Well, good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today. What an absolute pleasure it is to see you all up live and personal. It's been too long, great to see you. Thank you for coming. This is our third reset of our targets, it's our first deep dive into the hygiene business. Today, though, we'll be starting with pest control, where the team will provide an update on the future growth potential of the market and its key drivers. We'll take a more detailed look at our digital ecosystem, we'll demonstrate our PestConnect service. We're gonna outline some exciting new innovations and also provide an M&A update before bringing it all together with some high-level numbers.
We'll then take a break for lunch, where you'll have a chance to see a number of displays on digital, on innovation, on ESG, before we dedicate the rest of the afternoon to hygiene, and we demonstrate why this is indeed the new pest control. Here, we'll provide you with a first look at the results from what we believe to be the world's largest research survey into hygiene expectations since the start of the pandemic. We'll update you on the organic growth opportunities that are clearly enhanced as a result of these changing attitudes. We'll explain where that growth will come from inside the washrooms, which is our core hygiene proposition, as well as outside the washroom and from geographic expansion. We'll again cover the enhanced M&A opportunity before finishing with some high-level numbers. We'll wrap up the day by leaving plenty of time for Q&A.
If you do have any questions during the sessions, please feel free to add them to our Q&A portal if you're in the room or via the event website if you are viewing online. We'll do our very best to include them all at the end of the day. I'm not gonna go through the biographies of our speakers today. They're set out in the deck there, but suffice to say, they are indeed a very talented bunch. Of course, please don't hesitate to speak to any of the team throughout the day. We've got about 20 members of our vastly experienced team here with us today. Before I hand over to them, let me take you through some of the key highlights of the afternoon. Starting with Rentokil, the global leaders in this outstanding pest control industry.
Pest control is an essential service, and it protects the public's health against a vast array of risks associated with pests, many of which can cause severe illness or even worse. This is a $22 billion market, and half of that market is in North America and a 1/5 in each of Europe and Asia. It's a market which we expect to continue growing by at least 4.5% over the medium term. Gary will outline in a moment how there's been no letup in the core market drivers post-lockdown and how every market in every region is increasing its per capita spend on pest control services and products. He'll also unveil some new research carried out in 10 markets on the key factors influencing the decision-making process of commercial customers when selecting and working with a pest control provider.
Without wanting to steal his best lines, the research clearly shows the importance of service reliability, innovation, digital, and sustainability, themes which play to our strengths and which you'll hear and see throughout today's event. Rentokil is the global leader in pest control operating in 87 countries and with 56 market-leading positions. This remains our main platform for medium-term growth as we push deeper into key markets, we target higher growth customer sectors, and we enter key emerging cities for future growth. Today, we've set a new medium-term organic growth target for pest control of between 4.5% and 6.5% per annum from 2022. One of those key drivers of future growth will be our digital ecosystem. That's a combination of digital handheld devices, remote monitoring, online portals, and data analysis.
It's proven, it's robust, it's secure, it's responding to customer needs, and it's delivering high levels of customer satisfaction. As Paul Donegan, our Digital Innovation Director, will demonstrate in a few moments, this is the future of pest control, and we've already made a major investment in time and money and effort to build our platform and to develop new opportunities through the use of data, informing our new customer propositions and our future innovations. Clearly, PestConnect's time has come. This is a high-quality commercial service, and from 3% of our commercial customers today, we're setting a new ambition to reach 25% of our commercial customers with this outstanding service by 2026.
Phill Wood and Dave Hall from our U.K. business, which has led the way with its deployment, will outline our model and demonstrate why Tesco and other high-profile customers are choosing PestConnect. Product innovation is embedded in our DNA with our U.K.-based Power Centre. That's our home of science and innovation in pest control, and we have an unrivaled level of capability in-house. Among our many firsts over recent years have been, we've been the first to develop connected pest control services, the first to use CO2 in rodent control, the first to deploy LED lights for highly effective and sustainable insect control. Lizi Jenkins, our Group Innovation Director, was due to be with us today, unfortunately she's had to drop out at short notice.
Mark Reader, our Head of Pest Category Marketing, will now be giving you a glimpse of some of our new projects from the pipeline of over 50 solutions, including remarkably video tracking and facial recognition software being used for the tracking of rodents, another first, as well as an expansion in our range of connected devices with our first new products for flying insects and crawling insects. Today, we're also announcing some changes to our category structures, and in pest control we're just making one small change, and that is to include our U.K. property care business from January next year, moving it from Protect and Enhance. In fact, it was the original Rentokil-branded business back in 1925. The business protects properties from woodworm, and it's already operating closely alongside our U.K. pest operations.
M&A is, of course, an important part of our growth strategy, and this afternoon you'll hear from Chris Hunt, our M&A Director. Since 2016, we've acquired over 200 businesses, mostly in pest control and with revenues over GBP 850 million. We've built a network of contacts. We've got a proven acquisition model, and that continues to create significant shareholder value. The pest control market remains highly fragmented still with around 40,000 companies worldwide. About half of those are in North America. Despite five years of significant M&A, our pipeline in the States remains very much in line with 2016. Over that time, 43 companies of the top 100 companies have been sold, many to Rentokil, of course, while another 42 companies have grown in scale and have been added to the list.
With the average size of the top 100 companies still bigger than it was five years ago. Indeed, the company that's placed in position 100 has revenues of over GBP 5 million, that's about 5% bigger than the company in position 100 back in 2016. The company in the 25th position is in fact 20% larger than the company in the same position five years ago. There are plenty of opportunities still to go for. We don't just go shopping for businesses in the U.S. We've got an active program in the rest of the world, where we seek to build out the local density in the 1,000 or so cities that we're already in, as well as targeting those cities of the future that will deliver even higher growth levels over the next few decades. Again, Chris will cover this later.
To wrap up the pest control session, Stuart will provide a financial overview. We'll take a break for lunch before turning our attention to Pest Control's very important partner business. Gary will again kick us off looking at the changing hygiene landscape and outlining our new research from 20 international markets. This brings to life the impact that the COVID-19 crisis has had on hygiene attitudes and on behaviors and on customer preferences going forward. What's become very clear is that the benchmark of what constitutes good hygiene is now set at a far higher level. That the drivers of future growth have changed significantly since the pandemic. Initial was the global leader in hygiene services with 22 market-leading positions and top three positions in 38 markets of its 65 markets.
We offer a wide range of high-quality washroom products and services to meet the needs of our customers across the three main areas of hand hygiene, air hygiene, and in-cubicle hygiene. Our hygiene revenues have exceeded GBP 500 million in each of the last three years with pre-pandemic growth of around 3%-4%. Today, the U.K. team of Brian Lynggaard and Jill Rogers will provide you with a deep dive example of how our U.K. business drives both revenues and margins. Firstly, through postcode density, and that's exactly the same as in pest control, which focuses on increasing the number of customers on each technician's route. Secondly, through product density, increasing the number of products and services in each washroom premise.
Thirdly, through the positive impact of its shared overhead with Pest Control, combining the use of buildings, of infrastructure, of back office, of IT, then adding revenues onto that shared fixed cost base. Fourthly, through M&A, building Pest Control density and adding more revenue still onto the shared cost base that we already have. Today, we'll take time to explain that core washroom hygiene business, and we'll also demonstrate how the importance of hygiene has changed, and we think for good. In response to these new customer needs, we are now creating a new category called Hygiene & Wellbeing, which we believe is the right business at the right time to help our customers keep their customers and employees safe in a less safe world. Our Hygiene and Wellbeing business will offer a broad range of services across three key areas.
