Well, good afternoon, everyone. Fantastic to see so many of you here in person. This is our first hybrid event, so let's see how it goes. I t's great to see so many people here. Welcome to everyone dialing in online as well. This is the BAE Systems ESG and Digital Intelligence overview. Just a little bit of housekeeping. Obviously no fire drills planned, and please keep and make sure your phones are on silent if at all possible.
Just as a bit of context then, following last year's deep dive and laying out on ESG and laying out many of our targets, policies and procedures then, the aim very much for today is to provide an update on the progress in the last 12 months and also to try and bring our ESG agenda to life a little bit. Some case studies, Tom is gonna dial in from the U.S. covering electrification and our technology advantages there, which is a real focus. A few videos. It wouldn't be a BAE Systems event without a few videos, so hopefully they will go smoothly. Just for everyone, I mean, you've all got printed packs. The packs are online as well.
There's a lot of in some detailed information in the backup tool, and actually we've increased our disclosure year on year. Just with regard to Q&A, we'll obviously take Q&A in the room, and we'll also have the ability to do Q&A online through the usual operator format. We've allowed a little bit of time at the end of each presentation to do so. I would say that today, if we could keep the questions to ESG and to Digital Intelligence only, please. Brad will say a few statements at the start of the second part of the presentation about how the business is placed and a few updates, but we'll be giving a fuller trading update on the fifteenth of November.
We aim to finish about 3:30 P.M. and we'll flex the timings as appropriate. With that, I'm delighted to hand over to our Chairman, Sir Roger Carr.
Well, thanks very much, Martin, and warm welcome to everybody in the room and indeed those that are joining us via the ether. I think as Martin said, we really hope this is gonna be a sort of interesting and an informative session, which is about our commitment and engagement to the whole delivery of the ESG agenda and the digital session, quite separate, but something equally important to follow. We've assembled, I think, a really good team today. We've got obviously, Charles is the CEO here. Tom Arseneault is on the line, and he'll be there for the whole of the event. Dr. Jane Griffiths is joining as non-executive director. Of course, she is chair of the ESG committee. Karin Hoeing here, who is responsible for actually making the ESG agenda happen, so no pressure.
For my part, I wanted to cover in about 15 minutes or so what I really do believe is an important case for value of the defense industry in general and of course, BAE Systems in particular. I also wanted to give you, I think, some insight into our board, the way it currently functions, and indeed will evolve over the next 12 months or so. Now, there's no doubt that as an investment proposition, support for defense ebbs and flows according to the assessment of national risk, and indeed the moral judgment of society on the industry itself. Clearly in recent times, the conflict in the Ukraine has thrown the need for defense and security into a much sharper focus, and the public perception to a much more supportive position.
Now, I've been fortunate to be chairman of this great company for the last, just over the last nine years. I believe today, what I felt when I first accepted the position, it is an industry that is sometimes misunderstood, but fundamentally a force for good. It helps governments deliver their prime responsibility in providing security and safety for their citizens, while simultaneously underpinning the prosperity agenda of nations with high quality, well-paid, sustainable employment. Naturally, not everyone shares this perspective. There are some that have a deep and passionate belief that all arms manufacturing is wrong, that defense contractors encourage conflict, not prevent it, and that irrespective of the economic benefit, there is a moral dimension that overcomes all favorable arguments. As I say, frankly, at all AGMs, their views are to be respected, if not always accepted.
In recent times, however, as you know, the case against defense has drifted into a wider group in the investment community whose agenda is to measure and judge the environmental, the social, and the governance qualities of all companies. On occasion, they have failed to adequately distinguish between the contribution of highly regulated, ethically led, and government-backed defense contractors to that of the independent and freewheeling arms dealers. It is a confusion that is dangerous and damaging to the reputation of some of the finest companies in the United Kingdom, and ultimately to their cost of capital. Their ability to invest and to attract the fine minds that are required to preserve the cutting-edge capabilities that are vital to the countries in which they operate. It's taken the war in Ukraine to recalibrate investor views on defense, to show that hoping for peace is not a strategy.
That geopolitical complacency is a dangerous mindset, and that ultimately it is only by having a strong defense capability that deters well-armed aggressors from initiating conflict. To those that believe the removal of the nuclear arsenal is a step in the right direction, I think the war in Ukraine has shown that the sacrifice of the nuclear deterrent exposes the country and empowers the nuclear aggressor. Without doubt, it underpins for the case for the UK's continuous at-sea deterrent. It's there to keep our foes in check. It also shouldn't take a war to wake up the West to the risks of complacency or to turbocharge the demands that NATO members must invest at least 2% of their GDP in their protection, rather than rely on the United States as a low-cost insurance policy. It shouldn't take it, but it did.
It shouldn't take a war for the investment community to revalue BAE shares by around 50%. Clearly, it has. It is vital that we remember peace is best preserved, as President Roosevelt said, "By those that speak softly but carry a big stick." The case for defense and security is not simply to be armed for the rainy day. It is to invest in the industrial umbrella that will build skills, secure employment, and provide prosperity while peace prevails. If I may, just a few facts and figures that demonstrate how significant the contribution that BAE Systems makes to both the prosperity and what used to be called the leveling up agenda in the United Kingdom, and indeed elsewhere in the world.
In 2020, according to Oxford Economics, we contributed over GBP 10 billion to UK GDP and around GBP 4 billion to exports, as well as supporting a total tax contribution approaching GBP 3 billion. We support 143,000 full-time jobs across the UK through a supply chain of about 5,000 companies, and invest more than GBP 1 billion in technology and R&D. This includes, naturally, our own capital as well as that of our customers and partners. We're committed to supporting young people, recruiting around 1,100 apprentices in the UK this year alone. It's a record for us, and making some significant headway in recruiting more women to make our company much more diverse.
We provide considerable in-kind support, working with local enterprise partnerships across the U.K. to develop the left-behind communities, and mentoring small businesses to help improve those that are far behind in productivity. We have a direct impact on the communities in which we operate. Indeed, because traditionally, military equipment sites were located out of cities and major towns. Some 40% of our employees are directly employed in the U.K. in the most deprived regions. We make an important economic and societal contribution wherever we are active, in the U.S. the Gulf, and Australia. Added to this, we're making real progress against our 2030 net zero carbon targets across our operations and developing some exciting sustainable technologies to support our route to net zero. As a board, our focus is not simply how much money we make, but indeed how we make money.
The board has been developed to ensure we do have the right combination of skill set, and I think most importantly, mindset, to discharge our obligations to all our stakeholders. From a governance perspective, we continue to meet best practice expectations with regard to gender and ethnic diversity. Let me emphasize, all selected on merit rather than simply box-ticking. We meet in person at least five times a year and electronically at least three times. Our board committees for remuneration, audit, and nomination are appropriately populated and rigorously managed. We organize regular site visits, town halls, breakfasts and dinners with high-potential executives, and our ESG committee has been active in overseeing that our connection with our employees is both in deed and word. I think COVID has taught us to communicate much more regularly and indeed more informally. We've used frequent video links to good effect.
From a business perspective, we have remixed the board skills that we need in keeping with the shape and the focus of the business. In this respect, we've added to the core experience of members with international, industrial, and financial backgrounds, but specializing now with capabilities in science, technology, and digital intelligence. We've strengthened our committees through the formation of the innovation and technology committee led by Dr. Ewan Kirk, who is a world authority on AI, and reinforced the strength and depth of our ESG committee under the very passionate leadership of Dr. Jane Griffiths, who you'll hear from a little later. Looking to the future, my own term as chairman of this remarkable company, I have to say, sadly for my part, comes to an end after a little over nine years in May 2023.
Succession planning under the leadership of Chris Grigg, a senior independent director, has secured an excellent replacement, Cressida Hogg, who will join the board to participate in the strategy meeting in November. That will be in parallel with Lord Mark Sedwill, who brings with him a wealth of international and government experience as the ex-head of UK National Security and, of course, the Cabinet Office. From May next year, we are on track to meet the new FCA board diversity targets, including a female chair, a 40% gender mix with one member from an ethnic minority background. Additionally, in keeping with UK government requirements, we have a British CEO, Charles Woodburn, and more than 50% of the board are British citizens, and that's something we must have.
Together with an outstanding executive leadership led by Charles, I am absolutely confident that this board will continue to be in excellent shape for the future. Additionally, given the unique and very special agreement we have with the United States, which enables us to own U.S. businesses, which are engaged in the most highly classified projects, we benefit from the advice, guidance, and oversight of the Inc. board, comprising members who have served at the highest levels in the U.S. government and military.
I would add that over and above all the strict legal rules, the regulations, and codes under which we operate, there is a human dimension whereby directors exercise personal judgment in decision-making as to what is morally acceptable and enable each to have secured a sound night's sleep in the knowledge that the right things are being done because they are the right things to do. In conclusion, I feel that our governance structures, our environmental commitments, and our societal engagements have been thoughtfully developed. They are strictly observed and rigorously policed. In the final analysis, I feel that only by government, industry, and the community, and investors being in single-minded lockstep on the value and values of the defense industry, can we hope to maintain the capability, underpin the prosperity, and preserve the peace that we all desire.
With that general outline of our view and our principles in the way we run the business, I'll now hand over to Dr. Jane Griffiths, who's gonna talk about the ESG side. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Sir Roger. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm delighted to be here, and I'd like to brief you on the key activities of the ESG committee, and what we've overseen over the last 12 months. Let me just recap first on who's on the committee. We have a really experienced group of non-execs. We've got Nick Anderson, Crystal Ashby, and Nicole Piasecki. Chris Grigg was also a member until recently, but he's now stepping down because he's got other commitments for BAE board. We do, reflecting the diverse picture on the board itself, also have a wealth of diversity on the ESG committee, both through sector experience, also gender and ethnicity. It's been really great to have Crystal Ashby joining the ESG committee.
She's an African American, and she brings obviously a unique perspective with her, which is really beneficial in terms of driving our ethnic diversity agenda within the company. When we have our meetings, obviously, the ESG members attend, but also Sir Roger attends. Charles also attends. Brad is also there and a number of other senior executives, and I think that really reflects the interest and commitment to ESG that this company has. If I move on to the role of the committee, obviously, the primary role of the committee is to provide oversight, challenge, and assurance of the company's ESG agenda and also the progress that we're making. At our meetings, we hear from senior management, obviously, content experts, and also external speakers come to educate both the ESG committee and also the board at times.
