrastructure on the southbound side. And so we have built software that can have a Nokia network, can have a Samsung network, can have a Huawei network, could have any other transport network. It doesn't really matter because software you cannot have software that is dedicated to a particular network type. Then you're not in the software business. So we've been very, very clear that all of our software is agnostic to any cloud vendor, any network vendor, any hardware vendor.
That's when you have true software because otherwise, you're going to limit the ability to actually your customers to monetize or use them to manage their networks in itself.
I think we'll take a final question from Joachim. We're running short on time, but go ahead, Joachim.
Thank you. Joachim Gunell from DNB. So can you just talk a bit about the puts and takes when it comes to your organic approach to a Network as Code and also with regards to that what gives you what assures you that you're taking a lead here when it comes to Ericsson and Vonage?
First of all, I think this is the strategy we believe is the right strategy. And why do we believe this is the right strategy is because we believe the real opportunity exists in 4G advanced and 5G and going forward, not on the legacy CPaaS market, which till today has really not made money. So we believe that this is the right approach that we should be taking. In addition to that, we see actually the monetization of this coming in 2025 and beyond. This market is still nascent and developing. And we want to be extremely prudent in our approach as to the timing of this value creation and to make sure that we time investments and opportunities and everything. And so we are being more thoughtful in our process. We do not want to bring legacy forward. We've already signed six customers this year.
We will continue to sign a lot more. As we sign this and as we learn through this, we will reprioritize what investments we have to make. So we believe that this is a more prudent approach based on the opportunity developing underneath us. This is why we feel that we're not carrying any legacy. This is a huge thing because in that legacy, it's actually going to drag you and pull you down. The legacy was all about connectivity. It was about voice, video, and text. This is about capability where you're taking network capabilities, APIs that are emerging in the 5G space and trying to monetize them. That world was a world where an aggregator showed up in the middle between us and the ecosystem and separated us from the ecosystem.
We want to participate, and we want our customers to participate in the value chain and not just be relegated to a connectivity player. So that is why we chose the approach we did. And that is paying huge dividends in terms of how we are approaching the market.
Great. Thanks, Raghav. Thank you all for the attention so far. We'll now take a short 10-minute break if anyone wants to stretch their legs. For those in the webcast, we'll stay on the same connection, but we'll be back at half past to continue with talking. Thank you, Raghav.
Thanks, Raghav. Sorry. We ran a little bit late.
Thank you, everyone. And thank you for coming back so promptly. So we'll now move on to the last presentation on mobile networks. And so I'd like to welcome Tommi Uitto to the stage. Tommi.
Thank you, David. Thank you, everyone, for being with us today. For those of you who travel to Finland, welcome to my warm home country. Today, I will be sharing how Mobile Networks is revamping its strategy. We have begun to rebaseline our operation for resilience and profitability while maintaining our unwavering commitment to technology leadership and protecting our R&D output. These cost reductions and other profitability improvements and net working capital rotation improvements are expected to be completed by 2026. The profitability improvements and cost reductions are expected to lower or reduce the net sales level required for delivering double-digit operating margins from approximately EUR 11.5 billion to approximately EUR 10 billion or by EUR 1.5 billion in the current scope of business. We will be accelerating our offerings to the faster-growing segments, so private wireless for enterprise, private wireless for defense, Cloud RAN, and Open RAN.
This acceleration means in R&D, sales channel development, and potential bolt-on acquisitions. We will also see further opportunities to win completely new CSP customers because of the improved competitiveness of our products and services, as well as some geopolitical opportunities. Today, we also share three exciting pieces of news publicly. Now, many of you are, of course, interested in AT&T, and some questions have been asked already. We will be addressing this topic during my presentation in some points as well as during the Q&A. But I would like to highlight upfront that AT&T recognizes our leadership in mobile networks. So here's a quote from Chris Sambar. Chris is the EVP of Networks.
As he wrote to me about the decision, which was driven by very AT&T-specific financial reasons, he proposed AT&T go on record with what they think about our competitiveness in RAN in the products and services, as well as the engagement, quite unusual in this type of situations. AT&T decision, of course, is a disappointment, but it's one paragraph in the book that we are writing. The reality is that there will continue to be strong demand for wireless networks, high-capacity radio networks. We have tremendous capabilities in this technology. We are the number two in 3GPP wireless, even after the AT&T decision. We have been taking lots of market share. Our portfolio is more competitive than ever. There are exciting opportunities in 5G, 5G Advanced private wireless for enterprise, private wireless for defense, geopolitical opportunities, Open RAN, Cloud RAN, as well as, of course, finally, 6G.
So let me tell you about the strategy going forward. We will start by looking at the market dynamics, the market size, the growth, the different undercurrents in this market. We will look at our progress since we last spoke in mobile networks, since London and since the late 2020 capital market day, as well as how we are positioned in this market based upon our capabilities and market presence. Then we move on to the revamp strategy to capture the long-term opportunities in this market. We wrap up with the key takeaways before the Q&A. So regarding the market dynamics, of course, this business is cyclical, like Pekka Lundmark said.
We have this 2023 decline after the 5G deployments peaked in North America, Japan, South Korea, for instance, some of the inventory normalization in North America, as well as high interest rates and some of the macroeconomic impacts that our operators have experienced. We foresee modest growth in the addressable market from 2023 to 2028, and again, some acceleration when we move to 6G by 2030. But within this modest growth, there's continued strong growth in private wireless by 21% CAGR from 2023 to 2028. You may have seen 18% in Raghav's presentation, but that was a slightly different time frame up to 2026. Now, 5G is driving CSP investments in most markets for mobility voice and mobile broadband, and in some markets also for fixed wireless access as well as private wireless. 5G will continue to be deployed in Europe.