Firstly, our core washroom hygiene services using our scale, our service expertise, and our brand, as well as our digital and innovation expertise that is inside the washroom to drive organic growth. Secondly, premises hygiene, that is leveraging our hygiene expertise outside of the washroom, including specialist hygiene services in air care and clinical waste management. Thirdly, enhanced environments, where we offer wellbeing services to improve the employee or the customer experience, including premium scenting, plants, green walls, as well as air quality monitoring. This new category brings together our core hygiene business with Ambius Plants and Scenting, with Dental Hygiene and Cleanroom Services, all moving into the new category of Protect and Enhance as of the first of January next year.
With Property Care also moving out of Protect and Enhance into Pest Control, this will leave our Workwear business in France as a standalone third category alongside our two large core categories, Pest Control, Hygiene & Wellbeing. Now on the screen here, you can see a financial summary of that new Hygiene & Wellbeing category, and Stuart will cover that in more detail. As you can see, the category's ongoing revenue increases by around a quarter based on 2018-2019 data. I'm pleased to say that we will retain the new organic growth target of 4%-6% for core hygiene, and we'll apply that to this larger Hygiene & Wellbeing category as of the start of next year. As we all hopefully move towards a post-pandemic world, we see a compelling medium-term growth opportunity.
To offer some broad guidance on where is that 4%-6% of organic growth gonna come from, we'd expect our core washroom services to generate around 50% of the 4%-6% medium-term target through enhanced washroom hygiene services such as No-Touch, such as Digital, and for the other 50% to come from a combination of premises hygiene and enhanced environments, that's outside of the washroom, like air purification services and from extending our geographic reach. This afternoon, you'll hear from Alain Moffroid, our Regional Managing Director for Europe, as well as from members of our management teams in the U.S., in Asia and Pacific to explain that latter part of the plan outside of the washroom and extending our footprint. Four to 6% is our new organic growth target. In addition, we also have an excellent M&A opportunity.
Chris will return later in the afternoon to focus on this M&A opportunity in the expanded Hygiene and Wellbeing category. Clearly, this is applying the very same proven value-creating model as pest control with a focus on city-based density building opportunities. We expect to see the momentum in Hygiene and Wellbeing growing through 2022 to be supported by an emerging pipeline of around 80 targets today. Over the medium term, acquisitions adding annualized revenues in Hygiene and Wellbeing of over GBP 25 million each year. In addition, we will also be open to the potential for larger transactions should they become available. Now, when I took over as Chief Executive Officer all the way back in 2013, I put in place new group targets for revenue, for profit, and cash. We beat those targets each and every successive year.
In 2017, we put in place our revised medium-term targets, and you can see them there on the left-hand of the chart. Since that time, our performance against those new targets has been strong. Given the new medium-term organic targets for both Pest Control and for Hygiene and Wellbeing, the time is right to again demonstrate our confidence and our ambition, and to revise the overall medium-term group financial targets upwards. Our organic revenue growth target will increase by 1% to between 4% and 5%. Our total ongoing revenue growth target also increases by 1% to between 6% and 9%, of which M&A will typically comprise between 2%-5%. Our ongoing operating profit growth moves from around 10%- 10%+, and our free cash flow conversion rate remains at 90%.
These medium-term targets will come to effect from the beginning of next year. When we break for lunch, coffee, and for drinks, I do hope that you'll take the time to visit the displays that we have of our latest innovations, of our digital ecosystem, including Connect, and indeed on our ESG credentials. ESG is real in Rentokil Initial. It's embedded within our operations, and as you can see here, this is also being recognized by the independent raters, where we have a very strong relative performance to the competition. This is another area where we are determined to do the right thing in line with our social purpose of protecting people and enhancing lives, and at the same time, differentiating ourselves as a world-class employer and as a purpose-driven, high-quality service provider.
Let me now hand over to Gary, our Chief Marketing, Innovation, and Strategy Officer, who will cover the global pest control market. Over to you, Gary.
Thank you, Andy. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Gary Booker. I'm responsible for the marketing, innovation, and strategy functions within Rentokil Initial. I'd like to talk today about the drivers behind our pest control business and why this continues to be an outstanding and thriving investment opportunity. The pest control market continues to grow at a very solid rate, delivering positive and consistent year-on-year growth. Over the last five years, the overall market has grown from around $18 billion in 2016 to over $22 billion in 2020, showing resilient growth even in the midst of a global crisis. Overall, the compound annual growth rate for this sector over this period has been around 4.7%. Looking at the overall share of the market, North America continues to dominate and represents over half of the worldwide total.
Over the last five years, apart from the very smallest region of Africa, growth rates have been in a range of 4%-5% in most regions, with Asia being the fastest-growing at a compound rate of 6%. Looking forward over the next five years, we expect to see similar growth rates, with all regions looking likely to grow at a slightly faster rate than over the last five years. The effect of this and likely outcome is that Asia will actually overtake Europe as the second most important region worldwide by 2026, driven by China and India growth in particular. In terms of how the market breaks down between its key segments, commercial remains the most important sector with 45% of the world total, but with residential still remaining a key area with over 1/3 of the market.
When I last spoke with some of you in 2018, I shared exactly this slide, memorably in the middle, using the word ratpocalypse. On the slide from three years ago, I highlighted nine key factors that we believed would drive growth in pest control. Looking back at this list, I think each of these has indeed had an important role to play in the market growth. What I'd like to do today is to group together and highlight four of these areas, which I believe will be of particular importance as drivers for the years ahead. The first of these is the importance of climate and environmental factors. Whilst there are some who still may not believe, it seems to most to be an inescapable fact that the Earth is getting warmer.
A number of interesting statistics exist, in particular, that we were already nearly 1 degree warmer in 2020 than the average from the previous century. Also at the more extreme end, the number of days of incredibly hot weather has nearly doubled. What is also clear is that there's a direct correlation between warmer weather and pest activity. At its simplest, warmer temperatures mean longer breeding periods and an extended season of pest activity. There is evidence that some insects are now experiencing several additional life cycles per season compared with previous years. Increased warmth in previously cooler geographic areas also means we're seeing an increased migration of species, so a broader spread of pests into areas where they perhaps weren't before, such as an increasing mosquito population and problem in some Southern European countries.
All of this simply means that climate and environmental factors are leading to an increase in the pest populations. Warmer weather means there are just more pests. There are more pests in the world, but there are also more people. The world population continues to grow and is set to exceed nine billion by 2050. The other trend of urbanization also continues. We have seen strong growth in this over many years, this trend is set to continue with nearly 70% of the world's population living in urban areas by 2050. The impact of this is also fairly straightforward. There are more pests, and there are more people living more densely together. More buildings, more harborage areas, more food production, and all of this leading to an ever-increasing need for greater pest control.
It's not just the number of people that is increasing, it's also who they are and what their expectations are. The middle classes as a sector is set for a particularly strong period of further growth over the next 10 years, with much of this growth coming from emerging markets. The increased wealth of this sector leads to an increasing intolerance for pests, with changing expectations and demands for ever higher sanitation standards. This is true and has an impact on driving both residential and commercial demand. The last key driver that I'd like to highlight concerns data accessibility and transparency. Everyone has more access to technology, and the capability and reach and scope of that technology is increasing every year. The Internet of Things continues to expand apace with a near tripling of connected devices forecast in just the next 10 years.