As Sir Roger said, we also use site visits and virtual meetings to engage directly with employees to hear their views, not only on topics around ESG, but topics that really impact their engagement within the company. Importantly, we approve the ESG related objectives and targets which form part of the executives incentives. For example, in 2022, both safety and diversity was set up as underpins or qualifiers to the overall award of the non-financial elements of the executive bonus. That is good performance in both of these areas is expected rather than rewarded. I think over the last year, what we've also done is establish a nice cadence of, you know, the company is proposing what goals it's wanting to achieve or driving to achieve. We discuss it at the ESG committee.
It then goes to the audit committee to make sure that what we are deciding upon can be measured and is auditable before it goes to the RemCo. That sort of good cadence has been established. The other elements, obviously, for the remuneration plan are covering the company's net zero plan, driving an inclusive culture, and maintaining and improving our reputation and rating with key stakeholders such as yourselves in the audience and online. The key areas of focus for the committee during 2022 are shown on the slide, and also our committee agenda is provided in the annex to this pack, so you can see what we're getting up to throughout the year. A recap of the key activity this year, if I take the ESG titles one by one.
For the environment, obviously the main focus has been on the Net Zero program, and its overview. I think it's now very nicely established within the strategy of the company, but also, embedded within financial planning overseen by Brad here, and also, relating to TCFD and climate risk reporting. We've also had external briefings, for the full board from PwC on climate, and I think that will be an ongoing picture within this committee that we continually have external people coming to speak and educating the committee on various aspects of ESG. If I move on to social, it's a very broad area, and the company is focusing on certain aspects that it considers to be important within the company. Those areas are diversity and inclusion, safety and well-being, employee engagement, and community impact.
If I take each one of those. Safety is definitely improving. It's something we continually need to keep a focus on. We were particularly pleased as a committee to see that there's a focus on well-being and mental health as well in the company. I think Karin may touch on that in her presentation. I think that's particularly important given the environment at the moment and the stresses on employees, not just in the workplace, but also in their private lives, particularly with the economy the way it is. I have had direct engagement with the safety teams in Australia and Saudi Arabia, and it's always very interesting to do that. They were very positive, very engaged, and it gives them an opportunity to provide us with information and hints of how they would like things to improve.
Very beneficial. Diversity, a topic close to my heart, is hugely important to the company. W e recognize that challenges of an engineering company, you know, can sometimes make it difficult to achieve the particularly gender diversity figures that we would like to. Progress continues to be made, and I know that Charles will talk about that. What we want to see is more focus maybe next year on ethnic diversity as well. As I said before, having Crystal on the ESG committee will really help us with that. In terms of governance, robust standards of governance are truly upheld by this company. It's essential in any industry, and particularly so in defense. We regularly oversee the anti-bribery and corruption program.
We see presentations from the company on that, and the full board recently received an overview of the ethics program and helpline. What we heard confirmed the fact that employees are really being made aware of the company standards, but are also highlighting any issues and feel free to do so, which is good to see. We're also keen to increase the input of external stakeholders' views to the committee, and we monitor ratings and we receive teach-ins, as I said, but it's important to us that we're recognized by the external community for what we do. External assurance is also important for the ESG data, and this year, Deloitte will provide external assurance over our carbon numbers. I think it's important, obviously, if we're disclosing these numbers, that they're assured externally.
In summary for that part, BAE maintains robust standards of governance and is making good progress across the environmental and social aspects of ESG. Employee engagement is a delegated role on behalf of the board, and it's our job to oversee employee engagement in line with the corporate governance code. One of the most interesting and enjoyable things that we do is having the opportunity to meet employees out at the sites. I have to say that Charles is really great at opening up any door that any of the ESG or anyone else wants to go to on the board to meet with employees and listen to what they have to say. The most recent one was great. We were at a board dinner in the US, meeting Inc.
Revisited Electronic Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire, and met with a lot of the staff there from the shop floor right up to senior execs. It was great to meet with them, and I think one of the things that I see when I go out to these sites is it's the staff in BAE are truly engaged in what they do, and you really feel that in all the sites that you go to. I also, as I said before, have had direct engagement on safety and diversity. Diversity is an important topic. We're working on that, and safety is, as ever, a really huge focus from the company. It's important for any company to address each of those aspects of ESG, not only for the company's point of view, but for the environment in general.
I've personally championed this not only obviously on the board in BAE but also in my career with Johnson & Johnson. What I see in BAE is that it's really on the right path. What the committee has a role to do is check that it's doing what it said it set out to do, to have some good challenge, but also to have some good debate as we move forward on each of the topics of ESG. Actually, I feel really privileged to chair this committee. It's incredibly interesting. It's an important topic that we oversee, and it's a wonderful company to work with.
That's not to say that we don't continue to put Charles under a lot of pressure in the committee and hold him to account and the company in the aspects that they're working on and areas that they need to improve. You'll continue to hear me banging on about diversity and net zero, Charles. I'm grateful to be on this committee, and I'm gonna pass over to Charles now, who will give you a lot more detail, and so will Karin, about what we're doing in BAE on ESG.
Thanks very much, Jane. Good afternoon, good morning, everyone. This second part of the presentation gives me and a number of the executive team the opportunity to build on some of the topics covered by the chairman and Jane, but with an executive lens on the delivery of the strategy and the value our operations bring from an ESG perspective. I first wanted to play you a short video, which we played at my recent leadership event, to reflect how we see ESG and how we explain it and what is important to us and how we can embed that to deliver a better long-term business. Hopefully, that drew out how sustainability is integrated throughout our business, from the operating frameworks to our integrated business planning process and business review cycles, and incorporated within our objectives.
Well understood and clear communication from the boardroom to the shop floor is critical as we progress on our targets and look to retain and recruit the very best talent to drive strong operational performance and value for our customers and shareholders. It is also important that it is led from the top team, hence my appointment of Karin Hoeing here as Group ESG Director on our executive committee. We all recognize the ESG agenda is broad, with many criteria and changing priorities. What is important for us is that through engagement with our stakeholders, we focus on the areas which are most material to our sector, our communities, and our business. We then apply a collective focus in addressing and managing the material risks with our customers and supply chains.
From this framework, we look across each of the elements of ESG, and last year, we laid out our key targets and commitments as detailed here. I'll now provide a brief update on our progress in each area. We set our net zero ambition for our Scope 1 and 2 operations by 2030, and those of our products and supply chains by 2050. We've already made progress towards our 2030 target, primarily through greening of our energy sources and improved monitoring and measurement. As Jane referenced, we recently undertook a detailed evaluation of our carbon reduction plans as part of the IBP process or integrated business plan. Our sectors will be pursuing a range of measurements, including power purchase agreements, reductions in energy consumption, and more efficient energy use.
We will also look to collaborate with our customers, peers, and suppliers to advance technology solutions. We recognize and welcome the level of interest that our employees have in this area. Our early career sustainability group organized our annual sustainability week in June, which had over 3,000 attendees. We used last year's COP26 event to launch a number of initiatives to further employee engagement on climate and environment, as well as promoting hybrid drive technology by offering a bus as a green transport option around Glasgow. The safety and well-being of our employees is a huge priority. We operate a range of industrial sites which come with an inherent risk. A strong safety culture has many different facets, but the dominant one is commitment of leadership and the tone from the top.
Early last year, we saw that the safety performance had deteriorated at some of our sites. I'm pleased to say that through significant effort and investment, we have reversed that trend and we'll redouble our efforts to ensure we continue to improve. Mental health and well-being received necessary focus during the pandemic. Again, I'm pleased to say that we continue to strengthen our efforts in supporting employees on these issues. We provide employee assistance programs and promote discussion and awareness on some tough topics, including family loss, stress, and depression. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are key enablers to both recruiting the best talent, driving innovation, and creating a workplace environment where employees are valued for all that they bring.
We are making steady progress on gender diversity, and I'm pleased that we now have three women on the executive committee, strengthening my leadership team and have also increased ethnic minority representation at this level. We recognize the challenges of the engineering sector, but through our schools and early careers program, we are proactively increasing diversity in our pipeline and seeking opportunities to bring in talent from a wider segment of society. Resourcing, talent development, and succession planning remain key for us across all markets. As you all know, we're a large employer and a significant presence in many of our local communities. We also recognize our responsibilities in respect of national and governance initiatives. We contributed more than GBP 11 million in 2021 across a range of causes, but it is less about the amount than the value we create.
While we contributed almost GBP 4 million to skills education, that doesn't include our investment in apprenticeships and graduates, where we continue to increase our intakes to build capability for the future. I'm particularly proud of the effort and willingness of our employees to support local causes, and we are looking at how we can facilitate a greater range of opportunities, recognizing the strong employee engagement this fosters. Strong governance is at our cornerstone. We maintain strong and robust policies and processes with rigorous assurance provided by both the internal audit function and external assurance. Our key policies are in the backup material along with all our product trading principles.
Our code of conduct provides employees and contractors working on our sites with clarity on the standards we expect, but also how to seek advice or guidance or raise an issue if they have concerns. Contacts to our ethics helpline have returned to pre-pandemic levels, and I'm pleased to note that more than 50% are people seeking advice or guidance rather than actually having an issue to raise. We rolled out our annual all-employee training in June. This is a series of scenarios depicting typical nuanced situations in the workplace. These scenarios form the basis of a team discussion where they consider similar issues they might have encountered and what the appropriate course of action should be. The scenarios always prompt much animated discussion and debate.
As you know, we confirmed last year that we are intending to exit the production of the smoke screen shell containing white phosphorus, and we have formally notified the UK MOD of our position and will continue to work with the customer to help them find an alternative effective smoke screen. Wages and compensation are obviously a key issue for us all. We signed up for the Real Living Wage Foundation last year and continue to progress this with our key contractors. We've been making good progress against our commitments and remain focused on doing what is right for our business and stakeholders. These stakeholders have many challenges that we recognize. We continue to look to give increased clarity and disclosure to help you in what we recognize remains an investing universe with increased legislation and requirements, coupled with often inconsistent and confusing data sources.
While we don't go specifically chasing rating agency improvements, we do use their scores and feedback to reflect on our own internal programs and use as a means to identify improvements. We retained our double A rating with MSCI, and those of you who use Sustainalytics will be aware they place a high-risk rating on certain aspects of defense, hence our lower score there. This is an area that Karin is driving hard, and I will now hand over to her to expand on our ESG agenda. Over to you, Karin.
