Good afternoon, and welcome to Sabancı Holding Building Materials Day. Today, I have Orhun Köstem, Sabancı Holding Group Chief Financial Officer, and Burak Orhun, Building Materials SBU President, Sabancı Holding, to discuss about the segment's current and recent developments and the strategic ambitions going forward. Before start, I would like to draw your attention to our disclaimer on the screen right now and remind you that there will be a Q&A session at the end. With that, I will leave the floor to Orhun Köstem.
Thank you, Sule. Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone. Many thanks for joining us today in Sabancı Group's Building Materials Day. We're very happy to be able to talk to you about an important part of our overall portfolio. When I say important, that's the third largest contributor to Sabancı Group's net asset value, as you see. It does about 15% contribution to the total net asset value of Sabancı Holding, or if you look on a non-bank basis, of course, it's the second largest with about 24% contribution. So we're talking about a fairly important value contributor to Sabancı Group's overall portfolio. Not only that, we feel that our performance, the financial performance of the segment, is satisfactory.
If you first look at the bottom of this page, in the nine months of 2023 versus 2022, we've seen quite serious top-line growth. Having said that, we are also quite happy that our profit performance has been faster than the top-line growth, and therefore, we have looked at growth with margin expansion, which for those of you who listen to us quite frequently, would know that we at least say a quality growth is taking place, and that's what we expect to deliver. Now, here, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that there has been some changes happening in our network.
For example, last year, as you know, Kayseri and Niğde, two plants in Türkiye, have been divested, and these financials that you see at the bottom of this page have been adjusted, so you see this performance on a like-for-like basis. And as far as the EBITDA contribution of the business segment is concerned, if you look at the non-bank contribution of all the businesses, from 10% last year, the building materials segment's EBITDA contribution has increased to 15% between nine months of 2023 and nine months of 2022. So in addition to the net asset value contribution, the profit contribution of the segment has been quite substantial in 2023.
Given this good performance, given the fact that there has been a number of changes that has been taking place across the segment structurally, we have invited Burak Orhun, the Building Materials Group President, to tell us a bit about the strategy, the future, and the outlook for our building materials unit. Burak, welcome.
Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you very much, Orhun, and thank you, everyone, for joining Sabancı Building Materials SBU Investor Day. It's been actually a while, about two years, since we have done our event, a Building Materials Day, and as such, there has been a lot of progress and a good amount of changes within the group. So instead of going all one by one over each change, we wanted to prepare a short film, a short video, to share with you all the things that happened in the last two years, and then afterwards, we can discuss and share some more maybe information with you about how we see the future for our group. Let's have a look at the video together first.
What have we done and accomplished through our journey? We concluded the takeover process of Buñol, the most high-tech white cement plant in Europe. Thereby, we enriched our international investment network with Buñol and became one of the leading white cement actors in the world. As the first and only calcium aluminate cement producer in Türkiye, we invested $45 million to increase our production capacity, and we produced our first clinker in October. With this investment, we became one of the top three global actors in calcium aluminate cement production. We initiated the process of our investment in the USA. We will also be active in the gray cement market in the same region, with our investment in a 600,000-ton capacity cement mill. Each year, almost one-third of the cement exported to the US from Türkiye is supplied by Sabancı Building Materials Group.
With our port network, we are providing international cement supply, as well as our growing third-party services. Cementitious products portfolio dynamically managed between export and domestic market while operating at full capacity. We displayed the importance of R&D to us by establishing the Sabancı Technology Center in Munich. We developed an excellent product for airport runways, Flycrete, of which we have completed its international patent applications. With Flycrete, runways are now ready for flight within three hours. Ecocrete, the product of the new generation ready-mixed concrete family, stands out with its durability and high performance while reducing carbon emissions by at least 15%. For the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, the 1803 concrete product, which is produced with a special cement of Akçansa Çanakkale Plant and does not require maintenance for at least 100 years, was used.
At our Mersin plant, we built a solar-powered house by using 3D technology with our super white cement. We encourage our employees to develop ideas and solutions to strengthen the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. We proudly launched our sustainable product portfolio. We also took concrete steps in our renewable energy journey. In cooperation with Enerjisa, we established one of the largest solar power plants in Türkiye at our Afyon plant, and started generating solar power. To establish an energy efficiency at our Eskişehir plant, we cooperated with Enerjisa under the title, Energy of My Business, and initiated the investment process for waste heat recovery. With this investment, we will cover 25% of the annual electricity consumption of our plant. At our Çanakkale plant, we are generating 18% of our energy from green resources by using waste heat recovery and wind turbine.