In just two years, half of all devices and connections are expected to be free of any human involvement at all, with a corresponding further explosion of data. More connected devices, more sensors, more measurements, more transparency of information, More awareness of problems with all of this data delivering new information and insight into the hands of customers and driving demand. These are some of the factors that have driven both pest market growth over recent years and will continue to do so in the future. Also in 2018, I shared the significant delta and variance that exists in terms of spend per capita between key regions. Back then, we talked about the average global per capita spend being around $2.41, with the European spend being higher than the average and the North American spend massively so.
By comparison, Asia spend was much lower and therefore represented a potential opportunity. As we look over the last three years, what is interesting is that every region, and therefore the total global per capita number, has gone up to the 2020 estimates now as shown. Of particular interest is the highly significant increase in Asia per capita spending. This potentially reinforces the point from earlier about the growing middle classes in emerging and developing countries. As you can see, it's driven especially by increases in India and by an extraordinary number in China. This again highlights the importance of having a strong global footprint in order to capitalize on the areas with the strongest growth potential.
Similarly, we also see significant ranges in terms of the commercial versus residential mix in different countries, all of which emphasizes the higher than average growth benefits that can come from taking a targeted approach. All of this provides a great background and overview of the market. Against that backdrop, Rentokil is the largest pest control business in the world. In terms of global coverage, we're able to service 85% of global GDP, with significantly more revenue coming from markets outside of the U.S.A. compared to some of the other market players. Of the 87 countries we operate in, we're positioned as the number one market leader in 56 of them. In addition to this, we continue to take a priority city targeting approach.
Key to this is having a strong market share in each city, which we know is important to deliver the density and service efficiency that we want. Our ongoing plan, which we will hear more of later when Chris speaks to us about our M&A approach, is to target specific cities and infill. In this way, as the bottom right-hand chart shows, we're able to build scale in those cities which are actually set to have a higher GDP growth rate than either their national country GDP or the global rate of growth. What this means is that we have the best platform for global growth of any pest business. Aside from our scale and global reach, what else do we consider as key factors that make us different and set us apart from everyone else? The first of these for certain is our expertise.
Rentokil has had a specific focus on solving pest problems through innovative solutions since the very first day we started, around 100 years ago, when the legendary Harold Maxwell-Lefroy, the Professor of Entomology at Imperial College London, was asked to study ways of exterminating the death watch beetles in Westminster Hall and began to develop the first fluid specifically aimed at controlling wood-boring beetles. We are unique in having a dedicated global R&D center for our science, innovation, and training, enabling us to study animal behavior in a variety of live environments and as a working space to trial a constant range of new innovations. We also have an in-house regulatory and technical compliance team and a certified GLP compliant analytical laboratory to ensure we stay ahead of all regulatory changes and can continue to develop our own new proprietary solutions.
For our frontline teams, we pride ourselves on continual learning and development to ensure we stay as the acknowledged experts at the forefront of the latest thinking with the highest quality training. Our technicians completed over 300,000 training courses last year alone. All of this sits behind our constant drive and focus on innovation. It's not just in our central facility that we do innovation. Innovation is a core part of our culture that runs through every aspect of our business. We get constant feedback and input from our expert frontline technicians. We get insight and identify new opportunities through the vast amount of data that our digital ecosystem automatically feeds in and provides us with remotely every minute of every day around the world. We constantly strive to be first to market with new and patented solutions.
At any one time, we have over 50 different ideas, concepts, and products at different stages of development and trial in our pipeline. All of these now have key criteria around ensuring they will have a positive impact from a sustainability point of view. Perhaps most importantly, we don't try and do this alone. We work with some of the world's foremost academics, researchers, and expert partners to ensure we take advantage of the very latest thinking and are able to incorporate vast additional expert resource and insight into everything we do. Related to this and emerging from all the work we've done over many years is our unique and proprietary digital ecosystem. When I say digital ecosystem, you may be hearing or thinking connected devices, and this is certainly a very important part of what we do.
Our ecosystem is actually a suite and a full range of end-to-end digital solutions, as Paul will share with us and explain in much more detail very shortly. Essentially, our digital ecosystem consists of three parts. Frontline data capture and input onto mobile devices, which feeds through into a portal for every customer, providing unparalleled visibility and transparency of all on-site activity directly to them. A range of always-on connected solutions for 24/7 constant monitoring and customer peace of mind, and a hugely powerful command center through which all our branches and teams can access key elements of the data we hold from all our sites worldwide.
This provides a number of clear customer benefits, not just in round-the-clock monitoring and early problem identification, but in enabling our customers to access much of this data themselves, and in allowing us to serve them with automated dashboards and documentation for complete transparency, for audit compliance, and even for automatic e-billing. All of these things, we believe, create a material point of difference in what we are able to provide and the way in which we can better serve our customers. Also, we always want to be sure we fully understand and are delivering against exactly what our customers' needs are. In particular, in advance of our event today, we wanted to look at the largest sector, the commercial customers, and see what things were most on their mind, particularly in the light of the world slowly, increasingly re-emerging from the crisis.
We commissioned a survey and spoke with the final decision-maker for pest control in 10 countries, as shown on the right, and across six different customer sectors to get a wide range of different views. What's interesting when we look at the results is the extent to which there is clarity and alignment from across the range of customers around a few major topics. Unsurprisingly, on the left, the top-scoring response was around the need for the highest level of service delivery. These are longer-term, high-value contracted customers, and what they want is reliability and speed of response in dealing with any issues.
The vast majority of these customers will have the myRentokil portal, which gives them full on-site visibility, and increasingly, these are the customers who now have their sites protected by connected devices as well, which constantly update and feedback immediately in the event of any activity. Right behind quality of service delivery came a clear statement around innovation. More than ever, the top commercial customers are wanting to ensure they have the very best new solutions on site to deal with any problems swiftly and efficiently, with three-quarters citing this as an important criteria in choosing a service provider. This is almost equaled by those who say they want to have always-on, round-the-clock remote monitoring solutions for their sites, and expertise and a suite of connected solutions in this area is also highly important in their choice of provider.
Similarly, the ability to have automated reporting and proof of service, which such technology enables, is also right up there in importance for them. Perhaps even more enlightening from our research is the number of customers who are now very clear on the need for any partner they work with to be delivering the service for them in the most sustainable way possible. Very many corporations now have specific net zero or other sustainability commitments they have made publicly and need to ensure any suppliers they work with are also acting in full support of the delivery and achievement of those objectives.
Per the last point on the right, as we will see later on when Dave speaks with us, this reduction in chemical and pesticide usage is precisely the reason that the very biggest customer in the U.K. turns to Rentokil to partner with on implementing a completely new pest management service across their entire estate. We are clear on what our customers want and in our ability to deliver against their current and future priorities. We have unrivaled scale and a global footprint that gives us a competitive advantage with a city-targeted approach and further density driving through M&A. We have over 95 years of experience and expertise built firmly on a foundation of scientific knowledge and continual training and learning.
We have a culture of innovation present right throughout our business, which leads to a stream of new proprietary and patented solutions coming onto the market to better serve customers and create a real point of difference. We have the very best end-to-end digital ecosystem, which continues to grow in both breadth, depth, market penetration, and capability, all underpinned by the power of the data we gather every minute of the day. For all of these reasons, we believe we are strongly positioned for organic growth in the pest control market with a target range of 4.5%-6.5%.