Thank you, Charles. Good morning, good afternoon. We have heard from Charles that we have made great progress on our ESG agenda, and we have done this across all the markets in all different areas. We also now have a much clearer agenda. If I can get the next slide, please. Thank you. This doesn't mean we are done. We can do a lot more, and a lot more means how can we do this? We can do it considering views of all the different stakeholder, and last but not least, leverage the enthusiasm our employees have, which is great.
This chart here shows you a little bit on how we build on our core foundations, which you see all across the bottom of this chart, and how we then picked out four key themes we would like to amplify, build on, and get better at much, much more. This is to deliver sustainability and growth in BAE Systems. If I focus just one second on the core foundations, most of them, Charles has just explained to everybody around safety, where we got better at over the last nine months alone. Health and well-being, mental health was a big topic during COVID time.
Not only did we look at mental health for our own employees, but also included families, children, and the broader surrounding of our employees, which was a very, very big topic and a huge uptake on all kind of training, learning apps, et cetera, what we rolled out globally. Diversity and inclusion, Charles talked about it. We have set ambitions globally, enterprise-wide, and we're going after it. We're getting better, focusing secondly now on ethnic minorities, people of color in the U.S. Again, it's milestones we have set, enterprise mindset, a lot of collaboration, a lot of lessons learned from all different places and sites around the globe, and so on. Last year, I think we talked a lot around product training, quality and safety, so I won't repeat it again. Accountability, transparency, early careers, I will briefly talk about in a minute.
If I look now at the four key themes we point out on the right side of the slides, the reason being these are areas where we can show our strength and capabilities even more on. We have on the top addressing climate risks. Charles mentioned around progress we have made on Scope 1 and 2, meaning what are things we can impact ourself on our own operations on emissions. We're now also assessing our supply chain and the footprint of our own products. These things are ongoing, and we're making great progress, and we will be in a much better position in Q1 to have a great baseline and have a roadmap and understand what is it that we need to do for Scope 3, which is a massive undertaking for our end, giving the footprint and giving the supply chain we are having.
Secondly, we're also looking at TCFD. What are climate influences and climate risks that actually impact our own operations, and how do we go about it? Certainly an area of interest to us, and certainly an area where we have a lot of focus on as we speak. The second bullet, innovation, technology and ideas, really a core strength of BAE Systems and something we are very proud of. If we're looking at how can we actually support our customers better, looking at green technologies, having deeper dives on technologies we are doing, taking a green lens on all the technologies we are having, what can we improve? What can we do differently? How can we leverage the massive talents we have in this organization, bright mindsets, and see what is it that we can do in this space here?
One example would be the Bohemia acquisition we have recently done in our U.S. business. Instead of live training, we now can actually use simulation. This is a great improvement, especially given the technology and greener technology we can use with this. Tom will talk about later on electrification, and Charles is gonna give you an example about Tempest. Again, great ideas around innovation and technology on what we have done in BAE Systems, and we'll continue doing going forward. Creating opportunities for people and communities. Charles talked about a couple of example on what we have done so far, but there's still so much more than we can do. In the current time, we have the big resignation. We now have recessions. We have all kind of challenges. All our employees, all our stakeholders are actually coming to terms with. How can we help them?
How do we make sure we still have skillsets for the future? How do we make sure we remain attractive for skillsets of the future and attractive for people to retain and remain in our organization? It means we need to create inclusive workplaces for multi-generational people that work in our organization all across the globe in different places, and also in places where they are maybe not as privileged as in other places. This means we're investing in career-long learning and other parts I will come back to in just a minute. Last but not least, partnering. Historically, the relationship we had with some of our partners was quite different. We are looking much more at how do we leverage customers, suppliers, trade unions, universities, and learn from each other?
Because only together we have a much stronger voice and can see how we can advance in this important topic of sustainability. A lot of examples we show later on will be around different models on how we engage and how do we do things differently, which is very important. If we move to the next slide, please. Where do we go from here? What we have developed now is a strong global narrative. This is exactly the same as you have seen on the previous slide, now in a beautiful globe shape, with all the different themes at the bottom. What does it do to us? It helps us to engage with a much broader group of people. It helps us to support our purpose and strategy, excites and involve our people.
Just two weeks ago, we had our CEO leadership event with the top 100 leaders of our company together, and we did present ESG sustainability there. It was quite exciting to see all the questions we got, the enlightenment, because it means so much to so many different people. Seeing the excitement and asking questions on how they can get involved, what do they need to do, where do we go from here, was very, very good to see. There is certainly a buzz around in our company around ESG, which really is something we would like to leverage and move forward with our agenda. We also have planned a virtual event for about 2,000 middle-level managers that's starting in the first week of November. It's a two-day event, which is pretty much global. Of course, of time zones, it's quite difficult to juggle.
Again, one of the big items on our agenda will be ESG. I already know now by the questions asked upfront that this is a very exciting topic people would like to get involved in. On top of it, we will have WebExes and road shows planned from Q1 onwards to as many sites globally as we somehow can get to explain to people what does it mean, what does it mean for BAE Systems, and how we can get involved regardless of what level you work in this organization. Which I think is quite exciting and quite a great opportunity for BAE to get a whole organization behind one and the same goal.
Not only does this narrative help us to engage internally, it also helps us a lot more externally with our other stakeholders, customers, suppliers, universities, trade unions, as I mentioned earlier. A lot of engagements we would like to leverage, and we'd like to learn all together. Also, hopefully, a much stronger and more visible picture towards the case for defense, as Sir Roger mentioned at the beginning. If we move to the next slide, please. Looking forward, Charles presented the progress we have made up to now. You have seen a little bit of a clearer picture on where we are going, and what we're trying to achieve here is to show you what's our near-term objectives, where do we go near term. On the environment front, as Charles mentioned, we're working on net zero Scope 1 and 2 specifically.
We have now just finished this summer the IBP, our financial five-year plan, which now underpins how we achieve our Scope 1 and 2. Also, this what kind of commitments we are going to make when and where. I mentioned a minute ago, we are looking at Scope 3. Establishing the baseline is the big priority, and also looking at our products. How do we get there? What's the baseline we need to take? And how do we get the roadmaps in place for Q1 to then drive it forward? Because 2050 seems around the corner, even though it's far away. It seems just around the corner when we look at our supply chain and our own products and what it needs and what it takes to get there. We also started a deep dive and feasibility assessment of green technology.
There is a lot more I could talk about on the environmental side, but if I really have to put it on the three main bullets, these would be the ones I would use at this point in time. On the social side, Charles mentioned a couple of things already, what has happened. Many, many examples we can talk about. However, one of the things we probably need to get better at, to give it in a much more global picture for all of you. We probably give you 150 examples every single time, and we can probably give a lot more, b ut what is it really, if I put it into a couple of bullets, that makes the biggest impact for the societies we work in, for the communities we work in, where we invest in?
How do we create this much more social impact framework to better understand from outside what is really that BAE is driving and why, and what's the impact we are seeing. That's one of the big agenda items we are working on. Jane talked about gender diversity, talked about ethnic minorities, and we understand the challenge, and we are going with the challenge and moving forward with it. Very well received. We have, again, lots of roadmaps. We have our ambitions out, and we're driving the agenda forward. In times of recession, in times of talent wars, et cetera, ever so often it is more than ever it is important now to define our employee value proposition. Employee value proposition does not mean just salaries and incentives. It means a lot, a lot more than that.
It means the benefits, the environment we create, the ways of working we allow people to have, the branding we have, the workplace climate we have, inclusion. I t's a huge, huge amount of different things that different people would like to see. How do we make sure that we're driving the agenda forward to be open to anybody that would like to work for us and attract all the skills and capabilities we need to drive our business agenda forward? Then last but not least, we are looking at the governance pieces, which are the programs we work to drive disclosure requirements. We talked about modern slavery, TCFD, et cetera. We continue to drive these agenda items forward. We mature our ESG risks and mitigations.
In other words, we are not just repeating the same training five years in a row, but every year refresh the training, make it up to date, make it fit for purpose for the right audience at the right time to make sure people really understand why it is important and what we try to achieve with it. Obviously, the ESG policy changes and involving our policies and embedded in everything we do, everywhere we go, make it part of the culture is quite important with a very solid assurance framework around it and data analytics and reporting improvement. This has been a lot of words, a lot of models, a lot of ideas.
To bring this to life a little bit more, we thought we'd give you some case studies. I'm handing over to Debbie now to start with our first case study. Debbie leads our climate and environment work, and we'll talk a little bit about what we have done in the Portsmouth Naval Base.
Well, thanks, Karin. There's been a number of references to our net zero ambition and what we're trying to achieve with our carbon reduction plans. At its core, there's three basic elements, which is green, the energy we bring in, use less energy, and the energy we do use more efficiently. We want to try and bring it to life across the scale of our operations, the full breadth of it. We're gonna start off with a particularly large example, as you can see from the slide behind me. Just to outline it before we introduce it. Going back over 10 years, there were the two carriers being built up at Rosyth.
Now, when they were going to be based at Portsmouth Naval Base, 10 years later, there wasn't gonna be enough energy around the Portsmouth area to both provide for the ships, which have the energy requirement of a small town, as well as the Portsmouth city area. Something needed to be done in order to bring the carriers home. I would like to play a short video to bring this to life to you.
With the arrival of the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers at Portsmouth Naval Base, the biggest ships ever built for the Royal Navy, energy consumption was set to more than double the site's peak electrical demand.
There was huge concerns that with the amount of power that the carriers take, it would cause a huge strain on the capacity within Portsmouth city itself, as well as the dockyard. Something the Navy really wanted to keep away from was shoreside diesel generators. That's when the energy program really focused on looking at new and innovative ways to provide sustainable energy to the naval base.
We retrofitted the electric light and power station, originally built in 1906, from diesel to natural gas. The 13.5 MW combined heat and power plant and 3 MW large-scale battery for backup have been successfully integrated into the aged 60-year-old electrical and steam network at the base. Switching to self-generation and reducing overall demand has meant the strain on the local grid has been reduced completely. The updating of combined efforts amount to a cost savings of GBP 10 million, with GBP 4 million coming directly from the combined heat and power facility, meaning over the past 15 years, we have helped reduce energy-related carbon emissions.