Any slowdown in Europe would be temporary and primarily driven by the macroeconomic situation, delaying project timelines but not canceling the 5G deployments. Europe is seriously behind in 5G. You remember our KPI of the penetration of mid-band wide carrier 5G, where Europe is trailing behind the average of the world. 5G will also continue to be deployed by many richer countries in the Middle East. 5G deployment in India is expected to slow down in 2024 after a very strong high-speed deployment in 2023. Yet our sales, if we look at our sales rather than the addressable market, our sales are expected to stay at the level higher than we had back in 2021 or 2020 because we won Reliance Jio. We have our 45% market share with Bharti Airtel and almost half of the Reliance Jio deployment.
So we have a much bigger presence in India now in 5G than we had in 4G. 5G deployment is basically just starting in most countries in Latin America and Africa, many countries in APAC, Eurasia, and in Eastern Europe. And 5G deployment will, of course, continue well into the 2030s, even after 6G has been introduced, just like we are still deploying 4G even many years after 5G was first introduced. The oldest 5G equipment that was deployed back in 2018, 2019, 2020, will start to enter the technology or the hardware refresh cycle driven by higher performance of new base station technologies or new base station platforms, feature support for 5G Advanced, energy efficiency, automation. So there will be a refresh cycle where our competitiveness will again give us the opportunity to grab some share.
Another undercurrent will be the geopolitically motivated changes in supply policy because, as Pekka said, we have already won some 50% of all the value that was moved away from the so-called high-risk vendors. But there will be further countries, further governments who will be banning or restricting the market share of the high-risk vendors and operators who will be reducing their exposure because of the technology competitiveness due to access to leading silicon in 5-nanometer and later 3-nanometer technology. If we look at the traffic growth, the traffic growth that we see requires new spectrum, and it will require 6G by 2030. So mobile network traffic is expected to grow 5-fold by 2030 or 20%-30% per year CAGR. And this is excluding the private wireless or the enterprise traffic, so simply the CSP traffic. This growth is organic in mobility voice and mobile broadband.
Plus, there is the fixed wireless access traffic and then AR and VR traffic, and in the 2030s, consumer metaverse at scale or consumer metaverse for masses once the end user device is something that is highly attractive. Now, if you look at the graph on the right-hand side, it's interesting to see. Actually, they work together. You see that 4G without 5G would have already run out of capacity by now. So on average, globally, 4G already does not have enough capacity, which is why 5G has been required. But 5G mid-band with an average 100 MHz carrier, which is the typical mid-band with massive MIMO in, say, C- band or 3-5 GHz, that will also run out of capacity around 2028 with this type of traffic growth that we see.
So even if you have 4G, 5G refarming of previous spectrum into 5G, eventually, 6G will be needed. 6G will be needed at least for two reasons. You have this traffic growth, so you simply need more capacity. Then in XR, VR, or for metaverse at scale, 5G and 5G Advanced will not have enough of uplink capacity or short enough latency. So these are the two main reasons why 6G will be required. Sometimes in this industry, you nowadays hear the discussion of, "Do we need 6G at all?" The answer is very simple. With this traffic growth, you are going to need some new spectrum because the existing spectrum is congested. There will be a new spectrum now decided by the humankind in the World Radio Conference as we speak during the month of November and now December.
The humankind will decide on the new spectrum to be used in the future for having more capacity. New spectrum means new radios will have to be deployed. New radios will be deployed. Then the question is, what technology will we deploy? Will we deploy only 5G or 5G Advanced, or will we deploy the most spectrally efficient and energy efficient technology that scientists and engineers have been able to figure out, which is 6G? The answer is obvious. It will be 6G because it is just better economically. Let's look at the mobile networks progress and positioning since we last spoke. Here's some good progress for you. This is the Dell'Oro data. But if you look at the data from Infonetics or Omdia or LightCounting or Mobile Experts, it gives you a consistent picture.
Over the last two years, we have increased our market share in 5G, excluding mainland China. We have increased our market share from 22% to 29%. That's more than any other supplier has been able to achieve, both relatively and in absolute terms. If you recall the way how this works is that the top five, three of which you see here, are Ericsson, and this is excluding China, Ericsson, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, ZTE, and then the rest far behind. Even after the AT&T setback, we will be in a better position than we were back in 2021 because of this market share increase that we have experienced or achieved thanks to our improved competitiveness with the products and services, as well as some geopolitical tailwinds.
Behind this curve is that we have won 47 completely new CSP customers that we didn't have back in 2019, and actually also almost 700 private wireless customers with Raghav, but we'll come back to that. Another reason is that 31 of our old CSP customers decided to award us more market share than they had in the past. Yet another reason for the market share increase is that, of course, the market mix has helped us a bit with India as we control almost half of the market in India. As I said, we have won these cases because of the competitiveness of our products and services, as well as some geopolitical reasons. Some of this share has been won from Huawei and ZTE, some from Ericsson and Samsung, and then there's a couple of greenfield cases on this list as well.
I'll tell you, many companies are showing this type of charts or slides with logos when it's a proof of concept or trial, or they've had a discussion with the customer. I can assure you that behind these logos, there's an agreement for wide area commercial network deployment for radio access networks, okay? Behind the logos and then the country flags in cases where we have not been allowed to share the customer name. Let's move to the enterprise. Raghav was already alluding to this as one of the key areas where CNS is playing. We, of course, provide the radio access networks piece for this. We have already sold to more than 675 enterprise customers selling private wireless in all kinds of different industry verticals.