At our three plants in Afyon, Ladik and Çanakkale, we succeeded in burning alternative fuel at more than 30%. In line with our sustainable product initiative in Çanakkale and Büyükçekmece plants, investment for handling fly ash was completed. The Science Based Targets initiative has accepted our commitment to our emission reduction target. In Fortune 500 sustainability research, both Çimsa and Akçansa placed on the list with grade A. Çimsa became the first cement company to receive a CDP A Score in supplier relationships rating. Akçansa increased its environmental, social, and governance ESG performance score to 87 as a result of the evaluation conducted by Refinitiv, an international sustainability rating company, and rose to second place globally among construction materials companies in ESG performance. Çimsa became the only building materials company in the top 100 among 12,000 companies in the world in the Refinitiv Diversity and Inclusion Index.
We are in the MSCI Small Cap Index together. Our total market capitalization exceeded $2 billion as of November 1. We thought that women could also be mixer operators at ready-mixed concrete plants and started trainings. Akçansa has placed 280 artificial reefs, 160 of which are three-dimensional, on the floor of the Marmara Sea to be home for sea creatures. As Sabancı Building Materials Group, we add value to humanity and society with every step we take and every project we do, for a better future with our experience.
Thank you for coming back again. As you can see from the video, as I mentioned, a good amount of accomplishments and changes since our last meeting. But since it's been almost two years now, I just want to refresh who we are and what companies build make up the SBU actually. So first of all, we have three companies. The first one is Akçansa. As you know, it's a joint venture, a long and successful joint venture with Heidelberg Materials. Three integrated gray cement plants, two international ports, through which we are highly export-oriented. In fact, one of the largest exporters of low-alkali cement to U.S. And the current market valuation hovers around $1 billion.
The next one is actually Çimsa, and Çimsa also three integrated cement plants. In Çimsa, we have on top of gray, we have white cement and calcium aluminate cement as well. In white cement, Çimsa is one of the key players. In fact, in the Western Hemisphere, excluding China, has the largest white cement capacity, actually, and as such, one of the key players. And through the latest expansion of calcium aluminate cement capacity, it's also becoming one of the key players in calcium aluminate cement market as well. Together with Afyon Çimento, which is also a public company and a subsidiary of Çimsa, the total market valuation is around recently $1.3 billion.
Then the next one is Sabancı Building Solutions, which you might remember we have established about two years ago, right before we acquired our Buñol plant in Spain. The purpose and the mission of the company was to combine the financial strength, the balance sheet strength of Sabancı Holding, with the operational strength and know-how of Çimsa, to help the growth of Sabancı Building Materials, actually, outside of Türkiye. But now we believe that Sabancı Building Solutions, that purpose or that task has been completed, and as such, you might have seen the news. On Friday, Çimsa has announced that it has acquired 10.1% of Sabancı Building Solutions shares, and as such, from now on, Çimsa will start consolidating all the financial and operational results of Sabancı Building Solutions.
We will be operating basically and managing all our cement operations outside of Turkey under one entity. I will touch that transaction in a minute on a separate slide as well. Under Sabancı Building Solutions, as you know, we have our Spanish plant in Buñol, white cement plant. We have one cement grinding station in U.S. and six terminals across various countries in—mostly in Europe, which are very, very important and to get closer to our customers and as such, increase profitability. Now, before we go any further, I would like to touch briefly on how we see the global cement world as of today. So first of all, when we look at on the demand side.
To fight inflation, as you know, the policy rates are increased globally, and as such, that dampened the investments, the construction, meaning also cement demand. So going forward, throughout 2023 and going forward into 2024, we are expecting stable to negative growth actually across the world for cement, but that depends also a lot actually on the region. So for example, when we look into U.S., proves to be one of the more resilient regions, and as such, it has grown in 2023, and we expect it will further grow and continue to grow in 2024 as well. However, when we look at the next region, China is unfortunately one of the problematic regions because of the real estate crisis, and which also lowered the demand for construction materials as well as for cement.