We've implemented a number of initiatives here on the base, both to reduce energy, but also to move to more sustainable forms of energy, like upgrading lighting systems to use LEDs. We replaced a number of roofs with solar PV arrays, very simple things like window replacements on buildings. We've transferred our operational fleet to electric vehicles, like the vans that you can see behind me. This is only the start of the journey for BAE Systems and the Royal Navy. Hopefully, that gave you a good picture of some of the things we've been doing. There's no one lever we pull. We have to look across the whole gamut of the operations we're doing. This slide is more for reference. It's got some of the key facts we outlined in the video. I'll just highlight a couple rather than go through each in turn.
I guess one of the fun facts in there is the over 27,000 LED light bulbs on Queen Elizabeth alone. That not only provides a lower source of lighting, but also because of the reduced heat element, it also reduces the air conditioning pull across the ship. All of these things have a multiple benefit. I think the overall point to take from that video is we managed a 40% reduction in carbon emissions while doubling the energy demand across the site. Really great news as to what can be done. Moving to the next slide, just want to give you some other examples, just a very brief overview, and there's plenty more, including more videos on our website. To demonstrate the breadth of what we're doing, I'll just work around the slide.
Up on the top right, Samlesbury, UK. That solar farm you can see is the size of 8 football pitches. It was put in in 2015 to cope with the refurbishment and upgrade of the Samlesbury site. We're seizing any opportunity we have. It's on an old airfield, disused land, a great opportunity. It now provides energy for the Typhoon program and the F-35 program that are out there. Helps with the surge in demand we've had because of those programs. It means that we're not increasing energy demand. We save over 500 tons of carbon emissions every year because of that, due to the generation of over 2,000 megawatts of energy just from that solar farm alone. Moving down, the fourth slide, the fourth picture's at the bottom, the fourth building.
That's where we've taken the opportunity in our electronic solutions business when we're looking at new facilities to build them to state-of-the-art standards, build them to the greatest levels of energy efficiency, assume we've got the metering and monitoring in there, so we can use the buildings effectively. Those other things like the LED light bulbs come out again there as well. Using every opportunity we have. It also makes them really attractive modern facilities that bring the skills and capability into that part of the business. Moving up to the top left, San Diego, California. What you see there is a dry dock called the Pride of California. It's a huge one, 55,000 tons, if that means anything.
When that was being put in order to bring it across and get it secure in the San Diego Bay, we had to look across the whole environmental piece. Not just the design of the dry dock and energy efficiency within that, but how it recycles the water. Obviously, a huge amount goes through that, and it all has to go back into San Diego Bay, and it's cleaner than what came in, but also marine life. I think that gets to the broader point of climate. It's not just about carbon, but it's about those broader impacts. One of the things we will be looking at going forward is a more coherent approach to biodiversity. Many turtles benefited from all the different measures that were put in place in implementing that dry dock.
Things like marine safe paint on the whole of the underneath of the hull, which is no mean measure given the size of it. Wanted to just give you that sense as to what we're doing across things. As you can see from the bullet points, there's a range of levers we're pulling to deliver on our climate risk, addressing the net zero program. While I've covered those that are more within our domain, the Scope 1 and 2 operations, there's now going to be some more case studies which will look particularly say at technology. With that, I'll hand over to Tom on the line to talk about electrification.
Thank you, Debbie, and hello everyone. On our path to a cleaner energy future, both as a company and for our customers, one of the technologies we are bringing to global markets is electrification, to reduce or eventually even eliminate the use of combustion engines. We're fundamentally changing the way people move, not only making travel more efficient, but also lowering harmful emissions by applying our electric power and propulsion solutions across multiple domains. Our flagship electrification product from our Electronic Systems business is our electric power and propulsion system, which is installed on more than 15,000 transit buses around the globe. By switching from traditional combustion engines to low and zero emission technologies, we're helping to significantly lower CO2 emissions, reduce operator maintenance, and improve air quality.
With decades of experience in our leadership position in the urban bus transit market, we're applying that expertise to broader market opportunities across growing land, maritime, and air domains. On land, in addition to the more than 15,000 buses equipped with our systems, in May of this year, we introduced our next generation power and propulsion technology that uses a revolutionary design intended to offer heavy duty industrial vehicles a faster and lower installed cost solution for their electric vehicles such as school buses, mining vehicles, sanitation, and yard trucks. Moving to the maritime domain, for a number of years, we've been expanding our clean energy footprint to the waterways with electric hybrid, battery electric, and hydrogen fuel cell electric propulsion systems.
In San Francisco, the first U.S. hydrogen fuel cell electric propulsion system will sail on a vessel named Sea Change in the San Francisco Bay Area, transporting hundreds of daily commuters using its all-electric system, which has no harmful emissions. Water is its only exhaust. In the air domain, we are uniquely positioned in the air mobility market to leverage our expertise in flight controls, power management, and energy storage systems. I'll cover a bit more about this market in a few minutes, where we are partnering to innovate and advance hybrid and all electric systems for a safe, affordable, and reliable air transport. As I mentioned on the prior slide, we have 25 years of experience as a global leader in urban transit bus systems.
Transit agencies and government customers are addressing their climate agendas by fielding our hybrid near zero offerings shown on the left here, and our full electric zero emission propulsion systems shown on the right of this slide. No matter where transit operators are on their journey to zero, we have the breadth of low or zero emission solutions to help them make progress. For example, our low and zero emission systems are operating across Europe. London and Glasgow in the UK have been operating zero emission capability hybrids, and full battery electric technology is also operating on buses in Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, with at least 150 vehicles in Paris alone. If you visited us during the Farnborough International Air Show this past summer, you may have seen that we showcase some of the extraordinary possibilities we see for electric aircraft.
This is an exciting time in this arena, and we're exploring opportunities with several partners. In the air domain, we have a unique position where we are integrating our expertise in flight controls, power conversion, and energy storage to capitalize on this rapidly evolving market. We are already developing operational prototypes that demonstrate reliable performance using systems that are lighter and more compact for smaller scale aircraft, and then leveraging these standardized building blocks to scale the systems across multiple platforms. Aviation electrification is a growing market, driven by the increasing need for greener alternatives and reduced operating costs. One example of our engagement in the U.S. is our partnership with General Electric and Boeing on the NASA Electrified Powertrain Flight Demonstration Project.
BAE Systems is providing the energy management components, including the energy storage system, cabling and controls, to accelerate and introduce electrified aircraft propulsion technologies into the U.S. aviation fleets. Again, we're able to leverage more than four decades of flight controls experience and 25 years of expertise with developing hybrid electric propulsion systems, and collaborations such as this one are accelerating our progress toward these next generation solutions. As we think about electrifying air transport, we have a short video to share about our journey and the outlook for the coming decades. There is even more we're doing in the U.K. I am pleased to share with you some of the work my colleagues from the air sector are doing to explore, develop, and invest in electric product capabilities, which could provide solutions for both military and civilian customers.
Recognizing that our customers will need an evolving range of products and services to meet rapidly changing requirements, the teams are working with innovative partners to accelerate sustainable technology. Some of the areas being explored are the increased use of synthetics, electrification, and other non-polluting energy sources. I'll mention just a few examples. We are working with Malloy Aeronautics to develop an all-electric heavy lift, uncrewed air system as a potential new solution to deliver cost-effective, sustainable, rapid response capability to military security and civilian customers. At the Farnborough Airshow this summer, we signed a memorandum of understanding with Embraer. This confirmed an intent to create a joint venture to develop a defense variant of Eve's electrical vertical takeoff and landing vehicle.
Teams from both companies will work together to explore how the aircraft designed for the urban mobility market can provide cost-effective, sustainable, and adaptable capability as a defense variant. Our aim is to bring vital operational capability to our customers quickly and at a lower cost, while also supporting environmental and sustainability goals. We also plan to collaborate with Pipistrel Aircraft on the development of solutions for the defense and security market, including the application of electric aircraft. While operational capability will always be the priority in defense, we know that solutions that are sympathetic to the environment are becoming increasingly important. This presents a fantastic opportunity to leverage our joint expertise, and we have recently commenced flying our own Velis Electro to learn more about the potential of electric flight.
In all of these collaborations, we are bringing our extensive expertise in the design, engineering, and systems integration of military aircraft together with industry leaders in electric aircraft to accelerate the pace of innovation to meet our customers' ambitions as well as our own. Building on the military aspect of these aircraft programs, we're leveraging our U.S. commercial electrification know-how to support our defense sector customers. One example in the U.S. is our integration of a hybrid electric drive system on a Bradley fighting vehicle. Turning to electrification for defense, U.S. government and Pentagon leaders are increasingly discussing their net zero objectives, and we have a role to play in supporting their progress. BAE Systems has been awarded a $32 million prototype agreement by the U.S. Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office to integrate a hybrid electric drive or HED system onto a Bradley.
This development program is part of the Army's modernization effort for combat vehicles to demonstrate that hybrid electric systems are essential and viable for a modernized combat vehicle fleet that can respond to evolving threats and are capable of conducting multi-domain operations. It's important to note that next generation combat vehicles must integrate emerging lethality, survivability, and mobility features to maintain tactical and operational overmatch on the battlefield, and hybrid electric drive technology can be instrumental in supporting these mission objectives. Working with QinetiQ, our designs have completed digital engineering and extensive lab tests, and the Bradley project featured on this slide is demonstrating that hybrid electric technology has matured to a point where we can modify an existing platform family to increase capabilities and acceleration, range, and onboard power, while also providing new capabilities like Silent Watch, all without impacting crew volumes.
You see quotes here on this slide from Lieutenant General Neil Thurgood, noting his comments about recent demonstrations that were amazingly quiet and emphasizing how powerful it is to have the ability to watch silently for hours at a time or move quietly into position to achieve a mission. HED architecture offers these and numerous other military capability and operational benefits, and the best part is, it is technology we have available today, thanks to our decades of investment in industry collaboration to advance hybrid electric drive technology in commercial markets. As we come to the last slide, I believe this case study demonstrates how electrification is contributing to meeting our sustainability goals, our own, those of our customers, and those of our global communities. We are leveraging our know-how and collaborating with others to make significant advances across the land, maritime, and air domains.
Our solutions are platform agnostic and are supporting our customers' ambitions in both the defense and commercial markets. This is more than a small adjacent opportunity for us. Electrification is a core competency that we can offer to our customers to deliver a more sustainable future for all of us. Thank you for your time today. Now I'll hand things over to Karn for the next case study.