What we'd like to do now is tell you a bit more about a few of these key areas for us, starting with our Regional Managing Director for the U.K. and rest of world regions, Phill Wood, who's going to lead the next section and explain a little bit more about how and why the pest control industry is transitioning to digital. Thank you.
Thanks, Gary. Great build up there. Good afternoon, all. Welcome to the Digital Pest session. Together with Paul Donegan and Dave Hall, we're gonna try and bring digital pests to life on the ground for you all. This is gonna be an exciting session. Concentrate hard, everyone, yeah. Okay. As Andy announced a short time ago, today we've set a new ambition to reach 25% of commercial pest control customers with our connected products in five years. Thought it would be helpful to appreciate the significance of this by giving you a journey before and after about how this industry actually works on the ground. For a number of you, this will be a journey down memory lane, for some of you, maybe something a bit new.
In a world pre-digital, and indeed throughout our industry as we speak, the world really is about bait boxes with traps or poisons. This model does rely on technicians to check each one manually for signs of activity, but still have the skills, expertise, attention to detail, and communication skills to diagnose issues and to design action plans to solve issues. Technician visit cycles are largely six-week to eight-week inspection programs, meaning a potential infestation might have started weeks ago. During the visit, any activity would have to be noted, and actioned, and written on a manual report, and then filed away in a folder in the building. In regards to control of any issues, the dependencies would be on rodenticides or snap traps, the boxes would have to be adequately supplied by both.
That's the picture in your mind you should have of the world out there as we speak now. Fast-forward that to our digital-enabled solution. In Rentokil's digital pest world, the bait boxes are replaced by connected devices. Dual AutoGate devices restricting the use of poisons to the target species. Report books and paper replaced by myRentokil's electronic data capture and reporting. Data captured at source and in real time via our ServiceTrak app. Data transmitted in real time to a central command center as connect digitally watches our devices on site 24 hours a day. This should be seen as an evolution, as despite all this technology enablement, the technicians, the skilled quality technicians, highly trained and in sufficient numbers, are absolutely mission critical to ensure even greater response levels in the business.
Customers, as Gary have said, wants more effective pest control and they want sustainability. In our connected world, they get both. You can see why we find these exciting times for what is a really exciting business. As you go through this session, remember report books, reports, and bait boxes being checked, and that this digital world is now replacing. Let me hand over to Paul Donegan for the technology side.
Let's start with a quick video to explain digital pest control. What is a digital pest control ecosystem? Well, to put it simply, it's about connecting the world's best pest control devices to the Internet. That may sound simple, but it's not quite the same as connecting a smart device to your home Wi-Fi. Have you ever tried asking an information security officer if you can connect 500 mouse traps to their corporate Wi-Fi? Never mind what happens when the Wi-Fi password changes. The first layer of our ecosystem is our unique and proprietary long-reach network, which helps us connect our devices directly to the Internet. The second layer is our IoT cloud platform.
It's hosted in Google Cloud and has been designed for our ambitious growth. It's already managing over 10 billion messages a day, connecting our devices, colleagues, and customers in near real time. The third layer is our colleague and customer experience layer. That's a suite of apps that allow our frontline colleagues to interact with our devices. It allows our back-office teams to remotely manage devices and our customers to have 100% transparency. Let me take you through this ecosystem step by step to show you how and why this is digitally remastering our industry. One of the early challenges was to ensure that our onboard radio and electronics didn't interfere with the device's ability to catch pests. Another was ensuring we have a solution which had long-range connectivity and could work both internally and externally.
Remember, they are low-cost, battery-powered devices, and where pests like to live is not where Wi-Fi and radio signals operate easily. I'm sure you've all had experience of Wi-Fi dropouts over the last 12 months, and many of you will have to install boosters around your house. I bet you still don't get a great signal at the end of the garden. These are all problems that we've had to overcome, and with many years of investment and focus, we're confident we have a solution that is ready for scale. Unlike many of our competitors, we don't use our customers' Wi-Fi, and our devices send us heartbeat messages regularly to inform us of their health. These devices can also be updated and controlled remotely. For example, one of our Dual AutoGate is activated.
They tell the other AutoG ates to open, allowing us to dynamically start baiting programs and remain compliant with legislation without any human intervention. Let's focus a little more on our long-reach network. I've hinted a few times already that connecting devices to the Internet is not as easy as it sounds. Our early learning was all about how far can you push local communications in terms of range and at the same time keep power consumption low, so we can obtain multi-year battery life. We wanted to keep the local installation as simple as possible and avoid complex and expensive boosters to get the range we needed. If you can imagine a large food distribution hub, it might have 50 loading bays at the back of the building. It's full of complex machinery and a very dynamic environment with moving people and equipment.
That's the type of environment we've been testing in, and some of our largest installations have over 1,000 connected devices. Knowing we can operate in these complex environments gives us confidence we are ready to scale this solution. Our investment in long reach means we stand alone from our customers' Wi-Fi network, and we have full control of everything we install, which gives us agility and gives our customer better protection from cyber attacks. The Internet of Things is not something you can just buy off the shelf, and the Internet of Pest Things can only be a collaboration of the best in class across a number of sectors. As we continue our digital transformation, we're working with the best in mobile technology, cloud platforms, and data and analytics. We have amazing collaboration across our technology and innovation teams, our frontline teams, and these technology giants.
Partnering with the likes of Google and Vodafone, we are jointly pioneering low-cost commercial IoT at a scale unseen in our industry. A year in the life of Rentokil contains some pretty impressive numbers. We have over 20,000 frontline colleagues spanning 87 countries working with over 970,000 customers. We visit over two million customer buildings each year and record detailed pest management information at over eight million individual scan points and visit those locations over 50 million times. Our teams and our devices recorded 10 million signs of pest activity. We made over 3.5 million recommendations and took over 5,000 pictures to support them, which are in turn helping our customers pass their audits. We've already digitally empowered our frontline teams. The days of clipboards, pen and paper, and leaving printouts at a customer site is over.
Everything we do at a customer site is captured digitally, and making our apps easy to use reduces training and creating great colleague experiences is helping us deliver this digital transformation at pace. By linking our connected devices to our frontline apps, we can create a digital twin of the customer site and start to guide our frontline colleagues directly to the devices that have pest activity. This clearly has efficiency benefits and gives us more time to spend with our customers and help them implement our recommendations. The command center is bringing our data to life, and it's helping us be more effective, efficient, as well as highlighting new sales opportunities. We can view our data at a global level, and we can use it to monitor pest trends across countries and market sectors. Remember the food distribution hub I described earlier?
Well, around the world, we have thousands of locations like this, and as we define our customer site the same around the world, we can now understand what pests thrive in those locations, what time of day, and what day of week pests are most active. These data insights are now helping frontline teams solve problems quicker, and by helping our innovation teams design the next generation of solutions. We're mining the recommendations we make and inform our sales teams of new opportunities. A customer's building type and its location can have a major role to play in the risks of pest activity. For example, a food storage warehouse that was built in the nineteenth century, located near a river, woodland, or wasteland brings lots of additional risks simply based on geography and topology.
As we apply AI and machine learning, we can start to predict likelihood and future risks more than we could ever have imagined in a traditional world. myRentokil is our digital customer interface, providing 24/7 access to our customers. Everything that we historically wrote in logbooks and leave at a customer site is now collected by our teams digitally and uploaded immediately to myRentokil, stored safely and securely in our cloud platform. myRentokil is where our customers track progress against the recommendations we make. They can update the status and ask for further help. We create a full digital audit log, which helps them pass their audits from the likes of AIB and BRC. Unlike the paper-based reporting of old, myRentokil has a full suite of data analytics tools and provides access to near real-time pest activity trending across their entire estate.