So you have manufacturing and warehousing, you have mining, airport operators, seaport operators, public safety, utility companies, smart agriculture, all kinds of different places. And it's just a super exciting area because we keep learning so much. I mean, the obvious things are what Raghav was saying about worker safety. You have the productivity improvements, speed, quality, cost, and these type of things. But we're actually learning a lot of stuff. Like Raghav was referring to this Arçelik, a Turkish manufacturer of domestic appliances. They used to run their AGVs using Wi-Fi in their factories. When they changed to 4G LTE due to the high OPEX that they had with the maintenance of the AGVs, they saw 25% reduction in the maintenance OPEX and the downtime of the AGV simply because 4G LTE is a higher performance wireless technology than Wi-Fi.
Or in the mines, we thought that it's only about automating the mining vehicles, having better access control, and that sort of things. But actually, using private wireless, eliminating the need to have human beings in the mines, or at least in some corners of the mines, it reduces the need to invest in the air exchange and the air conditioning in the mines. So now, with these almost 700 customers, we have lots of learning, which we can leverage with more and more and more customers. It becomes like a flywheel because we accumulate the experience and the learning from all of these cases, what works, what doesn't work, and that's then available to all of our customers. Now, architecture-wise, you can say that there's two different segments here.
There's the campus wireless, which, as the name would suggest, is local by nature, a few, maybe 10, maybe 20 base stations, often small cells. And that's where we have agreed with Raghav that CNS is the lead business group leading the charge, and we supply the radio access network. Point being that in many of these cases, it's not really a connectivity play. It's rather about the convergence of IT operations technology or OT and then wireless, with, for instance, the NDAC, the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud Platform, and the MXIE platform, the home for the OT applications from the ecosystem that CNS had. And we are proud to provide the radios to these campus wireless cases or enterprise cloud edge cases, like we sometimes call them. In the wide area networks, Mobile Networks is the lead business group because this is more of a CSP paradigm.
So this is typically utility companies, big electricity, gas, water type of companies, public safety companies, which obviously need to be with a wide area cellular coverage. And that's where we are the lead business group. Here, the number of base stations is then rather in the hundreds or even thousands and more of a CSP paradigm. What's remarkable about this almost 700 is that already more than 145 of them have 5G. Why is that remarkable? It's remarkable because this is just plain vanilla 5G, just mobile broadband. There are no URLLC capable IoT modules yet, and RedCap or eMTC will be part of 5G Advanced only. So think about the potential of private wireless when we can actually support a very large number of low power, low cost IoT sensors with RedCap or wireless robotics with URLLC.
I mean, so far, 5G is used here only because, well, better uplink speed for, say, video quality or because these people know that they will eventually go to 5G, so why not go to 5G immediately or in some cases due to spectrum reasons? But this is really a high growth segment for us. And our sales, as we have said, is actually growing faster here than the market, and we have a very good market share in this segment. So let's move on. So we continue to invest, of course, in R&D. We have an unwavering commitment to maintain and develop further our technology leadership, what we worked so hard to develop back in 2019, 2021, when we turned around mobile networks. So in 2023, we launched a lot of new great products and solutions.
So the Habrok massive MIMO radios, wider occupied bandwidth, instantaneous bandwidth, smaller size, lighter weight, lower power consumption. We were already in a good place with our Osprey massive MIMO in 32 TRX high output power category, the market smallest. Now, with Habrok, we tick the box in '64 and are in the lead. We have our MantaRay SON, self-optimizing network solution with AI and ML. And this is the market leader if you ask any industry analyst in self-optimizing networks. Some diehard customers of my competition are using this solution to optimize the energy efficiency of my competitors' radio access networks. Then in the baseband side, we launched Ponente, Levante, and Lodos, very high capacity, high connectivity baseband boards. This is about the cell connectivity, subscriber connectivity, data throughput, scalability, also power consumption for that matter.
We were already the market leader in baseband, and this will just extend our leadership on the baseband side. AI and ML has also come not just in the MantaRay SON product or in our own operations, but also in our R&D, but also in our services, processes, and tools together with digital twinning. Wavence, our microwave radio product family, happens to be the best microwave that we have had in my 28 years in this company. I started in microwave radios on this campus back in 1996. We've never had this good a microwave radio product. The best ratio of output and input powers or the best energy efficiency, the longest distances with E-band, integration with base stations, integration with the network management system is just a fascinating product.
Then, as energy efficiency is so important, not just in the base station or in the microwave radio, we have also worked on the energy efficiency improvements of the site solutions. So instead of having many separate cabinets, we have all-in-one super energy efficient cabinets as well as zero footprint sites with no cabinet whatsoever. And then finally, we have the AnyRAN collaborative advantage where we started working with the leading hyperscalers, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, as well as the server makers, Dell and HPE, to make our Cloud RAN work like a dream in their data centers, in their private or public clouds, as well as the servers in case the CSPs or the enterprise want to build Cloud RAN using these data centers or servers. So a couple of examples or demonstrations of the leadership, just little tidbits from here and there.
Of course, we take great pride in beating competition with the carrier aggregation because that has been such a big topic in 5G. It impacts the throughput, the overall cell capacity. We have had this lead now since, what, 2021 in the marketplace. So we were the first to introduce 5-component carrier aggregation or 5 CCA across 5 TD D and FDD carriers in sub-6 GHz. In the millimeter wave, we have extended the cell range to 11 kilometers, reaching still 2 Gb per second, which is great for those cases where operators need more than a few hundred meters or want to use millimeter wave for fixed wireless access. For fixed wireless access use case, you either need to have ideally a dedicated spectrum band or a very wide band where you can then play with that for fixed wireless access and mobility customers.