Thank you, Tom. We have a long and proud heritage of supporting skills and education in the UK, and we have a whole variety of education programs that help inspiring young people from primary school age to around the age of eighteen to consider a career in STEM. We're working with schools, institutions, and partners all across the UK. We also help to educate not only the pupils, but also teachers and their parents, who quite often help to make decisions. On the second picture here, you see the school roadshow. Since 2005, we're actually running school roadshows together with the RAF and the Royal Navy. This is the UK's longest STEM roadshow existing. We have about 420-20 schools we visit per year, and we are highly interactive.
It's actually very, very interesting to see how we are engaging with almost every single child in the audience and ask them to come on stage, being part of an experience to really make it hands-on and very, very interactive. It helps to excite our pupils in the STEM subject. Last week was actually a great milestone because we had around 1 million pupils at Blackburn Central High School that we educated on it, which is fantastic achievement. Coding success. This one came around and about when the pandemic hit us. Because we couldn't do the roadshows anymore, we had to find very quickly an alternative on how we still engage with pupils in schools around the country. We developed and launched a virtual program together, again, with the RAF and the Royal Navy, which basically is like a Lego robot kit.
If you know these little boxes of kits that we can send out, and we did that to schools all around the UK, to schools that we partner with and schools where they're underprivileged neighborhoods, and also schools specifically where a majority of girls are, purely girls schools, to also educate much more on the STEM subject. These kits were helping to learn about coding itself. We sent them to more than 600 schools and around 40,000 children by now, and we actually continued this year despite the fact we have the roadshows back up and running and going. A huge, huge intake on, different ages of children that we now have engaged and excited with them. Every time we ask for feedback, surveys, et cetera, to ask how does it land and how is the excitement.
We do see an uptick of more and more children now, again, thankfully excited by the STEM subject and willing to take a STEM career going forward. It does resonate very well to the schools we go for. STEM ambassadors. Today, we have around 400 ambassadors. These are young people in our organization who are role models that go out to the different schools we partner with and are our role models and ambassadors to again, excite pupils, to make sure we recruit the right people and laying the foundations and saying BAE Systems or generally the STEM arena is a great place to work, and it's actually a future career that's long-lasting and exciting. Work experiences. Today, we have around 600 placements each year we are providing for young people. In previous year, it was purely in place.
2020, we obviously changed it to a virtual environment. Today, this is a hybrid experience. We are having the opportunity due to that we can get people from all over the UK excited by it, and not only those that live very close to our workplaces. It is something we would like to continue. A slightly different topic is we're helping unemployed young people with, if you go back to the previous one, please, with something called Movement to Work. This is a collaboration between the Prince's Trust and UK employers. We're offering quality work experience to those not in education, not in employment or in training. Those it's called NEET, N-E-E-T. Earlier this year, we actually received an award for Movement to Work's Employer of the Year in Social Mobility, which we gratefully achieved.
End of 2022, we will have had 800 work experiences as part of Movement to Work, which is some phenomenal result given that we only started a few years ago. Going to the next slide. Most of you will have heard about our apprenticeship programs. This is a very, very much something we're proud of. It's an award-winning, highly rated apprenticeship schemes that we run in the UK. It's run for a long time. Today, we have around 3,000 apprentices in training as we speak in the UK, with record recruitment of 1,100 this year that just started. Most likely in 2023 onwards, it will even increase from there. These are really record numbers of intake.
We have achieved an Ofsted Outstanding rating, and for those of you that have ever been involved in achieving this, it is a lot of work with a lot of people to make sure we have the highest standard on education and skills that we can offer to get there. 95% of our apprentices complete their course. 30% of them are actually above national average, which I think speaks for itself. We also received the Princess Royal Training Award last year, which again, something we're very proud of. We have overall more than 50 apprenticeships program, with over 60% of these in engineering and manufacturing.
More selfishly thinking, last year, we also launched a sustainability apprenticeship program for the first time, and it's one of a kind so far in the UK with Cranfield University, and we are proud to say that we're gonna continue it now as well in the second year with new intake to come in March next year. Not only do we have education and skills program in the UK, we also leverage our UK work and skills and education for other countries. An example would be Australia, which is on the next slide, please. What we have done, especially when we stepped up with the delivery and build up of our Hunter Class frigates, we created a digital diploma for our naval shipbuilding workforce on new digital skills. It only launched in 2019, but we already won an award in 2021.
Currently, we are having an initiative launched to increase it with women participation in the course, and also, again, more focus on digital skills in the naval force. Systems engineering apprenticeship model has been approved at federal and at several state mandate level in Australia. This is the model we took from the UK, and it took a lot of persuasion and discussion with Australia to make sure that the same model would actually work now in Australia as well. We had discussion with a couple of universities as we speak, so we are very hopeful that in the next few years, we will have systems engineering apprenticeships as offering as well in Australia with universities. We started to work as well on a new software engineering degree apprenticeship with the University of South Australia.
Again, this will go live very soon, and we're in the last discussions now to get going with it. These are examples from Australia. Saudi Arabia, again, we shared our approach towards aircraft maintenance apprentices, and we do the training in the kingdom as well as in the UK. We have built a very successful skilled partnership with SDT, our Saudi Development & Training, which actually has a state-of-the-art facility just outside Riyadh. It's really nice. On a visit, I had the pleasure of recently to do that, to see the excitement of the young people there and see the state-of-the-art facility and how they can learn about all these skills.
We also created a project management curriculum together in partnership with the Effat University in Saudi Arabia that's still running, that's very much in line with our project management apprenticeship curriculum that we're running in the UK. In 2021, we took on 58 graduates in Kingdom, and they're part of the broader graduate program we have in place. With that, I hand over to Charles to talk us through the Tempest example.
Thank you, Karin. Pulling this together, a good example of how sustainability runs through our business is the next generation Future Combat Air System or Tempest, as it's more commonly known. This program is continually looking to develop innovative technologies in collaboration with the supply chain, SMEs, and academia to value and develop the people, deliver highly skilled jobs around many parts of the country, make a positive social and economic contribution to the community, and deliver critical sovereign defense capabilities for our customers, and while doing all of that, reduce its environmental impact. We have a final video to highlight some of those key messages. As we announced at Farnborough, we will be flying our first prototype within five years, so that program is moving at pace.
In wrapping up, the acute threat environment has clearly shown defense and security is required for a free and prosperous society, and there is a growing global democratic mandate to increase defense spending. The strength and importance of NATO and the nuclear deterrent is, in our view, both evident and critical, and defense and security underpins broader ESG objectives. For us, our ESG agenda is focused on what we can do and positively influence. Thank you for listening, and we now have some time for questions.
I think timing-wise, we'll probably take about 10 minutes of questions in the room, and then we'll have time at the end of Dave's presentation to take some online and a few more questions if necessary. I wanna try and stick as close to the agenda as we can. If there's a few questions in the room on that presentation, then please put your hands up, please. Charlotte? Should be a mic coming your way.
Hi, everybody. I'm Charlotte from Barclays. I've got three questions, trying to keep them all to ESG.
Good.
I've been right through the pack and it's perfectly possible I missed it, but I haven't seen anything on the cost plan for achieving net zero in 2030. I wonder if you could comment on that, please. The second one, I also saw in the pack, it talked about LTIPS, the ESG targets forming part of our LTIPS for 2023. Could you comment on the weighting of those and specifically which targets? Finally, a topic near to my heart as well is diversity. Perhaps you could just comment on recruiting at the sort of junior end is arguably easier to get the balance equal. I wondered how your attrition rate was tracking at the sort of mid to senior levels for women and what you're doing to mitigate that or improve it possibly. Thank you.
Well, I was gonna say on the cost side of it, a lot of work being done, but Brad, do you wanna just bring us up to date on that?
Yes. We've done a sort of bottoms-up approach to the evaluation opportunities to go to net zero across the piece. You know, of course, as Charles has outlined, you know, the first instance is really about connecting to a renewable energy supply. The greening of our energy is, I think, a fairly passive approach, but it's a big part of how we get to net zero. There are some CapEx projects that we're looking at, retrofit of facilities across the board. You have to look in the grand scheme of things. Our strategy is not to rely on offsets, but if we were today to rely on offsets, it would be a GBP 20 million sort of circa investment.
It's not a massive undertaking, but we do see a portfolio of projects that help us get to net zero. We have evaluated those and prioritizing those, but the first instance is really about connecting to that renewable grid, greening energy, and becoming more efficient at what we do.
In terms of the LTIP weighting, well, I probably have a view, but we have to discuss and there is consultation with our shareholders at this point. I think we're probably more, you know, aiming for somewhere in that sort of 10%-15% of the LTIP. You know, there's still a fair bit of conversation to be done.
It is work in progress, and you understand that. I mean, it's very much work in progress because we want something that's measurable and something that's meaningful that actually encourages the sort of behavior that you've seen outlined. It's all committees have got their hands in this, and Charles is waiting for the outcome.
Yeah.
I mean, given your last prior role as head of HR, Karin, I mean, on the attrition of women, I think it's probably your best place to comment on that.
Yeah. No, happy to. It's something we constantly measure and observe, as you can imagine. Right now, not sure if it's good or bad news, but the gap between male attrition and female attrition is still there. We have more men leaving, and this is external retirement. Even if I take retirement out, we have women actually retaining much higher in organization than men, which is, if you like, a positive in that sense. We have seen attrition going down since 2018.
We lost a lot more women percentage-wise in 2018 than we do today, which is another good thing I would say, especially given recently the pandemic, where a lot of women, as we know, have been under a lot of stress and pressure, if I stereotype you now a little bit. We're trying to offer much, much more flexibility than we have probably done previously, and this might be the result of that as well.
That's the reason.
Yeah. Well, one of the reasons I would say is probably the flexibility.
Charles.
Hi. Charles Armitage at Citi. Just sort of two ethical questions which are always difficult by definition, I suppose. First of all, with defense, the right for a country to protect itself, I think, is one of the main points of having a country or being a country. I think that most sort of liberal democracies, most people don't see any problems with that exporting to them, b ut what about exporting to non-liberal democracies? How do you think about that? And I guess the follow on is, the democratic defense industry is the most regulated export there are, and that's determined by liberal democracies because we happen to live in supposedly one. Is that enough, or are the other considerations a higher bar than that?