When coupled with PestConnect, gives insights unrivaled in the industry. At a touch of a button, customers can set up automated reports and be delivered directly to them when and where they need it. It's live in 46 countries with 1.6 million customer sites registered and has over 200,000 active users every month. I've worked in technology within this industry for almost 25 years, and the pace of change in the last five years has been significant. Pest management was a very traditional industry, our digital ecosystem is reinventing pest management and is digitally remastering pest control for the better. Of course, all of this technology means nothing if it doesn't help us deliver better pest management to our customers. To tell that story, I'm gonna hand over to Dave Hall, the U.K. Operations Director.
Thank you, Paul. Who would have thought anyone could have made technology so much fun, really? Now let's get back down to earth and talk about how this works on the ground and demonstrate our operations in this space. Our model has been to go large in the U.K., learn and tailor before we roll out at pace across global markets with a target of 25% of commercial customers based on connected. I'm Dave Hall. I've led this U.K. rollout. Since launching Connect as a mainstream offer in 2019, we have increased our connected portfolio by fourfold and it now compromises circa 10% of our total business portfolio and is well on track to deliver that 25% portfolio.
We've seen progress both in our large key accounts and also local accounts and have targeted both new sales and also conversion of our current customers. PestConnect is intelligent pest control that doesn't cost the earth. What does that mean in reality? The benefits to our customers are fivefold. Firstly, and most obviously, 24/7 connected monitoring. Secondly, it's about having enough skilled resource on the ground to sort out the problem once the connected system has flagged a pest issue. Thirdly, it's about access to our unique catch and dispatch non-toxic technology such as RADAR. Fourthly, it's about linking that to myRentokil and giving the customer the data and the information they need. Fifthly, it's about reducing the use of toxic baits. It offers a sustainable solution that reduces toxic bait by up to 40%.
In summary, it offers a sustainable solution with no compromise on Pest Control. We've had a really strong response from our customers. 25% of our new contract sales are now Connect, importantly, 70% of those are on three-year contracts rather than a traditional one-year deal. For current customers, we're converting nearly 60% of target customers over onto PestConnect. Importantly, we're making progress across a very wide range of customer types. This is mass market. It's not niche. As an example, we converted Tesco last year from the traditional Pest Control market to Connect, setting up over 1,000 sites in two months in the middle of lockdown. It's the biggest Connect setup in the world, why does it work for Tesco?
Well, in the last 12 months, we've reduced their toxic bait usage by 40%, which is in line with their own sustainable agenda. Levels of pest activity have reduced despite the challenges of operating a large retail estate in the middle of lockdown and pandemic. We have future-proofed their business against the changing legislation. It's not just Tesco. Last year, we set up a number of the Nightingale hospitals, including the ExCeL Centre in London. This is the second biggest individual site that's been set up in the world with over 600 connected devices. The site was surveyed on a Friday. The PO was agreed on a Saturday. The product was shipped on a Sunday. It was installed on the Monday, and by lunchtime on Tuesday, we caught the first mouse.
We won the CBRE Best Innovation Award in FM, and I'm proud to say we are awarded the Eden Project contract for Pest Connect in 2020, all on the back of a connected, sustainable offer. What is our core offer? Well, as an example, for a low infestation standard SME customer, my offer to them would be this: We will reduce the number of routine visits, the number of technician visits from eight visits to four visits. We still fundamentally believe it's important that the technician inspects the site as part of the overall solution. We will locate fewer but better quality devices. We'll offer you the digital reporting and 24/7 monitoring, all for broadly the same contract price as a traditional pest control offer. Obviously, we'll tailor that offer depending on the type of customer.
Our digital reporting means I can identify for the customer when and where exactly activity happens, right down to the time and the location. Because we have this large data bank of customers, we can benchmark their performance against their peer group, so we can offer advice on issues such as cleaning regime, colleague training, property maintenance. We've also invested significantly in technician training. We've learned that our technicians need not just to be an expert in Pest Control, but also the connected system maintenance in the real world. That's things like battery life management, location of devices, signal strength, and environmental factors. It's meant a significant upskilling in role for our technicians and enhancing the role from being a bait box checker to being a true connected Pest Control expert.
With the floor plan app, this means that our technicians have a view of the site, its history, the device location before they even cross the threshold in entering the customer site. What that means is that they can spend less time checking bait boxes and more added value time sorting out infestation, which reduces non-productive visits and delivers better customer service and means they can spend more time talking to customers about other added value revenue opportunities such as proofing and fly control. In summary, it has allowed us to strengthen our offer to our customers across a wide range of customer types, from SME to FM, from food manufacturing to retail, delivering for customers a sustainable solution with absolutely no compromise on pest control. Thank you. I'll hand back to Phill.
Thank you, Dave. Let me summarize what you've heard. I hope we've managed to excite you there. I can feel it. Yes. Digital pest control takes the best of what's a great business and makes it better. Let's talk about colleagues. For colleagues, digital provides a job with even more purpose by removing much of the mundane and repetitive, but remember, crucial part of the role and focuses time and attention on the forensic diagnostic elements of the job, plus the communication to the customers, which makes this such an impactful service. Digital pest control doesn't replace the people element, it supplements it, and that's what you really want to land here. If we go to customers, for customers, the dynamic changes. You've got far more comprehensive coverage.
Digital technology aiding the pest controller to be more proactive and precise, and with data making sure we're solving the right issues before they become major issues. From a customer point of view, digital pest control emphasizes the benefits of the current service, but moves the dial read proactive service, visibility, and data-driven decision-making. For the economics. Economic case for digital pest control is also clear and supports our weighted growth targets of between 4.5% and 6.5%. Connect gives us a clear point of differentiation. This takes all of Rentokil's traditional strengths, the best trained technicians in the biggest volumes, and enables them to focus on the true value add through data. This supports higher retention.
From a customer point of view, changing from a PestConnect contract back to a traditional pest control contract would be like going from a smartphone to a red phone box and a queue, for those of you old enough to remember those days. Not a minor competitive differentiation, a significant one when combined with our current strengths. Moving the industry from one-year to three-year agreements is clearly not a structurally unhelpful dynamic in regard to customer retention of what is already a high bar. In regards to margins, this is an expensive journey, and Rentokil's been investing for a number of years. We're now over that major structural investment part of the curve, and you've heard from Dave clearly into the mass deployment stage. Standardization and scale over the cycle should drive the cost of equipment down.
Our experience of margins is broadly they are flat at commencement, and that over time, we expect them to be accretive through equipment cost reduction and depreciation profiles. Digital pest. We've come a long way here, and we think we've now established an established proven winner for colleagues, customers, and shareholders. In our view, exciting times indeed. Now, for even more excitement, I'm gonna hand you over to Mark Reader, our Group Category Director, for the next generation of innovations coming our way. Mark, over to you.
Thanks, Phill. Good afternoon, everyone. It's now for me to bring to life how the pest control looks moving forward, embracing technology, sustainability, and an increasing amount of data to maintain our industry-leading innovation track record. Our innovation pipeline is as healthy as ever, combining a clear commercial focus with our pest control experience, setting out to deliver uniquely qualified customer focus solutions founded on world-class scientific expertise. Over the last 18 months, the pipeline has become more focused. Firstly, this helped us streamline through the crisis and pivot resources onto critical projects. Secondly, a focus on fewer things allows us to stretch the boundaries of our chosen areas further. This combination means we can deliver on our focus areas at greater pace. The more focused pipeline also means we can push the technology and solution to the absolute edge of what is possible today.