Or if you don't have that, then or if you run out of capacity in such midband TDD, then you might want to go to millimeter wave. So this is, again, helping our customers to make the most out of 5G. And then last, already I mentioned this 12 km E-band microwave radio distance. So moving on to ESG, we have been recognized as one of the world's most ethical companies by Ethisphere now seven times in a row. And this is something that not all of our competition can claim. Nothing similar can be claimed by some of our competition. With Orange and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, we've been working on recycling circularity, equipment refurbishment in Africa. Our Oulu base station factory has been able to increase their capacity by 250% without increasing energy consumption.
Most of our manufacturing is done by EMS partners, but we have two factories of our own, the Oulu and the Bangalore factory, which is where we hone the product for volume or the design for the volume production for our EMS partners. Of course, you have the Habrok and the new baseband Levante, Lodos and Ponente cutting the power consumption or improving the energy efficiency, but cutting power consumption by 50%. Last, it's about the safety because in our business, there's work at height in the towers. There's travel to the sites, distant sites or traffic, and then, of course, working with electricity. We have to be particularly prudent about how we manage the safety, especially with our scope three responsibility. We have made 120 senior leader safety tours this year against a target of 40.
Personally, I made my two trips to two sites in the outskirts of Bangalore, and it was just fascinating to meet the workers, audit their safety equipment, their harnesses, see their digital tools, see all their certification and documentation. It's just fascinating to be on the ground. So here's just some leading analyst firms' quotes on what they think about our portfolio. I'm not going to read this out for you. This is about the RAN overall, the radios, the baseband, the chips, and they all say that we've been taking market share because of the strength of this portfolio. Let's keep up the pace because time is running, and we get to the revamped strategy to capture the long-term opportunities after the base that we have built.
So we have been revamping our strategy, rebaselining our operations for the new market reality, taking action to protect profitability as well as the R&D output. This is one of the most important slides that I have today, so bear with me. So we've been rebaselining the operations for this new market reality by focusing especially. We started planning this when we saw that the market decline this year is going to be steeper than anybody thought. This is about focusing mainly on the support functions, headcount reduction and cost reduction in the support functions. In SG&A, if you take G&A, it's just about everything. It's finance, it's HR, it's IT, it's real estate, it's really everything. In S&M, it's marketing where we can be a lot more efficient on the marketing side.
In sales, and I'll come back to the operating model change, it's about management, reducing management layers, reducing all the sales internal support functions. And what we rather do is we protect the frontline account managers and have better resource allocation of the account managers, and then, of course, also better incentivization as opposed to one size fits all across all of Nokia. I'll come back to that. And 80% of all of this cost reduction is expected to be achieved by end of 2025. And even in R&D, there's some reduction, but it's really focused on the R&D internal support functions. There's a lot of R&D internal support function where we can streamline and also balance some of the between some of the competence areas and R&D sites without really impacting the R&D output.
So what we do is we protect the capacity we have in people writing specifications, developing chips, developing rest of hardware, coding software, integrating hardware and software, testing the products. That's the hardcore. That's what you should really do. It's like anybody else. They better help these people or not be there. And it's not only about the cost reduction, but also in our services and R&D operation, and actually across the board, we expect to get further productivity improvements with further digitalization, remotization in the case of services delivery, further use of digital tools, the digital end-to-end landscape, and in R&D with GenAI. Very important. We've had interesting trials running across a couple of hundred people exploring the usability and the benefits of using GenAI in our R&D operation.
And then we have the supply chain cost efficiency, especially now in the aftermath of the semiconductor supply crisis and the supply constraints and all of the inflationary things across freight and logistics and everything else that you might have. And that's also part of the net working capital rotation improvement, which is part of the program. It's not the only part, though. Moving to the third pillar. So we are integrating now the sales force from our customer experience to the mobile networks business group. Fundamentally important. So far, we have had a shared sales force. And this really marks the last step in this transformation of the operating model for this part, well, the latest step, I should say, because the other one is the autonomy.
This marks the point, one of the development items after Pekka and Marco came on board, and we moved away from the matrix organization to rather P&L responsible business groups, which are organized and whose scope is based upon how our customers are actually buying. So what we do here is we basically bring customers and salespeople closer to the product people and vice versa. So the aim is to improve customer intimacy, speed up decision making, make better quality decisions, be able to make better contracts, be able also to accelerate our strategy implementation when we diversify from CSP customers to the non-CSP segments, meaning the enterprise and the defense. And we know we're going to get higher sales and marketing efficiency here. And then as the last one, it's the commercial capability.
Increased focus on profitability, terms and conditions, all the different things that impact our net working capital rotation capabilities, and being able to also price based upon the portfolio value. When you have competitive products and services, you don't have to discount just to be in the race, which was perhaps the case back in 2018 or even 2019. So let's move then on and look at R&D. This might be a familiar slide to you from our previous webcasts. Here's an update. So what you may remember is that over the years, we have been increasing 5G R&D headcount. But not only that, we have increased dramatically the productivity in our 5G R&D, meaning that we got a huge boost in the overall R&D capacity, R&D output, which helped us accelerate and catch up competition.
And by the way, there's a certain limit to how far you can go because this industry, to some extent, is governed by the semiconductor or the silicon technology. So you can't really have 1 nanometer when there's only 3 nanometer chip available or the 3GPP standard. You cannot make some of the features before they have actually been standardized in 3GPP. So what you have to do is you have to be in the lead in this, but you can't get too far ahead. Now, what you can also see is that we have had some headcount reduction. We have let the attrition run, and we've done some active balancing between the competence areas and R&D sites because of the fact that we started to see the weakening of the addressable market during this year.