Well, Charles, let me pick up at the high level, really.
I mean, the first port of call, obviously, is, as far as we're concerned, we only work with countries that are actually allies of the British government or the American government. Therefore, there's a sort of package of these are the areas that contain our area of operation, number one. There is a degree of reliance on, you know, what and which governments believe are which allies when you look across the world. That's the first port of call. I think the second port of call is, when you work with countries which do not have precisely the sort of democratic principles that we all aspire to, and indeed some of us enjoy, the belief that you have to have is that first, fundamentally, it's the right thing to do.
Secondly, you can continue to influence positive behavior in those countries in the way you operate within them. In our own case, you know, we do see the effect of that in parts of the world, Saudi Arabia being the obvious one, where the whole country is moving to a much more liberal environment than one would believe possibly even five years ago. You know, I went, I don't know, three or four months ago for the first time since COVID. Change in that society is staggering, you know, although good. We are part of that in the way we operate. We encourage, you know, very much diversity in the society. We demonstrate it. We work with government in showing how functionally sound that principle is. I think as a result of that, it's positive influence.
Government, one, our own judgment, two, and the way we operate, three, to help society develop in the way that we all believe is ultimately, you know, the good destination. That was point one. Point two?
I guess you're coming off you, but you've mostly answered it. The question is, some countries you operate in, such as Saudi, believe they. How do you balance their cultural sensitivities, such as views on women, with your-
I just want to make sure I pick that up. I hope that's. It's a broad answer, but it is the one we live by and as a board, you know, are comfortable with. I mean, as I made clear in my own commentary, you know, there is a judgment call here that board members have to make. W e all need to sleep at night being comfortable that we are doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do. That's the other part of actually good governance.
Any more? Let's have a coffee. Oh, sorry, Chloé. Just in time.
Sorry, one last one on my end. Chloé Lemarié from Jefferies. I just wanted to come back on the electrification of aviation topic. Could you explain to us exactly which technology you want to master in-house and where you would be more comfortable partnering with other companies on this specific topic?
Yeah. I mean, Tom can come in, but I'm happy to go as well. Maybe Tom, you come in after. I mean, our view is that, you know, we have some unique capabilities as we try to highlight on the slide there of things like flight management, you know, engine controls, and power, you know, systems and power management. You know, our view right now is rather than try and pick the winners, as you know, many of these, we're talking about the eVTOL market, there's a lot of SPAC and VC money going into it, that you know, our unique capabilities are offering a range of subsystems that. We also know how to get these things, you know, flight certified, given that we produce, you know, the flight controls for almost every Boeing platform, for example.
You know, provide a range of capabilities that others can in a sense pick and choose a modular capability from. W e think that is a better proven strategy that plays to our strengths longer term. Now, that's not to say with companies like Embraer and Eve that we may not pick a couple that we're gonna choose to work with for defense capabilities. You know, we think we're very well positioned. I mean, this is, you know, for all of you in the audience, this is not a market that's gonna immediately appear in the next five years, but the five years after that, and certainly into the 2030s, we think it's gonna be a significant market, and we're well placed to benefit from it. Tom, is there anything that I've missed there, if you can come in on the line?
No, very thorough, Charles.
Okay. Sorry, Tom, I think you just dropped out there. Is there anything you want to add?
Okay. I was just gonna say just two things. One, that battery technology that comes from our hybrid bus business, there's quite a bit of intellectual property there we've developed over the years. As you can imagine, flying bulk battery at high altitude, there are certain dangers to that with respect to thermal runaway. Some of you may remember the days of lithium-ion batteries and you know, causing some incidents in the air. We've gone to great lengths to develop technology in and around that that prevents that kind of phenomena. That's very important. Then secondly, on the physical side, this comes from our civil aircraft business. This as well is technology that dates back many years, decades, in fact.
We just announced yesterday we were selected by Hyundai's Supernal aircraft, which is an electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. We'll be doing the flight computer for Supernal. It's a recent announcement. There's good headway there based on some solid underlying technology.
Yeah. It's also worth just adding our expertise in autonomy that we've been obviously working on for 30, 40 years is gonna be an important enabler to that. I think the bigger question in the short term is how comfortable, you know, we'll all feel jumping into a pilotless air taxi that lifts off from a skyscraper and takes us to the airport. It will eventually happen. The experts in autonomy make the point that that's a much easier problem to solve than a driverless car with, you know, footballs rolling out, kids in the streets and everything else. It's a much more controllable environment. Again, as science fiction as it sounds, it will almost certainly happen. At some point in our lifetimes, we probably will be very comfortable doing it and be using that.
Charles won't be the first.
Probably not. It'll be well tested and very reliable.
Great. I think we should take a break now. Everyone online, we will aim to restart at 2:45 UK time. Thank you very much.
How about that?
Great. Well, welcome back, everyone. Thanks for being so prompt to keep us on time. Second section, Brad's going to just give us a brief overview on some of the key investor issues that we've been answering since the half year. As I said, we are giving our trading update on the fifteenth of November, so we won't be taking any trading questions after the presentations. Brad will hand over to David Armstrong, who's sat here now at the front, to cover the Digital Intelligence business. With that, over to you, Brad.
Yeah. Thanks, Martin. Yeah, just a couple of minutes to take you through some of the sort of hot topics of the day. I guess we'll start with the defense market environment. You'll recall at the half year, we reported orders of GBP 18 billion, which was a record, and it took backlog up to GBP 53 billion. I'm pleased to say through the third quarter, this momentum has only continued. We see a lot of strong tailwinds across the market. The government budgets around defense have also been under state of reevaluation. You might have seen the French government's intent to increase by 7% announced recently. We feel that there's a strong market tailwind that's supporting growth for the medium and longer term.
Of course, in the short term, we are sailing through some pretty difficult headwinds around things like supply chain and inflation. In the first half of the year, again, you saw that despite these things, we are managing to drive top line growth and margin expansion. I think that's a testament to two main things. One is just the professionalism of our supply chain organization, but secondly, the strength of our commercial models. We think that these trends will continue despite supply chain inflation. We still see that we can drive top line growth and margin expansion through the second half of the year and beyond. One of the things that's been helpful recently is the softening of the labor market in the U.S.
One of the challenges we've been facing is just the inability to recruit fast enough across our U.S. businesses in particular. We have seen an improving labor market in that respect, which is helping us, particularly in Electronic Systems. Maybe energy is the sort of hot topic as well. I look at energy in terms of two main aspects. One is pricing and one is availability. On the pricing front, we're very well hedged in terms of electricity and gas well into next year. From a pricing perspective, I think it's a pretty benign situation for us. On availability, for our direct supply, we are in places geographically which are relatively independent.
I think generally, we have a pretty benign profile when it comes to any pending energy crisis, both on price and availability. Finally, on capital allocation, maybe I'll talk a little bit about pensions. Obviously, after the mini budget, market turmoil, there's been a lot of discussion around pensions. You'll recall at the half year, we had a historic surplus after running pension deficits for as far as anyone can remember. What I'm pleased to say is our very balanced asset approach and conservative asset allocation has held up very well. That surplus that we reported the half year has been intact. I think importantly, the increasing yield environment means that the funding situation has improved.
I think the pension situation for us is really a non-story, and we have a very good liquidity across our funds. That's really all I wanted to say on pensions. I think the other part of capital allocation is the share buyback. You recall at the half year, we announced a GBP one half billion three-year program. Through today, we're over GBP 450 million into that first tranche. Really, progress ahead of schedule on this, pleased to see that. Overall for the business, we continue to drive top line growth, margin expansion, and cash conversion. As Martin said, on November fifteenth, we will be able to talk more about those financial details.
One thing also to comment on is I think by the time we give that trading update, we'll have a better sense of the FX outturn for the full year, and we will see a pretty market tailwind coming from the stronger dollar as a result of that. We'll talk more about that November fifteenth. Turning to digital intelligence. As a reminder, our cyber and intelligence sector includes two businesses, the I&S business that is run out of the U.S. and the digital intelligence business that we're gonna talk about today. I'm really pleased to see the capabilities that we've brought together in digital intelligence and also the journey this has been through. You know, a lot of portfolio decisions to create digital intelligence, including some acquisitions and including some divestments.
We have a business now that's very well positioned for above market top line growth and strong margin performance. Dave is gonna share with you how we're gonna do this and how we're gonna win. Over to you, Dave.
Thank you, Brad. Good afternoon, everybody. Wherever you are in the world, good morning. For those of you who are here in the room, I hope you got the opportunity when you're outside to have a look at our digital thread demonstrator, or if you're careful enough, you will have seen a very reduced size of satellite, which was just sneakily put in the corner. We can talk a bit about that later if you didn't see it. What that illustrates is the breadth of scope that digital intelligence covering, from cybersecurity right through to things in space. What I'm gonna do is give you a better insight into digital intelligence.
I'll give you a background as to why we thought it was the right time to create it, what it is we have brought together to create this new business, what we offer to our customers explicitly, and how we're gonna take those offerings to the market, the investments that we're making to ensure that we will be successful as we take on this new venture, and a view of the market size, our business today, and where we think we're going to end up. The world of technology is changing rapidly. We all see it, but we're seeing our customers use it more and more as they go forward. I just wanna say some phrases to you. Things like big data science, cloud-enabled, artificial intelligence, and cyber, frankly, has just become a generic word.
These are all capabilities which are inherent in what BAE Systems does today in delivering its platform enterprises. It's not always recognized, though, by the people outside of BAE. Our customers do, but it's not always seen by other people that we have these core capabilities in this modern era of the digital world. We also see policy and strategy papers being published across sectors in the U.K. and across many nations, and they're determining that there is a data-driven systems that are gonna be essential for the future, but they must be cyber robust. As a result, what we are seeing is our customer is now shifting its priorities into where it wants to spend money. A recent survey of customers has shown that 84% of organizations operating in the defense, space, and government believe digital advantage is crucial to their organization.
However, in the same survey, only 21% of those organizations in high-trust sectors say they are completely digitally mature and need to transform to improve. Achieving digital advantage is different for organizations operating in high-trust sectors. The stakes are higher because the data they're handling is more sensitive, the IT environments are more complex, and the digital skill sets needed are hard to find and retain. Space is increasingly becoming the new area of defense and security. The cost of satellite launch has fallen. The capabilities of low Earth orbit satellites has increased. This is an area of opportunity for BAE. The conclusion of all of those environmental factors was we needed to create Digital Intelligence, create a brand, a technology business that can deliver data-driven systems across defense, security, and space. To create Digital Intelligence, we've taken proven areas within BAE Systems and enhanced them with acquisitions.