The low cement demand continued in 2023, and we expect it will continue so in 2024 as well. But the low demand in China not only causes problem for demand specifically, but also causes problem for supply side as well, which I will touch in a second. Come to Europe, we know Europe is lagging in terms of economic growth, and mainly because of the monetary tightening to fight inflation again. So we see the impacts on the cement and construction materials overall as well. So we expect the low demand to continue as well in 2024. Coming to our country, Türkiye, we had a very good year in terms of growth, in terms of cement growth in 2023, for various reasons, including the earthquake impact, some of the urban transformation projects, some infrastructure projects, et cetera.
But especially in the second half, especially recently, because of the interest rate increases, policy rate increases, we see some early indications that 2024 will be maybe not as fast growth as 2023. The early indications include housing sales and construction permits, which we observe coming down, actually. So for 2024, we expect more or less stable cement demand for 2024. Now, coming to supply side, unfortunately for Türkiye cement industry, the supply issues faced by this industry, they are mainly on the supply side, actually. So the first one, new capacities are coming online across the world, including Türkiye. In Türkiye, we have about 10 million, around 50 million tons excess capacity as of today, but we expect another 5-6 million tons additional capacity coming online within 2024.
As such, the excess capacity will increase to 20 million tons. Now, if you look outside, though, in our traditional export markets for Türkiye, meaning Europe and Western Africa, we see that Northern African, Middle Eastern, and even Asian players are becoming more and more competitive, mainly because of the subsidies they are receiving in their home countries, energy subsidies, as well as the very low freight rates. Also driven again by the, Chinese economy slowing down, which has an impact on the global trade. Speaking of Asia, Vietnam is something and a country we need to underline because Vietnam is the largest exporter of cement, in the world, but it used to export everything to China.
Now, with the Chinese demand coming down, it's looking for new, distribution channels, new markets for itself, and as such, reaching to Europe and to U.S. East Coast, where, it has not been before. So, overall, weak demand combined with, excess capacity overall, overall, impacting price resilience globally. So when we look at for Sabancı Group, we are actually working full capacity, and we will continue working full capacity at our plants as well as our terminals. However, as I mentioned, price resiliency, because of oversupply issues, seems to be the major challenge, for the upcoming year.
Now, we talked about the cement market global, but I want to elevate ourselves a little bit and maybe talk also for the macro trends we see in the construction materials world, because at the end of the day, we are looking not just for 2024, but for the next five years, how we want to shape the portfolio. So when we look at the macro trends, we really see three main trends ongoing in the construction materials. One, green construction. The consumers want low carbon materials to be used in the construction, as well as they want the construction to be done in a sustainable fashion, meaning less water usage and less labor usage as well. So which brings the digitalization and modular construction actually to the front page.
The second, consumers want to live, want the buildings to be sustainable through their life cycle, lifetime, meaning life cycle sustainability. And for that, obviously, that brings up the thermal insulation, external cladding, and water footprint, and businesses around these subjects to the front, and they become more important. And the last but not least, the consumers now want once the building ends its lifetime. The consumer wants the materials, the demolition materials to be reused again, recycled or reused again, and that's something, along with all the global cement players, we are working on very closely as well, mostly focusing on recycled concrete. There's one more trend, actually, that I have not put here, but I want to mention, which is the so-called intention gap.
While the consumer wants all of this, it is, we still observe that the consumer is not ready yet to pay the high premium some of these trends deserve or demand. As such, there's this willingness to pay gap. So whatever solution we come up with to address these trends, they need to be also affordable. That's actually the fourth trend I want to underline. So I'm not gonna go too much over the accomplishments, because I believe the video was very clear on that.
But, we are very happy about the first one, the Sabancı Technology Center, because that's exactly be the platform where we're gonna come up with new solutions in an affordable fashion, so that the, the consumers—we can address the concerns of the consumers, and so we can get closer to the consumers, basically. There are some, new investments we have already announced, including the U.S. grinding plant. We are adding additional capacity to U.S. in turn for gray cement grinding capacity. So with that capacity, or grinding capacity, actually, what I just described a minute ago as excess capacity in Turkey, which is a concern for the overall industry, it will become an opportunity for Sabancı Group, because that excess capacity, we will be able to utilize as our clinker source, basically, once this U.S. grinding plant becomes operational.