To look at additional aspects of the products such as sustainability of the solutions we develop. We can look at everything from cradle to grave, how raw materials are sourced, persistence in the environment, and what happens at end of life. All of this possible thanks to our investments in technology you just heard about, and especially our partners who are leaders in their own fields, and that combined with our data means that we have available to us gives us that edge. When I say more focused pipeline, we still have over 50 projects at all stages of the development cycle. These include hardware, chemicals, digital, and database offerings with 17 patent applications, creating the foundation for sustained differentiation in the future. Let's bring this to life with some of the additions that we will be adding to our digital ecosystem you've heard so much about.
RADAR X is the next generation of our mouse riddance solution. While everyone else is launching their first, we are already on iteration two. Change is fueled by experience from colleagues and customers. The biggest improvement we could make was to make it multi-catch. It now has two kill chambers. That means it is still a functional trap even after it is triggered once, with the added benefit of reducing the amount of visits needed by our technicians. It remains humane and non-toxic using a proprietary CO2 system. To make this product practical and usable, we had to shrink the footprint of the mechanics inside to keep the form factor acceptable to customers, while also making the unit more resilient, so it can be placed in the most challenging of environments.
Next, Eradico, our first bait box made from fully recycled polymers and designed for closed loop recycling. The tray is specifically designed to be multifunctional, so it can take bait and snap traps. We're also redesigning our connected and proprietary Dual AutoGate system to fit this new footprint. This means any solution put in this box should have maximum efficacy. One of the outcomes of this solution is predicted to save up to 300 tons of virgin polymer per annum. Crawling Insect Connect is our first foray into the world of connected insects. The box is no standard box. It is packed with super smart features, including a specially designed surface to help insects walk up the ramp, making it as attractable as possible for our tiniest pests.
Getting an alert when a nice, comparatively big, warm, fluffy mammal goes into a box is one thing, but getting alerts when cold-blooded insects smaller than 4 millimeters have wandered in is another. By adapting our detection technologies, we have achieved this, allowing our customers to get all the fantastic data and alerts that they do from our rodent solutions. Our final connected solution to share with you today is Lumnia Connect. Using the latest visualizing technology and applying that to the glue board, we have started to build our library of images and data. Through machine learning, we were able to build beyond counts and step into the world of ID-ing insects. Moving on from our digital ecosystem to two further projects that leverage our industry-leading data. To introduce one here called Helix, where the science is relatively heavy.
Reducing chemical use, as you heard from Dave, is a real challenge. Connect certainly helps us to do that, but there are other areas in which we can remove and reduce chemical usage. We believe that with our data, we can actually improve infestation control while reducing the amount of the rodenticides we use. Around 90% of rodenticides today are based on anticoagulants, and studies now show that genetic resistance to these chemicals is becoming ever more widespread. We now have the techniques whereby simply collecting droppings, we can identify animal populations that carry these genetic mutations by using specific DNA probes. Our own internal trials show that on some sites, populations of mice were 100% resistant to a number of frequently used rodenticides, while some populations of rats were up to 90% resistant.
By combining our data with that of publicly available data, such as the Rodenticide Resistance Action Committee, we can target our treatments. Using the correct rodenticide, we can target susceptible populations. This improves the efficacy of the active while reducing the overall amount of chemical needed to get an infestation under control. Final one to share today, check out a video of rats typed using computer vision and machine learning. This is where we start to use facial recognition technology to observe animals, pests, and rodents. People have been talking about video in the pest industry for some time, using camera traps and light to capture images of wildlife.
The real value and tricky part is translating remote point-to-point still picture cameras into a platform where video content can be analyzed and delivered to any one of our 20,000 frontline colleagues on demand. This is exactly what we're working on. We're using tracking mechanisms developed to aid our studies at the Power Center and have incorporated video analytics into our digital ecosystem. As you can see in the video, we are working towards tracking of features such as object attributes, movement patterns, and behavior-related motion, giving us certainty about identification, the source of the problem, and treatment solutions.
Having this type of behavior and spatial data will mean we can also understand the environments, what other species there are, and the interactions with targets, as well as the effects of temporal data such as time or weather and associated behaviors, so we can devise the optimum treatment for any area. The advances in deep learning video analytics and neural networks will enable us to identify other objects of interest and therefore automate processes such as harborage identification and better guide our frontline experts to where and when they are needed the most. I've very briefly introduced you six of our current pest control innovations adding to our track record of delivering industry-leading solutions. We have over 45 more in our pipeline, and as mentioned earlier in the day, we are leveraging partners and true leaders in their industries to help drive these solutions at pace.
Combining their expertise with our knowledge and ever-expanding data-driven insights allows us to deliver better and, of course, differentiated pest control solutions. Several colleagues will be around in our innovation zone later where you can see a number of these innovations. Thank you, and I'd like to hand over to our M&A Director, Chris Hunt.
Thanks very much, Mark. I'm gonna tell you today about how we create value through acquisitions and go deeper on three topics that I know are of interest to many of you. Our North American M&A program. Our activities in emerging markets, i.e., cities of the future. Thirdly, the sustainability of our pipeline, especially in North America. First of all, I wanted to set the scene by reminding you of the rationale for M&A within our business. We've shared the data on this chart with you before. It shows that branch profitability is optimized as you approach and exceed 25% local market share. That's because we're building density at a branch level. If we already have a branch operation and we buy another, then combining the two means that we can optimize the routes.
Technicians spend less time driving and more time in front of the customer. We can also repatch sales reps to make them more efficient and find cost synergy by removing duplicate admin costs and activities and/or consolidating properties. Some of that synergy can be reinvested. For example, we might choose to invest in sales reps to grow the business rather than let them go, or we might buy a commercial business and decide to invest in local marketing activities to expand into residential. We think about value creation as a business process, and I believe that's what's driven our success. I'll touch on just 3 aspects of that. Firstly, there's a dispassionate, disciplined evaluation of the opportunity. Here we get to grips with the quality of the business and the quality of its economics.
It's a big part of my job to ensure that we get this right, so that only investment-grade opportunities come through. We do that using a standard financial model forecasting future profits, cash flows, Net Present Values, IRRs, paybacks, and multiples. We reject roughly one in four at this early stage, either because we can't get the returns criteria to work or because we can't get comfortable with the steps necessary for that value creation. Secondly, there's a clear integration plan for each deal. Now, this is led by the business, not the deal guys. Operators are clear what they can absorb quickly, and the target business gets an idea of the rhythm, cadence, and requirements being a member of the Rentokil family entails. Finally, we exercise strong governance. We review progress, and we challenge regularly.
Our investment committee approves all offer letters and post diligence, our final business plans. We do post-deal reviews of performance against the PLC board twice a year. These reviews help us to feed back and ensure future deals address common issues or benefit from the learnings. This chart shows you our deal activity. We've got a strong track record. It shows that we've done 228 deals since 2016. 186 of them, roughly 80% of the total deals, have been in pest, with the other 20% in Hygiene & Wellbeing. I'll talk about those in a later session. You can also see that 73 deals, roughly a third, have been in North America. We spent the bulk of our acquisition dollars there.