From our existing capabilities, Applied Intelligence, a leader in the national security domain, a business specializing in cyber, artificial intelligence, and secure cloud systems. Defense Information, our business which provides the backbone of secure communication to the British Army today. To smaller areas, CORDA and Digital Service, which use data analytics to solve major ship logistics and provide wargaming scenarios to our customer. We strengthened our capabilities through the acquisitions of Techmodal, a data science business, PPM, a developer of high-end electronics, and lastly, In-Space Missions, a spacecraft designer and manufacturer. This merger of 7 businesses, all of which had their own unique digital heritage, forms a very strong proposition. A proposition working across 5 different continents with 4,000 people, leading experts in digital transformation, cybersecurity, complex data analysis, secure communication, and information systems for space.
Much of what we do is very sensitive, and we can't talk publicly about it. The next slide illustrates some of the areas of a flavor of what we do. In the pack you've got further in, there are some more areas. What I can say is whatever we do is something we deliver to our customers, and our people talk about mission-focused work. We talked about retaining people earlier on and the question about employment. People who come to work to us do it because what they do, they see they make a difference. I'm new to this area. I've been in defense all my life, but this particular area, and I can see it and feel it with the people I talk to. Over a decade, BAE Systems has been delivering digital capability across a whole range of government enterprises and departments.
I'll give you three examples which will draw out of this list. Child protection systems. I'll go a little bit into how they used to do it. You'd walk into a room. You'd have someone from a health department. You might have someone from a school. You might have a policeman. You might have a local doctor, someone from social services. They say the name of somebody who they were concerned about. Everyone would go through their data manually, looking and searching to see if they can see a connection. Sometimes they found a connection. Quite often, they missed it. You see the stories on the news. By putting everything into a database, turn it into information, and applying artificial intelligence algorithms, you can join the connectivity. Our police forces now use this to fast-track and intercept children who are vulnerable. Cerberus.
When we left the European Union, the Home Office launched a new border control security system, which was known as Cerberus. We are an integral part of that in terms of providing all the information, the data sets to make it work. We also put together the national automatic number plate recognition. I did find this one amusing. Every police camera that's around the U.K. was originally set up by the local police authorities. We put it all together. You can now track the movement of any car throughout the United Kingdom. This is being used to help with drug trafficking, often known as county lines, and other activities for people who are clearly misbehaving. What does it mean in terms of scale?
50 million images a day, that's more than Instagram processes, are being collected and gathered and analyzed at the request of a specific intervention. This, I think, confirms our pedigree as a digital data-driven business. Excuse me. I shall now describe our new portfolio, how we're going to take it to market, and what the top-level vision is which fits within that. You take those seven businesses and we distill it down into four core competencies and two specific areas. Six things. First one is digital partner. This is where we act as a consultant. We go client-side, we have a small team, and we help the customer understand what it is they are trying to achieve when they talk about having a digital system. They want to bring their enterprise together.
They want to bring their data solutions. They want intelligence activities. Having solved that definition for them, we then work into the transformation phase where we do the implementation and we deploy, and we build the products that they want across cloud-based systems. Cybersecurity. As a business, we are fully certified by the National Cyber Security Centre, which gives us the safe environment in the digital world to use our tools securely. STARA is a unique threat assessment that we use as a process and methodology. It's used across the national security and various government agencies, and it measures and it reports threats. It's a systematic approach to how we solve a problem. What is key about this, and I'll use an old expression, it's really our bread and butter. This is our core strength to be able to provide cyber assurance.
Whenever we deploy a product, whenever we give someone an intelligent system, it's cyber robust. Intelligent systems, I illustrated a few that I talked about earlier, with Cerberus and the child protection. It's an interesting thing to talk about because to make decisions, you have to look for information, you have to make conclusions. In the past, human beings did this. To solve critical challenges now and to make intelligent decisions, we can't look at data in isolation from one source. We need to break down the silos from different avenues. We need to make the connections across complex ecosystems. The effect is like weaving threads, and it's crucial to building that digital advantage.
We call this the digital thread, and Vivi, who's here, we have got a demonstrator outside which can help articulate and explain how we bring that connectivity together. The artificial intelligence and machine learning that we're expertising lets you bring and create that intelligent system in a more easy way and at a pace which humans can't achieve. What we specialize in, though, is we offer customer specific solutions to suit their needs, and we tailor our solutions rather than just offering a pure bespoke solution off the shelf. C5ISR systems. The core purpose of C5 is command and control. It's the raison d'être of the military, to understand the picture, to be able to act on it, and command and control. The other three Cs are communications, computing, and cyber.
I've explained through other examples why we fully understand those and also with the acquisition of PPM, how it helps us produce a more secure system. This blend of the experience of defense, coupled with what we were doing in national security, our cyber protection, and the other attributions, means that we are aiming, and I'm confident we will be a partner for defense across C5. Satellite systems. BAE Systems has always retained a presence in space. For many, many years, we've deliberately not gone into the large-scale satellites, the things I call the size of double-decker buses. We leave that to Airbus and Lockheed. The world is changing. It's also changing the digital solutions to space will soon prove fundamental to the prosperity of our society. What do I mean by that?
I'll illustrate it through Google Maps. We just use it every day. We look at the images to get from A to B. We do more than that. If you go to rent a place on holiday, you quite often zoom into the place to have a look around it. That imagery, that space information, is more and more becoming prevalent in our day-to-day lives. As we go forward, it will continue to do so. Space, in simple terms, is sensors and communication systems. No one can challenge BAE about its ability to put sensors on warships, on fighter jet aircraft and other land-based platforms, integrate them and turn them into a solution. Going forward, low Earth orbit satellites have become more affordable.
What we need to do is how can BAE Systems access the low Earth orbit market to provide all that knowledge of systems integration and sensors? The bit that was missing, the ingredient that was missing, was actually to build satellites 'cause there are a few tricks that they have which, BAE Systems may not have, been expertising, hence why we bought In-Space Missions. With those six capabilities, we have a vision. The vision breaks into five threads. Firstly, to be an established provider of data-driven systems that can operate securely within the cloud, a strategic partner in the U.K. for cyber, delivering multi-domain C5ISR systems to defense customers, and a leading supplier of LEO satellites worldwide, and ultimately, delivering digital advantage to our U.K. customer and across international markets. How do we take that to market?
Because it is a very complex set of activities. Firstly, we will focus and concentrate on the core strength that built our credibility of cyber and intelligence, which is national security and central government. This is a pillar where we are a trusted partner, and we will continue to prosecute and grow this market. We will build this capability and use it to access defense. In the UK alone, GBP 2 billion has been put aside to put digital infrastructure, enterprise solutions, and intelligent systems into defense. I don't understand it on a personal level. Our national security handles sensitive data, but they're more advanced about how they want to put in place digital solutions. Defense is catching up, and we're ready to capitalize on that because of our background and pedigree.
That is the reason we created a specific division in there called Digital Defense Services. It's an area already present with the Navy and Strategic Command, helping them shape and determine what their digital backbone needs to consist of. C5ISR. Our customers in the UK and globally are looking to transform their individual force structures to a single integrated battlespace picture. What I described earlier about our capabilities positions us well in order to take advantage of where that customer is now moving. This market size is estimated to be in the order of GBP 5 billion. As space moves forward and the next layer of defense and security, it merges, it aligns with the BAE Systems model. The combination of BAE Systems and In-Space Missions, as I said earlier, positions us perfectly for the expanding low Earth orbit market.
All of these domains and capabilities lends itself to the international market, to our allies. Firstly, we will build and consolidate within the UK. We'll start to move into the home markets that we know already in BAE Systems, and then move and extend further into other international markets. To ensure that we're successful, there are some areas that I've convinced Charles that he's going to support me on for investing. I'll cover these in a little bit. It says here in my notes, I'm now going to hand over to Doug Liddle, who's the CEO for In-Space Missions. The door is not gonna open and Doug is not actually gonna walk through because Doug has been presenting to Dstl today, a bid which we bid for a satellite. We're in competition there with two other companies. It was our pitch.
He texts me to say, "It's going really well. In fact, it's going so well, they're asking more questions than we planned. I'm not gonna make it." Fingers crossed that we are successful in achieving it where he is. What we're gonna show you though to kick it off is a video of BAE Systems self-funded satellite cluster known as Azalea, which we intend to put into space in 2024.
The UK has committed GBP 1.8 billion to invest in sovereign space capability. Azalea, which you saw in the video, is a satellite cluster delivering coherent ISR sensor for civil and security use. The Azalea building block is a cluster of four spacecraft which will work together rapidly to secure and deliver vital intelligence to customers, an electro-optical sensor, infrared sensor, and a synthetic aperture radar. The fourth satellite does what we call edge processing, so it takes that information and it processes it in space. This is unique because it then enables you to deliver it to the user, the soldier on the ground, a warship in the ocean, or back to strategic command rather than having to send the data back to the ground to be processed, then recirculated back by another satellite to someone else. It's only the first cluster.
We expect U.S. Space Command to buy a constellation, which would be several orders more than the first four that we are putting up. By doing the first four, we're demonstrating we understand to do the in-space connectivity and the in-space processing. Where Doug is today is to secure the order, hopefully, for another satellite, which is part of the MOD and the U.S. Space Command's own investment in the same thing. A little bit of background about In-Space Missions. I'll do my best. I'm sure Doug could have put more color on it, but I've got his notes.
In-Space Missions was formed by what he describes as space industry veterans back in 2016. What he doesn't say in his notes is there were several people very frustrated about the lack of pace and agility that was going on, and they had lots of innovation and idea, and they decided to take their courage to create their own company and set themselves off to do something different and try to break the standard mold on space. They were successful. They have a satellite already in space. They have a unique satellite, which is called the Faraday Rideshare. It's only about the size of a very large box about this size, but you can buy a slot. If you've got enough money, you can put something in it. You can just be a university, you could be a meteorologist.
Every time it passes, it's collected data, just pings it back down to earth. You can buy this, called a Rideshare system. They've been innovative in that. We're also proud they will be part of Virgin Orbit's first launch come October, whenever the UK makes its first launch from Cornwall later in the year. The space market for LEOs is growing. We all know that Elon Musk and others are doing things in this area, trying to get into for communications. There's an estimated, you know, GBP 10 billion worth over the next decade, with the CAGR running at about 17%. He's currently building another 3 satellites for the MOD and Dstl.