We are working together with Enerjisa on Eskişehir Waste Heat Recovery, and ultimately, our ultimate goal is for all our group to be energy self-sufficient, meaning at least in the next three-four years, 50% of the electricity we wanna produce through our own production or generation facilities, solar, wind, and waste heat recovery. And the last but not least, including also, not only in Turkey, but also in Spain, we are investing into solar power plants, so our Spanish plant actually becomes energy self-sufficient as well. And all, obviously, all these events are to help the profitability of our companies, but also to address the sustainability issue, which is one of the challenges that overall the cement industry is challenging. And sustainability has become—it's not an initiative for us anymore.
It's become a business as usual, part of our operations. In every decision we make, before even profitability, we make it the sustainability criteria, and then together with sustainability, how we can generate more margins and more profitability from the sustainability initiative or product, et cetera. Obviously, these are recognized for both by Akçansa and Çimsa, through third parties. For example, Akçansa... Actually, Akçansa increased its Refinitiv ESG performance to 87, which is one of the highest ones actually in the list. It's actually sixth place, second globally across construction materials. And Çimsa, for example, is listed, is the first and only cement company listed in BIST 25 Sustainability Index. I wanted to mention that, the alternative fuel usage ratio, because that's one of the reasons or tools we use to achieve our sustainability targets.
Over the years, we have taken the necessary steps to increase our alternative fuel usage ratio, much higher than Turkey, which is around 10% on the average in Turkey. Ours is 26%, but it's even slightly higher than the 25% average among global cement players. For the coming years, we are actually planning 30%. We can even go even higher. Technically, we can do that, but lack of alternative fuel or limited availability of alternative fuel in Turkey, because RDF, refuse-derived fuel, et cetera, import is limited in Turkey. As such, we are limited by the availability of alternative fuel here in Turkey. Now, after going all this on, on listing what we have accomplished so far, where we are today, so what are we planning to do for the next five years?
What is our strategy roadmap for Sabancı Building Materials group? So I have shared this vision before. Let me repeat it again. Our high-level vision is to move from pure cement to building materials, from local to Glocal, and from gray to green. I believe that sums up really nicely on what we want to achieve in the next five years and what we mean by Glocal. Let me actually open that up a little bit. We define Glocal as having local skill sets or capabilities within a global framework. So our terminals, for example, or our new U.S. grinder capacity in U.S., is a perfect example for us, moving from local to Glocal. Now, we have based, or we are basing our strategy for the next five years on three pillars, really.
The first one is we will maximize the value of our core business, which is the cement business. We will maximize the value of our core assets. Number two, we will transform the value of the portfolio by expanding into other non-cement businesses to diversify the portfolio in terms of product and in terms of sustainability, actually. And then the last one, the last pillar, is investing into future value, because we believe we have to start investing now to catch up some of the trends which will become a reality in the next 10, 15 years. And for that reason, we have a very focused R&D at our global technology center in Munich, and we are investing into venture capital and startups that are directly involved in construction materials or new construction methodologies or technologies.
Now, looking at the first pillar, how do we maximize value of the core? The first one is, or the first step is actually continuous, and I should add, ruthless network optimization. And under network optimization, I don't just mean assets, but also carbon and energy optimization. So when I say asset optimization, I believe we gave a good example of how to create value through asset optimization or what we call the portfolio reshuffling, because as Orhun also mentioned a minute ago, in 2022, we have divested our Kayseri and Niğde plants, not because they were bad plants, but they were actually landlocked and very limited export capabilities.
We have divested those assets for $123 million, and we are reinvesting those into A, Çimsa Americas, into our new US grinder capacity, and B, in Turkey, to our expansion of calcium aluminate cement capacity, which will... Both of these investments will strengthen our global footprint and increase our—so not only our gains or earnings will increase in terms of absolute value, but also the quality of earnings will increase because almost 100% of these earnings will come from hard currency, and the capacity expansion will make us among the top three producers of calcium aluminate cement globally. Another network or value creation through network optimization tool we have utilized is actually what I mentioned, is this structural change in the SBS ownership.
As of, as you can see on the slide, on the left, as of end of first half 2023, Sabancı Holding used to own 60% of Sabancı Building Solutions, and Çimsa owned 40% of the company. With our recent announcement on Friday, Çimsa acquired 10.1% of the shares, and from now on, as I mentioned, will consolidate operational and financial results, which will bring more optimization opportunities, more value added and bottom line increasing optimization opportunities, managerial efficiencies, as well as operational efficiencies. So all in all, with this transaction, we believe both Çimsa and Sabancı shareholders, shareholders, will see more value in the future as well. And I mentioned already the energy optimization as well.