You remember, and this was part of one of the earlier presentations, we thought still entering this year in Q4 2022 that MN's addressable market would grow by 5%. And MN says more than that because we knew we're going to be taking share. And now the latest view has been that this market is declining by 9%. We decline less than that because we are taking share, but quite a dramatic difference. And it sure paid off to be prudent here and manage the cost, manage the headcount and the cost in R&D. And going forward, we expect, like I said, to achieve further productivity gains with GenAI in particular in product development.
So let's get to the next point, which is about this cost reduction and profitability improvement program, which is reducing the level or the volume of sales required to develop to yield double-digit operating margin from EUR 11.5 billion to EUR 10 billion. So back in 2021 and 2022, the Mobile Networks turnaround program had led to sales in the range of 10% and sorry, EUR 10 billion and operating margin of 8% and 9%. So that was back in 2021 and 2022. The rolling four-quarter operating margin achieved 9.6% in the third quarter of 2022. In 2023, the market declines, as said. Our sales decline as well, but less than the market. And then there's also a significant change in the mix this year. So less North America, more India, all of which then led to the most recent guidance that we gave, which is 6%-8% operating margin this year.
With this normalized cost structure of 2023, we would require EUR 11.5 billion of sales to achieve at least 10% operating margin. With the cost reduction and other profitability improvements that we have started to implement, this would now come then to EUR 10 billion, so down by EUR 1.5 billion. This is, of course, important because of the market decline in 2023, the modest growth, the 1% CAGR that I said about the MN addressable market going forward, as well as, of course, in order to cope with this AT&T decision. If we look at how we serve our customers, we are, of course, helping our customers secure their user experience when 4G networks are congested, so offload traffic to 5G. We are helping them densify the networks, improve coverage, improve indoor coverage.
We help them with 5G standalone also to improve coverage, shorten the latency, enable them to launch new services, which would be required in 5G Advanced, of course. Voice over New Radio or VoNR would help reduce the call setup times. Then there's the refarming of using the old spectrum for 5G because it's more spectrally efficient, more energy efficient. There's network slicing, which is about protecting the user experience of both the mobility customers and the fixed wireless access customers if you have FWA deployed, or to guarantee the network performance for the enterprise customers in cases where they would be competing for network resources with the rest of the customers. And then there's 5G Advanced, which has XR improvements. There's URLLC and RedCap, like I said. There's drone improvements, very important.
There's AI and ML improvements, non-terrestrial network improvements, which is a fascinating area where we work, for instance, AST SpaceMobile backed by AT&T and Vodafone and others. Then what is not even on the slide is what Raghav was talking about, which is Network as Code, programmable networks. The reason why it's not here, it's in Raghav's patch. It's his business, but it helps me because it helps operators better monetize their investments in mobile networks. It's one of the hottest, if not the hottest topic that we discuss with our operators nowadays, Network as Code, the API exposure, which, like Raghav says, is not really a business to consumer like the CPaaS, but rather business to business. And it's a tremendous opportunity for the operators to be better in monetizing these networks if they just play it right.
Of course, we want to be part of creating the technology to help them do exactly that. So then we have some news for you. So private wireless, as I said, campus wireless led by CNS, WAN led by mobile networks. And the sort of base and a very solid base for all of this is really that we lead private wireless in both segments with the Nokia end-to-end solution and with all those capabilities of converging OT and IT and wireless for the benefit of our customers. So that's the basis. But then we also started to work with the server makers and hyperscalers because we foresaw that it's conceivable that there will be enterprise who will want to run on-prem or in some private cloud, OT and IT with, say, AWS, for instance, in a private cloud.
But if they do that and they have private wireless, then we should have Cloud RAN running in that same AWS Outpost server, as an example. Or if you have enterprise who are building the networks with themselves or with a systems integrator, probably, then if they want to use servers from HP or Dell, our Cloud RAN needs to run like a dream. So that was the second step. And now the third step is here. This is new. We're expanding our customer reach in private wireless in the following way. We were approached separately at different time by industry leaders, formidable companies like Cisco, or specific, not like, specifically, Cisco, Microsoft Azure, and HPE, who made their Athonet acquisition.
They said that they have customers who need private wireless and customers who want to work with Cisco or HPE or Microsoft, but they need high performance RAN from a tier one supplier. So that's where we come to play. So we have now struck partnership deals with them. We are developing the go-to-market with them and their MSPs, the managed service providers, the VARs, the value-added resellers, the system integrators, their sales channel. And we have progressed very well with the interoperability testing so far. We're ramping the sales channel, the sales capabilities, the supply chain, and the pipeline is developing quite nicely. So this will augment our access to the private wireless market with the enterprise. Very important. And by the way, not in any particular order. These are all formidable companies with great capabilities, great customer base, great technologies.
They have positioned themselves extremely well in this space. They are not in the same basket. It's just that we are super proud that we have been selected by all three. Another piece of news is what we're doing in the defense segment. So you can say that there's three domains in communication networks in the military, in the defense. You have the strategic infrastructure, which is the big home bases. You have the operative bases, the deployed forward bases, and then you have the tactical connected operations. So three layers in the hierarchy or the architecture, if you will. And traditionally, Nokia has been supplying IP MPLS, IP routing, optical networks, and microwave radios to this strategic, the big home base, the big military bases. Lately, we have also started with the private wireless for both the strategic and the operative segments.
Now we are expanding to the tactical communications. Expanding to tactical, it basically means that it's doubling the addressable market in defense communications for Nokia because one half of the market is in strategic and operative, and one half of the market is in tactical. Today we announced acquisition of Fenix Group, who is specializing in this type of tactical communications. We have a nice complementary nature of our base station technologies, our 3GPP technologies, and what they can bring to this equation. It's very interesting that the military or the departments of defense, the ministries of defense, they see the performance gap and the cost gap between the traditional military solutions or proprietary communication systems and 3GPP in wireless. So they see the big gap in the performance.