One of the unique features on it is that we are having what we call software-defined radio technologies and RF payloads, which enable us to reprogram the satellite in space. The analogy would be in the same way you download a new app to your phone. Rather than a satellite going up, be stuck on a mission for 5 years, 10, 15, they will be upgradable and adaptable to cope with the changes that the customer would want to have. That's why we bought In-Space Missions 1 year and 2 months ago. They're a great little company. They're growing with innovation, and they allow us to do what we couldn't do, which is understand how to build satellites. I could bore you a little bit if you come to the model. How do they stay positioned in space?
How do they move around? How do they get to the area they need to be in orbit? It's all quite tricky. They understand that. We know how to do intelligence. We know how to do sensors. We know how to merge things, and we know defense. It's a great partnership. Says here, "Thank you, Doug." To conclude, I'll summarize our investments that we haven't discussed. We'd already talked about space. In multi-domain, so I mentioned the importance of C5 and what customers are aspiring to do. The one thing they'd really like to do easily is have a method of moving across what we call multi-domain. Moving from one layer to the next layer, to the soldier on the ground, to the battleship, and connecting smoothly and easily.
What we have done is we've invested in a system called NetVIPR, which allows you to do that. It will operate at all levels, soldier, vehicle, GCHQ, and it will allow the same connectivity and the same information to be layered and tailored through the same system. Asset management. BAE Systems is a fantastic company for managing assets. It does everything it does today across Typhoon. We've done it for many, many years, but we can get better, so we will invest in apps and tools to help support that capability and how we go forward. Cloud mission services. We will invest in specific apps which will allow us to tailor things which are happening off the shelf in the cloud environment to allow us to get more utility out of it.
One investment is a product called Alpha LAB that will simply expedite the process of the prototype and then get us to a cloud-ready solution in advance. The market is very significant. It tends to come in very large numbers. When we talk to analysts and we talk to people, they're always very large numbers. We have tried to distill that down. I was quoted at one stage, "Oh, it could be GBP 750 billion by the end of the decade." I said, "Okay, but what could we realistically go after? What's addressable? I don't expect we'll win all of this, but these are the areas which are addressable in theory we could reach for." We see across the UK, across our domains, roughly GBP 18 billion and then international, similar, GBP 20 billion.
Central government obviously is a UK specific activity for what we do. What's important here is it's balanced across each of the domains that we put together. We're not dependent on one or the other, or on one single domain to grow. We've got a good balance. Our philosophy, though, as I said earlier, will be to address the UK first and then move more internationally as we build that credibility. In terms of finances, I hope you've not been holding your breath for a very detailed slide. Today we're a GBP 700 million business, and we'll deliver that this year.
We're positioned for good growth over the next five years for all the reasons I've outlined, and I expect to have growth in each of the divisions at various levels, across each of those domains that we talked about. The overall figure that we expect to have is throughout that process, we will have a double-digit return on the sales that take place. To summarize, we studied it just over 18 months ago at Charles's request to look at this area. I think we responded to how we saw the market change and created Digital Intelligence. The BAE Systems organic capability has been bolstered with three strategically significant acquisitions in In-Space Missions, PPM, and Techmodal. There's a significant addressable market in the UK and internationally. We have excellent pedigree across all the domains, which I hopefully I've brought out for you.
With a clear understanding of how to deliver that digital advantage to customers who want to move into or need to move into a more intelligence-led system. We've got a clear route to grow through the individual-focused portfolio, and we are investing to make sure that we maintain our position with the right capabilities. By applying our digital heritage and our defense knowledge, coupled with the business acquisitions, I believe we've created the right offering to our customers in a growing market. Thank you.
Thanks, Dave. Yeah, why not?
Why not? No.
You've earned it.
No, stand up. I prefer to stand.
We've probably got about 10 minutes for questions. Jen, can you let me know if any come through on the line? We'll take some in the room first. Christophe?
Yes. Christophe Menard, Deutsche Bank. Three questions, if I may. The first one is the difference between intelligence and security and digital intelligence, is it just the U.S.? Or, I mean, is it a geographic difference? Can you elaborate a little bit? I will follow up with the two additional questions.
Yes, if you're referring to the slide that Brad put up, Inc. is our Inc. equivalent of the business I described. I think it's fair that they've probably been at this on a more focused wider market than what we had as former Applied Intelligence for a number of years. It is also a bigger home market in the States, hence the disproportionate. My objective is to catch Al up.
Are there any ways to actually put the resources in common, or is it separate silos, kind of silos?
Yeah, go for it. Yes. I think it's always a difficult area when you get into security domains. We have started discussions, and it is clear there are areas that our U.S. colleagues can help us with here in the U.K. We're exploring exactly how to do that, capturing it and making it detailed so that they can do the necessary things they have on their side to make sure their equivalent security people are happy. There's also other areas with the acquisition of Bohemia, which took place last year with INS. It's a clear opportunity where we can help them this side of the Atlantic.
They've got people based in Farnborough, and we're talking about how can we help Bohemia get a better presence both here in the UK and in Europe as two examples. I think it is possible, and it's a question of just working through different examples.
It's worth just saying that the so-called AUKUS Pillar 2 activities, things like cyber, quantum computing, that those are areas that are obviously common that, you know, we're hoping to use and we will, I think in time, use that construct as a means to potentially share more. But, you know, that's still very early days yet.
Thank you. Question on the margin. You say double digit. If my memory is right, I mean, it used to be below double digit in the past. What is driving the improvement? It's productivity efforts, as you mentioned in H one, or is it-
I mean, I'll give the credit to my predecessor. I think he's driven down our cost base really well over the last couple of years. We've also consciously divested in areas I would say we're not so specialized at. We've moved out of what I'll call the sort of the commercial and banking sector and concentrate on what we're good at, which is defense and security.
Last question is, in space, is it enough for satellite building or manufacturing, or do you need more build-up or more acquisitions?
I hope we will need more. Now, whether we can do that all through In-Space, and I don't know, but my intention is to build it so that company has to be larger than it is today.
Thank you.
Alastair.
Hi. Couple of questions. First of all, if I listen to Thales, they all say a similar sort of thing as regards to their, I can't remember what they call it, Gemalto, I still call it. What's the difference between the two of you? Why are you gonna do better? The second question is, I guess, you know, we pretend we can forecast the number of airliner deliveries or the number of Typhoons or Tempests that are going to get delivered. Forecasting the growth of this business is just far more ethereal, I guess. Would it be fair to say that, you know, that, what is it, GBP 18 billion in the UK over 10 years, if we started GBP 1 billion and end up at GBP 2.6 billion, it gives you 10% a year growth.
Is that the sort of order of magnitude that you would expect to grow in the UK business?
I'll let my finance colleagues answer that. Martin, yeah. You can, or defer to Brad. I'll answer that as a simple statement. That is the ambition, to grow at that sort of order and to keep growing. We've deliberately put the business together in order to do that. Brad can come back with any absolute numbers.
You've done it. You've let the cat out of the bag. I mean.
Yeah, I think we are aiming to-
Gonna be override for his IBP.
I think, you know, David, your point's right. I think, these businesses are positioned for, CAGRs that are far higher than the market average. I think we're expecting, that's why we built the business, such that it is, so we can participate in this market expansion that we're seeing. I think the business, as Dave has described, is well positioned for that. We should be driving above market CAGRs going forward and, you know, 10%, we'll see.
I think the real tipping point is this move into multi-domain, going from asymmetric warfare to, you know, near peer or peer-to-peer type threat, really drives our customers now to look at buying decisions on multi-domain. That was ultimately, I think, 'cause we've had these capabilities within the business, the decision as to why now was we're starting to see our customers now look to increase their capabilities and ultimately buy like this. We obviously wanna be well positioned for that. I think we've got some unique capabilities, and brigading them together gives us a very unique offering, I'd suggest, even in the context of others, as you mentioned.
Mine's an ambition, Charles. Brad and they temper me with realism. I'm an optimistic person by nature. In terms of your question about AUKUS. Sorry?
We've just established your ten-year target.
That's a personal target. I think what differentiates us is that, it's not so much the space capability or building a basic spacecraft, et cetera, it's what we're doing to differentiate between how we're gonna integrate the platforms, as a solution in space. I think because this is going out generically everywhere, there's a few little nuggets in there which I don't really wanna say on an open line, but I think we've got good experience and connectivity, encryption, a way to do on-edge processing and various other aspects which can move us into a differentiator.
Finally, intentionally provocative. If we go back a while to GEC, the bits that you didn't buy, they assembled a bunch of businesses through acquisitions to create a telecoms network that then spectacularly failed. From the outside, it all sounded great. Why is this different?
We're not building a telecoms network to start with. I think that there is two fundamentals. One fundamental is the same for national security and the central government, and it's the same fundamental for where we are today in C2 C3I. We have very sound business building blocks. We have already got credibility in those domains, and we're recognized by our customer. When you start to blend the two together, we start to present a more unique offering because we're able to offer those intelligence systems which were not so prevalent in defense today, and we're able to blend both those areas in order to make a more substantial. We're building on something which is already robust and merging it to make something which is a better offering to the customer.
Any on the line?
Any on the line, Jim? Okay, well, we're coming up to 3:30 P.M. so that's perfect timing. Thanks very much, Dave. Charles, do you want to just put up the closing remarks each, and then we'll wrap up?
I'll just say a closing remark. I mean, first of all, to thank you all very much for giving up a lot of time this afternoon. No numbers, which I know is always a sort of underlying disappointment to everybody.
The purpose of today was really to give you something of the substance beneath the numbers and the way the business is developing and the culture and the things that really Charles and Tom and Brad are driving through the company with the aid of some very able people that you've seen today, to make sure the business not only is cutting edge in technology and in defense capability, but in the way it does things and its adherence to the real principles of ESG, which are now deeply embedded in this company and driven by Charles as a thought leader, not as a box-ticking activity, but as something the company really accepts and believes in. We hope you'll take that thought away, and in a few weeks, Brad will give you the numbers that you're all really lusting after.
Hopefully, that'll be as positive as today's experience has been as well. Thank you all very much for coming. We really appreciate it. Thank you.