I wouldn't want you thinking it's all about North America because we've got a good track record in emerging markets and growth markets outside of North America too. We're executing roughly three deals a month, and we couldn't point to a track record like that unless we built the M&A capability to identify, evaluate, negotiate, execute, and integrate these deals at pace. We do most of this with an experienced, dedicated in-house team. The front end, identify and evaluate, sits in the market, so we're close to the opportunities. The back end, the deeper evaluation, the deal structuring, and the execution, sits in the center with a small team of dedicated M&A specialists and links to our functional experts who help us to create value, for instance, in insurance or property.
If I turn now to North America, the chart on the left shows you revenue multiples paid across the landscape of North American pest deals. It's based on data from one of the main brokers, The Potomac Company, and thanks to them for allowing us to share it. I think it's a pretty good representation of what's getting done in the market. You'll see that at the upper end, it shows revenue multiples rose in 2017- 2018, and they've remained high since. There's been plenty of competition from the other majors, especially for the bigger assets, and we're seeing private equity on the hunt for smaller regional platforms to pursue a roll-up strategy. It's also worth pointing out that at the lower end, multiples aren't expanding anywhere near as quickly.
Now we're quite used to operating in this competitive environment and of course, money talks, and we're prepared to pay up for quality businesses because we know what quality looks like, and we're confident in our model to deliver the returns. Others are offering similar prices, so winning deals is also about positioning ourselves as the preferred buyer. We've built our reputation over many years. It's a mix of professionalism, sticking to our word, offering quick, clean, and simple deals, and respect for all colleagues in the integration. The chart on the right shows the revenues we've acquired and the returns we've made in North America. On average, we bought around GBP 100 million of revenue a year.
2018 looks a little light, but that's 'cause we spent our M&A dollars in other growth markets, and we had a few North American deals complete in early 2019. The second half of 2020 was huge. Sellers were keen to exit, fearing Biden's tax reforms would increase their capital gains tax bill. I'd feared that 2021 would be quieter because those planning to sell would have done so in 2020. That's not the case. Our deal activity remains very healthy. Playing to that healthy deal flow, I'm often asked if the North American pipeline's drying up. I don't think it is. This chart demonstrates why. On the left, you can see PCT Magazine's analysis of revenues from the top 100 pest companies in 2016 compared to 2020. It excludes the majors.
In 2016, there were 83 companies with revenue below GBP 50 million, and in 2020, 81 companies. The threshold for entry into the PCT top 100 is now around GBP 5.8 million of revenues, where it was about GBP 5.6 million in 2016. As Andy mentioned, the top 25 are larger now than they were in 2016, whereas number 80 is about the same size. On the right-hand side. Sorry, obviously, not all of those targets are actionable, but there's still a lot of bolt-on targets, and they're a bit bigger than they were. On the right-hand side, you can see how the top 100 markets evolved from GBP 2.6 billion in revenue in 2016- GBP 3.1 billion in 2020. In 2016, there were 96 businesses excluding the majors, and that became 95 businesses after Anticimex entered.
Of the 96 businesses, 43 businesses sold, and they've been replaced by 42 new entrants. It's also worth pointing out that those businesses who didn't sell have continued to flourish, growing around 9.7% on average each year, and they filled the gaps from those that have sold. In conclusion, between 2016 and 2020, there's been a recycling of similar-sized businesses, the market is bigger, and there's still a high number of good-sized targets to pursue. I focused on North America today, but it's also worth reminding you that we operate in 86 other growth and emerging markets. I'm not talking to you today about the growth markets, but opportunities remain good there, and they give us flexibility to deploy M&A outside of North America, where the multiples are lower.
Now, turning our attention towards emerging markets, as I mentioned at the start, we've got a good track record in emerging markets, having done 51 deals since 2016. Here, our strategy is a bit different. Emerging markets is about building a strong base for future growth rather than bolt-ons to infill our footprint or build density. Our hypothesis is based on four pillars. Firstly, that GDP grows quicker in emerging markets than it does in established markets. Secondly, emerging markets tend to have high urbanization rates. Growth rates in major cities are typically higher than the country as a whole. Thirdly, pest growth rates tend to be higher than city growth rates. Finally, growing market share to 25% or so will deliver good margins for us like it does elsewhere.
It follows that targeting the fastest growing major cities will lead to a faster-growing pest business relative to our more mature locations. Linking this with what Gary shared with you earlier, we see a considerable opportunity in cities of the future with ambitions to increase our scale in 125 cities of the top 250 cities and to enter a further 27 cities. We think building share, by building a market share of 25% or so, like in our established locations, will lay the bedrock for future profitable growth. Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate this is with an example from Indonesia. Indonesia is the eighth largest economy in the world on a purchasing power parity basis, and it will grow to be the fourth largest in the next 30 years.
It's the world's fourth most populous country, growing at around 5% a year, with more than half its people living in cities. Jakarta, its capital city, is growing at more than 8%, and we estimate that the Jakarta pest control market is growing at 2%-3% ahead of that. We've done two recent deals in Indonesia, and that's helped grow our revenues 6.5x . On the right-hand side, you can see the benefits from that density. Our revenue per service FTEs increased 2.9x . Our techs are now closer to their customers and spend less time traveling, so they can spend more time with or serve more customers.
We've consolidated the property footprint within larger branches, our revenue per branch has increased 4.7x , and our gross margin has increased 1,300 basis points, as we now have more productive staff and lower branch costs. In conclusion, M&A delivers profitable growth. It boosts our growth trajectory, and it's a key part of delivering our medium-term guidance. We've got a model to create value from bolt-on M&A, and it's deep-rooted in the business. We're using it to pursue pest opportunities globally, and those opportunities have been baked into our group targets to deliver between 2% and 5% top-line growth. North America will remain a focal point for our pest M&A activities, and M&A returns remain good, and we're confident in the pipeline.
Finally, we're looking to replicate the Jakarta model in other cities of the future, either growing our current market share or acquiring entry platforms. Here, we're identifying good local pest businesses that we can mold into the Rentokil model, and when the time's right, bolt on other acquisitions. We believe cities of the future will be a bedrock of longer-term growth. I'm now gonna hand you over to Stuart to summarize what we've told you and to share its financial impact.
Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everybody. Let me begin with a graphic you will recognize from our interim results presentation in July. It represents our cash compounding subscription model, which is driven by our operating model and which continues to run extremely effectively. Our operating and financial performance over recent years clearly demonstrates the efficacy of the model and its potential for acceleration in the future. We have very strong metrics in our pest control business, 2/3 of which is subscription portfolio and which generates very high levels of customer retention at 84.4%. We have a good ability to recover input cost inflation through an effective pricing. Postcode density and market share drive strong operating margins and organic growth, which on a four-year average has been around 5%.
While the business is highly cash generative, it has very low requirements for investment and capital expenditure. As we have said several times before, the industry is highly fragmented with 40,000 businesses offering significant opportunities for us to continue with our proven and successful roll-up M&A program, with a particular focus on cities of the future and North America. Combined, these elements mean we are very strongly placed to deliver growth in the medium term. Turning now to a chart which illustrates the value of our operating model has created since 2015. We've used H1 numbers as a comparator in order to give the most recent picture and demonstrate our recovery from the impact of the pandemic in 2020. The bar chart on the left shows that we've grown revenues by around 88% to 2021, a CAGR of 15.4%.