It's not realistic to assume that we could replace all of that technology with the 3GPP wireless, but it's a complement. 3GPP wireless, which has been honed for cost efficiency and performance for the past 30 years, is a good complement to the existing systems. Moving on, another piece of news. So we're back in Germany. Some of you may remember that we lost this account somewhere during our dark days. Must have been 2016, somewhere there. But when we started the mobile networks turnaround program, I went to Bonn, to Deutsche Telekom head office, and I promised to keep them up to date about our progress. And one year ago, we announced that we are working on a commercial trial with Deutsche Telekom or T-Mobile in Germany. Now this is about the wide area commercial network. And why is this remarkable? It's remarkable in many ways.
First of all, T-Mobile of Germany has the biggest radio access network in all Europe. Second, it tells you something about the competitiveness of Nokia's portfolio and capabilities because this was a competitive process. Third, this is a true Open RAN deployment where we work with Fujitsu using some of their radios. And then this is a true multi-vendor network. Don't forget that in the recent years, Deutsche Telekom has been using Ericsson and Huawei in the German network. And fourth, of course, it's a win back. So we started working on this already in 2019. Moral of the story, you never give up, and you can win back customers that you once lost. So starting, no, actually, we still have the Open RAN piece. So yeah, I mean, we have obviously been a leader in commercializing high performance Open RAN all these years.
I mean, with Docomo, who is our biggest Open RAN customer to date, we passed the system acceptance. We're deploying Open RAN. We're connecting to Fujitsu and NEC. This is the combination of the different configurations. We have contributed more to the Open RAN specifications than any other company. We still co-chair three of the 10 working groups. We have collaborated with all the companies that you see in the middle or the key server makers, hyperscalers, the founders of Open RAN, the CaaS software suppliers. If it's Open RAN and Cloud RAN, the CaaS layer should be an open one like Red Hat or VMware or OpenStack and not the supplier's proprietary CaaS layer, like you see in some cases. And we have already connected our DU and CU to five different suppliers' radio units.
That's more than anybody else has done, five different radio units from Fujitsu, Mavenir, Samji from South Korea, and two more. And now, of course, the landmark deal with Deutsche Telekom. So coming to the end, the key takeaways, and it looks like, again, Mobile Networks is keeping its budget or staying ahead of the schedule. This is what we do in R&D nowadays. We're rather ahead of the schedule. So despite these short-term challenges in the market, the long-term demand for high performance radio access networks remains, and we have tremendous capabilities in this domain, in this technology. We are investing in the new growth areas and in new growth, especially the private wireless for enterprise, for defense, Cloud RAN, and Open RAN. The cost reduction and the other profitability improvements reduce the sales volume required for us to deliver 10% operating margin to EUR 10 billion.
It's not like we want to be at EUR 10 billion, but if you just look at how this market declined this year and you look at the modest estimate for the coming years, 1% CAGR, you better do that. That's the right thing to do because we are certainly committed to achieving that 10% in the long term. You heard that our 2026 guidance is 6%-9%, but the long term after that has to be, of course, 10%. And as the number two supplier in 3GPP wireless, we are, of course, strongly positioned to make the most out of this market with all its peculiarities and in particular in these particular segments that we were talking about. So it's about the strategy pillar of Nokia, number one, where we take share in the CSP space. We've done some of that.
Number two, we want to increase the share of enterprise to reduce the dependence on a few large CSPs, if you will. It's about actively managing the portfolio, which is about the Bolton acquisition that we made with Fenix Group and on and on and on. And I have the ESG there as the last one because I wanted to say that it's as it is important to us, not only because it would be good for the planet or the humankind, but because we believe it's good for the shareholders. So thank you for listening, and I think we are now good for some Q&A.
Thank you, Tommi. So we'll now move to the Q&A session again, and I think we're going to welcome another table back on stage for Tommi. A silent table. A silent table that just appears. But we'll take the first question from Andrew.
Andrew, please go ahead.
Thank you. Very interesting presentation, Tommi. I'm struck by sort of the level of investment you've made and the progress you've made in terms of the product portfolio over the last how many years over here. Sorry. And sort of just interested in terms of the customer side of it. Clearly, a few years ago, we were talking about the Verizon loss, which was a big frustration to you at the time, but you weren't able to compete in terms of the product there. You fixed that. You've lost AT&T, and yet they're taking the unusual step of giving you a quote to plug in your presentation, and you're making the very clear point that it wasn't technology-driven or anything. It was AT&T's sort of, I think you said, commercial considerations. So price.
And yet, further on in your presentation, you're saying, "Well, we've invested in the product. We've got great technology. We don't have to give this away anymore. We can value price based on the value of the product." Doesn't the AT&T decision show that that's actually not the case? And how does this industry sort of stop just sort of going down that slippery slope now that one of the biggest CSPs in the world has made this decision?
I wouldn't draw a corollary there. And again, the reasons of AT&T decision are very specific to AT&T. Like Pekka said, financial. You said price, but I would say financial. I mean, again, a lot has been said about this topic, but if you look at the network that they have today, one third is supplied by Nokia, two thirds by Ericsson. It needs to be modernized.
5G needs to be expanded. We all know that the U.S. still has way to go in 5G. And if an operator ends up or concludes ends up in a situation or concludes that they have to go single supplier, then with that split, what do you think is going to happen? And I wouldn't draw the conclusion then as to what would this mean for the rest of the market or the competitiveness or the competitive nature of this market. I think Pekka said it well, that radio access networks market has always been competitive, and it will remain competitive. If you look at the big picture, we're actually seven different base station makers that came together: Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, Alcatel, Lucent, Panasonic, and a little bit of Nortel as well. We have been the consolidator because of the new competition that came from Huawei and ZTE.