This is a Çimsa example, but we are doing more or less the same actions and on Akçansa side. So as I mentioned, even today, we are procuring most of our electricity from renewable sources, but our aim is until in the next five years to be able to actually generate half of our consumption on our own through renewable sources such as wind, waste heat recovery, and solar. So going back to the energy strategy house again, we talked about the continuous network optimization. Second point is customer proximity in export markets. I mentioned our terminals help us a lot to get closer to our customers and as such increase our profitability margins. We want to actually expand on that. We want to increase our light, what we call light asset expansions. It can be terminal, it can be conversion warehouses.
In Europe and in various other countries, it can be in Latin America, et cetera, we are looking for different opportunities, but that will bring us closer to our customers. The third one is vertical integration. As we get closer to our customers, and as we know the market, for example, in the U.S., the idea is to go further down the value chain in areas we know, especially in ready-mix concrete. As you know, we know ready-mix concrete very well from Çimsa and Akçansa. And the next step on our value maximization for the core is in the export markets where we have presence, going down the further down, further on the value chain and expanding into ready-mix concrete. And the last but not least is commercializing sustainability and innovation.
We talked a lot on the sustainability, and we are doing a lot, and we have achieved a lot, and we will make sure that sustainability also pays off in terms of bottom line profitability as well, and creates value for all our shareholders of Sabancı Group. That actually means coming up with new products that are sustainable, as well as actually adds to the bottom line in terms of higher margin, and the customer is willing to pay for it, meaning it's also affordable. So Flycrete, for example, as shown in the video, is one of these examples. It addresses directly a concern of the customers. It's a sustainable product, but it also lowers the cost of the customer. And adds also to our margin. It's also a higher margin product compared to our other products.
So it's almost like a win-win-win product for the entire ecosystem. On the Akçansa side, we have all our green for cement and green for concrete products, which more or less help the same purpose. Coming to the transformation of the portfolio, we talked about maximizing the value of the core, but as I mentioned, a big task for us and a big initiative for us is adding non-cement businesses to our portfolio, so we can diversify our products, diversify the portfolio from sustainability perspective, and decrease the CO2 of our CO2 intensity. CO2 per revenue decrease, basically.
So for that, we are looking constantly for opportunities, and for sustainable building materials, we have, for now, we have prioritized insulation, roofing solutions, and prefabrication, which are pretty much in line with the macro trends I have shown you on a previous slide. Obviously, these are not written on stone, meaning if there are further opportunities, we can always look... We always do look into these other opportunities as well. But these are, as I mentioned, for us, priority areas. We have our pipeline, and we have looked in the past, in the last two years, to some, actually major opportunities, especially in the U.S. as well. Some of them actually, were in the news as well, showing Sabancı Group as one of the, as a potential candidate for, to acquire some of the assets.
Because of the macro volatilities in the world as well as in Turkey, we decided not to go forward, but I believe that's an indication that we are always looking, and we are ready to take the action if and when we find the right opportunity. For us to transform the portfolio, which in itself implies actually, the opportunity has to be a big-ticket item, because we cannot transform the portfolio by small-ticket transactions. And the last one, as I mentioned, is investing into the future value of this portfolio by investing into venture capitals, startups, and basically being on the forefront of emerging new technologies. So net-net, I just repeat our vision again: from pure cement to building materials, from local to Glocal, and from gray to green. Where do we want to take this under this vision?
As of today, our revenues are about 45% FX-based revenue. It's not bad, but we want to make this higher, take it at least to 60%-70%. As of today, about 20% of our revenues come from our international operations. We want to make this definitely higher. And maybe more importantly, only 2% of our revenues come from non-cement today. Definitely, we want to increase that with the transformation pillar I just explained. And at the end, we want to achieve a diversified and sustainable product portfolio. We really believe in this plan. Our main shareholders from Sabancı Board believes in this plan. We have a hardworking team day in, day out, actually focusing on this plan and working on initiatives to achieve this plan.
I certainly believe that we will be able to achieve this in the next, in the coming years, basically. So with that, I want to finish my presentation, and thank you again for everyone to join. I'll give the word to Sule for maybe Q&A session.
Thank you. Thank you, Burak Bey. That brings us to the end of the presentation. Now we can start Q&A session.
... So we have a couple of questions on the line. Let me start with the first one. We observed that both Çimsa and Akçansa shifted their volumes from export to domestic market in 2023. Do you expect that it will continue in 2024 as well? Could we say that export volume levels will stay same in 2024?
Thank you, Shula, and thank you, it's a good question, actually. I believe, yes, that is correct. We did shift both companies from export to domestic market in 2023, because the growth and the demand in domestic market needed that shift, basically, and we wanted to support our country rather than exporting. That, in a way, shows also the agility and flexibility of our companies, by shifting from export to domestic, and if need be, we can shift again from domestic. If there is excess lower demand here, we can shift again to export. For 2024, we expect the domestic demand, as I mentioned, around 24 levels. So stable demand, not too much growth, because there are increasing rates.
Investments are actually slowing down because macroeconomic policies are intentionally slowing down the economy to actually control inflation. Having said that, there are upsides as well to compensate, such as the urban transformation activities, which might start actually in—especially after the election. So we expect a stable demand. And the export versus domestic composition, we expect more or less to be the same in 2024 as well. However, as I said, we are agile and flexible. We can always shift from one to another, depending on the need, depending on where we can create more value, basically, for all our stakeholders, including Türkiye as well.
The second question is: What are your expectations in fuel and electricity prices in 2024? Is normalization observed in 2023 to continue and support margins in 2024 as well?
Thank you. Another good question. Yes, in 2023—actually, we ended 2022 at high levels, but throughout 2023, we observed the fuel and energy costs to come down. For 2024, we expect them to be around these levels, because as long as China, low demand and the impact on global trend continues. If China recovers, if somehow China shows a sudden recovery and starts to grow faster again, that the fuel and energy prices might start climbing up. However, that's not our base assumption. Our base assumption is that electricity as well as energy costs will remain around today's levels throughout 2024.
The next question: Is there any plan to merge Akçansa and Çimsa in the near future?
You know that both Akçansa and Çimsa have a totally different partnership structures, shareholder structures. They are both public companies. Akçansa is a very successful and a long-term joint venture with Heidelberg Materials, and they have different regions, different focus in a way. So at this point, in the short term, there are no such plans to merge these two companies.
Thank you, Burak Bey.
Sure.
The next question is: How do you make your projections about sustainable operating margins and operating income for next five years as Sabancı Holding? Do you believe cement sector is going to provide to holding growing cash flows?
Orhun, is that a question to you or to me?
Either way.
Okay, so first of all, for the Building Materials Group, if we respond as Building Materials Group, our operating margins, if anything, we expect them to go higher, because as we diversify our portfolio towards more sustainable products, which either are lower cost or demand and deserve a premium when we are selling on the market, that obviously has a positive impact on the bottom line and our profit margins. So we expect... And as we diversify our portfolio also to more sustainable and high value-added products, what I call the commercialization of sustainability and innovation, we expect our profit and earnings margins to slightly go up as well, along with that portfolio transformation. Maybe I can give you the word here.
Sure. Thank you, Burak. I think we believe, first of all, the example you see in the building materials, as far as the portfolio expectations going forward, it should give you an idea of what to expect across Sabancı portfolio as well. Here in the building materials, what we are talking about is two very successful companies, great, you know, domestic presence and operations, which they complement with exports, which is a, you know, sizable portion of their revenue. And today, we hope we have been able to tell a little bit about to you, as Burak was also explaining. On top of this base, we are providing new revenue streams for these businesses in niche value-added areas, growth outside of Turkey, and in many different ways. Now,...
And when we talk about, just to make sure, when Burak was talking about ESG or sustainability to be at the heart of our decision making, for us, at least from a financial point of view, this is ensuring our portfolio performance, profitability and value performance going forward, because our investments there, we believe, is going to mitigate any potential incremental costs we may encounter as we, you know, go in the next 3, 5, 7, 10 years. Now, you can take this and implement it in other segments, like, energy business. We have in a good base in Turkey with, you know, Enerjisa and the generation business of Enerjisa Üretim, and now we're complementing it with revenue streams outside of Turkey as well. Take our idustrial business, you know, Brisa, TEMSA, Skoda, joint venture.
These are great, let's say, Turkish-based businesses with exports, as well. And take Kordsa's business, who is an avenue for growth, especially after the composite acquisition a few years back, going forward. So the pattern is the same. We're looking at, obviously, sustainable growth of our profits and cash flow generation.
Thank you, Orhun Bey. The next question is, could you please explain about your actions on reducing carbon footprints?