And not always completely symmetric and fair, but okay, life is not fair. So that was the consolidation. Now we have a situation where many countries have banned or restricted the market share of the so-called high-risk vendors, and there will be more of that we can expect. There will also be the impact of restrictions or sanctions restrictions to access to silicon, leading silicon, which will impact product performance and characteristics. So this will give an opportunity to us. And at the same time, I think it's fair to say that some of the smaller Open RAN challengers have had less progress than people would have thought five years ago. And all this put together, I believe that we will be in a better position going forward to sell at good prices or better prices than we were in the past if you put all of this together.
But then you have things like market mix and market size and all these things that ultimately impact the operating margin. Today is too early to comment on that beyond what we said.
Okay. Do you want to go ahead, Felix?
Thanks for the presentation, Tommi. Felix Hendriksson from Nordea. I think in the past Nokia investor days, the group has sort of taken pride in requiring the return on capital employed to be greater than the cost of capital for each business group to justify their position as a part of the group. So my question is that do you think that threshold will be met in the coming years once the AT&T loss will be a drag for your profitability?
I think it's too early for me to comment on the ROCE of mobile networks today.
We will probably come back to that topic then in conjunction with the Q4 earnings. It's too early today to say that. But I will say that we have been, as we turned around Mobile Networks, we have been meeting the requirement. Looks like Marco wants to add.
Yeah, I just want to comment. You're totally right, and that requirement stays as well. So going forward, and this is one reason why Tommi and his team is taking a lot of decisive actions now when it comes to cost base and also aiming for double-digit operating margin going forward. So we haven't given up that requirement.
Do you want to go to Sami next?
Sami Sarkamies, Danske Bank. I think you've been very open today. Thanks for that. I would have a bit more of a housekeeping issue.
We know that you still have 2.5 years left with your contract with AT&T. So how do you see that playing out? Any sort of forward-looking comments you can give on how that customer relationship will develop in the future years?
Yeah, I cannot go to the detail of what we are discussing with AT&T, but good catch. I mean, it is less than five years ago since we signed a five-year contract with AT&T, and we are still in negotiation with AT&T as to how to execute the contract to the end. So that's still being negotiated. Too early to make any assumptions. Thanks. And if you want to go to.
One thing I can add while the microphone is being passed is that, of course, for mobile networks, we also supply things other than 5G to AT&T: microwave radio links and then femto access points, the AT&T Cell Booster and AT&T Cell Booster Pro. So it's, of course, the biggest part of the business is macro RAN. Hey, minun nimeni on Frank Karniemäki. Could you help us understand, is the customer behavior different between CSPs and enterprise and in defense? So do they appreciate different things in your hardware and software?
Yeah, it is very different because and, of course, it's fundamentally different because it's not their business. I mean, for CSPs, the business, from my perspective, the business is mobile connectivity, enabling people to call one another or access internet using wireless devices. So that's their business. That's not the business of the enterprise.
The enterprise are in mining or manufacturing or whatever they do. And for them, private wireless is an enabler. It's part of the machinery. And so it's a very different nature. They want solutions that work, and they don't have organizations that want to make science out of slicing and dicing the network to the smallest cube and trying to run eAuctions, reverse eAuctions on the cubes. So they value, relatively speaking, relatively speaking, they value more quality and performance and the outcome than the purchasing process. And you believe this is a sector where you are even more competitive than?
Yeah, we are. We are definitely more competitive there for a number of reasons. It's a question of the trusted networks.
It's a question of, again, as they want solutions and they don't have the purchasing or engineering organization to buy the different pieces from all over the place, this is where the end-to-end actually works. So you have our core, our RAN, our IP switches. You have the end-to-end actually works there better than it works with the CSPs.
Thank you, Tommi. Thank you. We'll take our next question from Artem. Artem, go ahead.
Yes, Artem Beletski from SEB. Maybe a question regarding to AT&T and the O-RAN evolution, so to speak. Do you think that going forward, for example, bigger operators would be opting in O-RAN world for one, basically single main supplier, and they'll look at some additional components to it?
Yeah, good question. Now, we have obviously, after this decision by AT&T, we have been talking to our customers, starting from the biggest ones and moving on.
And frankly, they have been surprised. Most of them don't understand why. Some people say that there's a dichotomy. Dichotomy? Dichotomy. Dichotomy. Dichotomy. Thank you. Dichotomy. So in going sole supplier and Open RAN. The reality, if you look at how this works, is Open RAN is about supplier diversity. It's primarily about being able to combine one supplier's DU and CU with another supplier's RU. There have been some other aspirations of splitting CU into two parts and DU into two parts and all kinds of things, but that's the primary thing. That's rather about introducing more suppliers than less. There's no need to go sole supplier today in order to start working on Open RAN. So it's a bit unusual.
If you look at the way how operators behave in these big access networks, wireless access or radio access networks or even fixed, for that matter, in the very largest networks, actually in China, the biggest networks in the world, they have four or five suppliers of radio in the same network. In the very biggest networks outside of China, they typically have three suppliers or two. You get into the medium size, and then it's one or two. And then when you get to the small operators, then it's one. Point being that there's a balance you have to strike between the fixed cost element of having several suppliers to manage and then the commercial benefits that you get through competition and suppliers being on their toes and that sort of thing. So that's why the small guys typically have only one supplier.