Sure, Umutözür. Thank you very much for the questions. I've been waiting for this question, actually, because we are taking a good amount of actions, almost on par, maybe even better terms of the global cement players, actually. So for any global cement player, for any cement player, there are really certain ways, tools to reduce the carbon footprint. A, increasing the alternative fuel, meaning instead of coal and petcoke, using bio-based, fuels. B, renewable energy, as I mentioned, as we are doing. And C, reducing the clinker ratio and the cement we are producing, meaning releasing less CO2 by using less, limestone, basically, in our product. But...
We are doing all these steps, and we are, especially on the low clinker products, we have come up, and we are almost the market leader in promoting and bringing to our customers low clinker ratio products so that our CO2 footprint is reduced, not only ours, but overall for the ecosystem, basically. Both of our companies made SBTi applications, and these SBTi applications science-based target initiative applications, and these science-based target initiative applications basically sets the target to reduce the CO2 per cementitious material in line with the 1.5% global reduction target.
On top of that, obviously, so we, we are, we can and any global, as I mentioned, cement player, after doing all this to reduce the CO2 of the cement we are producing, there's really a certain level you can come down to. Afterwards, it's really new technology, meaning carbon capturing, storage, and utilization. So we are also working very hard as a group, not only building materials group, but as Sabancı Group, together with industrials group, energy group, and building materials, on carbon capturing projects, and not only carbon capturing, but utilization as well. Because carbon capturing methodologies and technologies are already technically and commercially available. However, the problem is what you will do with that carbon you have captured. And our country, unfortunately, is poor in terms of carbon storage sinks, natural carbon storage depositories.
So we have to utilize that, and that's what we are working on, how we can utilize that CO2 we will capture through, from our chimneys, from our kilns, such as in green hydrogen, for example. There are projects ongoing between our companies and with the authorities as well, through the hydrogen valley, to utilize some of the CO2 that will be captured at our plants, to produce green hydrogen. So, these are basically all the steps: reduce the clinker ratio, increase the alternative fuel, increase the alternative raw materials, and the nirvana of it all is invest into carbon capturing and utilization technologies.
Thank you, Burak Bey. Next question is, any color on the ML pipeline for SBS?
Sure. I already mentioned the three areas, insulation, roofing solutions, and prefabrications, that are as priority, priority areas. But again, these are not, just, only the three limits. I mean, if there are opportunities outside of areas, we are more than happy, and we do look into those opportunities as well. And the other, color maybe I can share is that we are looking for opportunities mainly in Europe and U.S. We are looking for opportunities that are above a certain size, such that they will have the capacity and capability to transform the portfolio in terms of contribution, revenue, as well as EBITDA contribution they will make....
First and foremost, they need to be in sustainable building materials, basically, so that we can diversify and balance in a way our portfolio. So these are the colors I can share maybe on the M&A pipeline. We do have all existing pipeline. We do work with investment banks together to fill in the pipeline and make it a living and breathing, let's call it, pipeline. But it will be not appropriate to share any names at this point. Thank you.
Next question is: What will be the SBS contribution to Çimsa financials, and what will be the leverage after share purchase?
So, after we add, after Çimsa starts consolidating SBS, which started actually as of Friday, we expect the earnings of Çimsa will go up around 25%, let's say 25-30% up, and that will be the contribution of SBS. That's excluding the new investment we are making in US. That's excluding the new Çimsa calcium aluminate cement capacity. This is just existing businesses, existing assets. On top of that, obviously, we will get a US grinder contribution, the new calcium aluminate cement capacity contribution, et cetera. And when we look at the leverage projections, they are, when we combine these two assets or these two companies on a consolidated fashion, the leverage ratio are still below acceptable levels.
I guess I can share numbers are still below 2x EBITDA levels, which for us and for Sabancı Group as well acceptable levels, which still gives room to us to optimize our balance sheet, basically.
We do not have any more questions. Just to remind, you can use the Q&A part on the bottom of the page. If you would like to send your questions, you can please use this tab.
Thank you.
Once again, if you would like to ask questions, you can use the Q&A part at the bottom of the page. So it looks like we have come to the end of the Q&A part as well. Thank you, thank you everyone for participating us today in Sabancı Holding Building Materials Day 2023. This day will be uploaded in Investor Relations website for your convenience, and of course, any follow-ups, you can contact Investor Relations team. Thank you very much again. Have a good day.
Thank you very much.