And I don't think this will really change with Open RAN. If anything, Open RAN will give the capability to then rather use the best of breed in any of these categories, be it radio unit or the DU and CU. I mean, we've seen cases where there are some very exotic radio unit or antenna systems that we don't have a business case for. The volume is too small. We don't want to do it. But there's a supplier in the market who does that. So by us combining forces, it's actually innovation, and it helps. But I don't think the overall policy will change.
Thank you, Tommi. Any other questions in the room? Joseph, maybe, Alexey?
Yeah, it's Joseph from Barclays. And just a question on your guidance for 2026.
I think you clearly mentioned that now you target to reach double-digit margin with EUR 10 billion of sales. Clearly, your guidance, the 6%-9% margin, is not double-digit, which means you're quite far from the EUR 10 billion in 2026. I just wonder, what is your kind of top line assumption for 2026 to reach that 6%-9%, and what are the different scenarios? And maybe in answering it another way, what's your assumption for the business growth other than AT&T? Because I don't know whether you consider that as part of your TAM, just the underlying assumption for the 2026 guidance, if possible. Thanks.
Yeah. Unfortunately, it is not possible yet to give any specific guidance on the top line or revenue for 2026.
So what we have said is that the operating margin would be 6%-9%, and then the long-term target then 10% or double-digit. So at least 10%. And what we think is that this AT&T decision is pushing out this 10%, achieving double-digit operating margin by one or two years or up to two years. Too early to say about the 2026. By the way, it's not like we would want to be at EUR 10 billion. It's okay to be more than that. Okay to be more than EUR 10 billion and be better than 10%, so totally allowed. But it's just that we are committed to getting to the double-digit operating margin in Mobile Networks. Might just not happen yet by 2026.
And I'll take a few questions from the webcast. So what does the loss of AT&T mean for your pricing leverage?
Other US customers like T-Mobile, what does the advent of larger deployments of O-RAN mean for the stickiness of your future contract wins in RAN?
Yeah, so the first one, obviously, I'm not going to comment other than saying that it was, of course, interesting to see that T-Mobile US CEO, Mike Sievert, what kind of statement he made about how T-Mobile US values its two radio access network suppliers and how they believe in their supplier strategy. What was the second question?
Do you think seeing larger deployments of O-RAN will impact the stickiness of the RAN business going forward?
Yeah, complicated question.
I mean, the thing is that if you play this right, if you invest in technology leadership, if you have the capabilities, and we do, both in the DU and CU, which defines most of the system functionality, system performance, and in the RU, which is a little bit different ballgame, it's very difficult, actually, to make high-performance MIMO radio units and massive MIMO radio units that are cost-efficient, energy-efficient, have those bandwidths and all of this. If you're competitive in both, that helps you with the stickiness. And I'm confident. This was always the strategy that first we have to catch up competition and fix the base competitiveness of our 5G offering. In parallel, we worked on Open RAN because of the DOCOMO and our heritage of being the only established supplier who was supporting Open RAN when it was founded.
But we always thought that once you fix your competitiveness in baseband and RU separately, then you're ready for the big fight in Open RAN. And because Open RAN will happen with us or without us. And let's just face it. And our strategy in Open RAN is very simple. We need to win more, and we will win more from those companies who don't embrace Open RAN than we lose to the Open RAN suppliers when we open the interfaces. So the net impact has to be positive. Otherwise, why would we do it? So that's the strategy.
And a final question I'll take from the webcast. Obviously, there's been a lot of rumor and speculation around the competitiveness of Nokia's products over the last 10 days and questions, particularly around the cooling systems that we use. I thought you might like to address it head-on, Tommy.
Yeah. Ye ah.
So I mean, the article on fans, that was the canard of the year. It has nothing to do with AT&T's decision. Nothing. And I think I've said enough about the competitiveness of the well, I have said what I have said. But look at what Chris Sambar says. Ask anyone in AT&T what they think about our products and their competitiveness.
Thank you, Tommi. I think, ladies and gentlemen, that largely concludes today. I'm just going to welcome Pekka back up on stage just to make a few final remarks.
Thank you, David. I'll be very, very brief. First of all, thank you very much for joining us today, both here in Espoo and wherever you are. I actually wanted to leave you with one final message, and that is connected to what we have been going through today.
I mean, as you can see, there are many things that we are proud of. There's a lot of achievements. There's a lot of things that have gone to the right direction. Hopefully, we have been able to shed some light on the plans going forward. I may be stating the obvious, but I think it is important to say that there is one thing that we are definitely not proud of, and that is obviously the share price development. I am not happy with it. My management team is not happy with it. My board of directors is not happy with it. We believe that this company has to be worth much more than the share price is currently indicating. I hope that the actions that we have been presenting today will gradually start addressing this question.
This operational model development is obviously a very important part of it because, in addition to creating more agile businesses that will then execute faster and diversify faster to new segments, reducing our dependency on a limited number of the bulkiness of the limited number of large service providers, obviously, the other extremely important part of that is the increased transparency that we will be providing to investors. And if you take a business like NI, over EUR 1 billion operating profit, promising outlook, good, stable cash conversion, we really would like to ask the question that, okay, what should that type of business how should it be valued? Technology, once we close the Chinese deals, we are looking at their business that has a stable, good outlook, also over EUR 1 billion profit per year.
So that means that we will have two businesses in our hands with stable, over €1 billion profit per year, with good and predictable cash conversion. And then two slightly more complicated cases from this straightforwardness point of view, which is why we had the deep dives both in CNS and MN today. So this is the final thought I wanted to leave you with. We are not happy with the share price. We will not rest before we have been able to deliver better value to shareholders.
Thank you so much for joining us today. And those of you who are here in the room today, hopefully, you still can stay for a while and have a glass of wine with us. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Pekka.
And thank you, David, for joining.