Looking at operating profit growth on the right of the slide, this has risen by GBP 99 million since 2015, a CAGR of 15.6% to 2021. Both charts illustrate our delivery of substantial value creation in pest control over the last seven to eight years. Let me briefly recap on what we've told you today. We operate in an attractive global market growing at 4.5%-5% per annum. We've set our new organic growth targets of 4.5%-6.5% over the medium term, which represents further momentum in our compounding growth model. We are strongly positioned in innovation, digital, and sustainability, and to reflect that, we have an ambition to install PestConnect amongst 25% of our commercial pest control customers by the end of 2026.
You will have noted the category changes described by Andy earlier today, which have only a very minor impact on the composition of the Pest Control category with our U.K. property care business joining Pest from the January 1st, 2022. Finally, we have very high levels of confidence in the sustainability of our global M&A model, are particularly excited by the opportunities we see to grow and expand our footprint in the cities of the future. Which brings us to the future and what all this means for our targets.
The combination of outstanding pest control structural growth drivers, including increasing per capita spend and our own organic growth levers such as innovation, digital technology, and sustainability, and the continuation of our M&A program means that over the next five years and beyond, we can continue to strengthen our already leading position in the global pest control market, building organic growth and M&A on top of our base and enhancing net operating margins through greater density. We will now move to a 30-minute lunch break, during which you will be able to see some of our digital innovation and ESG displays. We are saving questions and answers to the end of the day. You will see in your pack a link which allows you to submit questions, a question to us online, which we can then respond to later.
Of course, you will be able to pose questions to us in real time later this afternoon. Please do enjoy your lunch break, and our Hygiene and Wellbeing presentations will begin at 2:00 P.M. Thank you very much.
[Break]
Good afternoon again, ladies and gentlemen. Hope you had a good lunch and had a chance to chat to some of the team at the breakdown. Far today, we've focused on pest control. We've announced a new medium-term organic growth target of between 4.5% and 6.5%. We've looked at that new market research on the expectation of customers for innovation, digital, and sustainability. We've highlighted our leadership in these areas, and we set that new ambition to reach 25% of our commercial customers with PestConnect over the next five years. We underlined the sustained value creation opportunity that we see in M&A. We also announced a new set of medium-term financial targets for the group. For the rest of the afternoon now, we're gonna focus on our new category of Hygiene & Wellbeing.
We're gonna look at the organic growth opportunities inside the core washroom, outside of the washroom in premises Hygiene and enhanced environments, and we're gonna look at the opportunities for geographic expansion. We'll then wrap up with M&A, the financials, and the Q&A session. Firstly, let me just take a few minutes again to set the scene. In 1903 in America, Henry Ford was founding the Ford Motor Company, Orville Wright was undertaking the first successful powered flight, and meanwhile, one Arthur Bigelow, a former soap seller from New York, had moved to London, and from a small room on the fifth floor of a building in Holborn, he began to sell towels and soaps. He was the salesman, his wife ran the office, and she would embroider the towels with the initials of the customers, so they would know that they got their towels back.
From that idea, the Bigelows came up with the brand name Initial. Before long, the company was employing a four r oute- men. They made the deliveries and collections. You see them there on the left of the screen with their state-of-the-art at the time, highly sustainable vehicles. 25 years later, Mr. Bigelow had changed his address somewhat. He'd moved from Holborn, and he'd moved to Grosvenor House, Park Lane. He was the first to figure out how to make money from washrooms. Over the last few years, we at Initial, Rentokil Initial, we've really fallen back in love with our Initial business. We've invested in innovation, in quality, in product development, in science, and of course, in the expertise of our people. Let's remind ourselves about the core of this business, the products that we offer today inside of the washroom.
We'll start with this short video. Over the years when I've talked to you in the past about our core hygiene business, I've usually said five things. Firstly, it's a very good business with committed people, great products, a large customer base, and high levels of customer service. Secondly, it's a valuable partner business to pest control, sharing overheads, IT, back office functions. Thirdly, that we've got a really operational focus in this business, delivering on time, in full, for every customer, every day, which is by no means to be underestimated. It's a business that's supported by digital tools to add efficiency and productivity. Fourthly, it's a density play. It shares its root density expertise with pest control, and because of this, we have a very clear role for city-based acquisitions to build out postcode density even further.
Fifthly, whilst its margins and cash characteristics are indeed very similar to pest control, this has typically been a GDP growth business, with the historic core washrooms market growing by around 2%-3% each year. It's a really good business, but it hasn't had that same exciting growth perspective as pest control. Then, of course, along came COVID. Gary will take you through our new hygiene research in a moment, but as you can see here, just two stats. One in two of us would now rather leave a venue if it didn't appear to have good hygiene measures in place. 84% of us now believe that it's important that our employer prioritizes creating a safe and a hygienic workplace.
Clearly, as a result of the pandemic, attitudes to hygiene and the drivers of growth in the category have changed very significantly, and that's why this is absolutely the right time to create this new Hygiene & Wellbeing category. On this slide here, you can see several examples of the services provided in the three key areas: washroom hygiene, premises hygiene, and enhanced environments. From No-Touch and digital washroom services to air purification, and from specialist clinical waste management to air monitoring, premium scenting, green walls, and office plant design. This also provides a broad structure on which to innovate and to bring new services to the market in the future. Stuart will go through the new category's financials later this afternoon, as I mentioned earlier on, from next year we'll be applying our 4%-6% organic growth target on this larger Hygiene & Wellbeing category.
Before the pandemic, this business generated annual revenues of around GBP 700 million, but was obviously negatively impacted in 2020 by the crisis. However, as you can see here, in the first half of this year, the new category delivered ongoing revenues broadly in line with 2019, with the core business essentially returning as customers have gradually reopened. This afternoon is really all about how are we going to grow this new enlarged category, and to answer the question, why is Hygiene & Wellbeing indeed the new Pest Control? That answer comes in six main areas. Firstly, all of the things that we love about Pest Control with its strong market growth drivers also apply to the new category.
Growing population, increasing middle classes, new standards and regulations coming in, as well as the threat of litigation in some countries, forcing employers to take steps to protect their employees. Of course, the growing importance of technology. All of these apply to Hygiene & Wellbeing, and Gary will cover these in just a moment. The second part of the answer is that Hygiene & Wellbeing shares the same very successful operating model as Pest Control, with our focus on people, service, and profit, and with a particular focus on density economics. Brian will provide you with a case study on those economics in the U.K. hygiene business, focusing on postcode density, product density, and the shared overhead with our other U.K. businesses, and how the successful integration of our Cannon Hygiene deal was a great example of using acquisitions to enhance even further those operating margins.
The third part of the answer, therefore, obviously, is to sell more services to our existing customers inside the washroom, which, as I mentioned earlier, we expect that to account for around half of the 4%-6% organic growth target. Jill will outline examples of how we'll go about this using new products, particularly in air care and No-Touch, also using new digital channels to market. Jill will also cover the role of digital products and innovation and share the exciting opportunity that we see with our new Rapid Smart Hygiene services. In a post-pandemic world, we anticipate an increasing demand for digital hygiene services and for online reporting, meeting the needs of increasing scrutiny, regulation, and, as I said, legal threat.
Just to undermine the same successful innovation model as pest control, later this year we will be opening a new UK-based center for innovation and product development, specifically for the Hygiene & Wellbeing category. The fourth part of our answer is, of course, expansion outside of the core washroom, and this afternoon you're going to hear examples from Greater China, from the Pacific, from America, and from Europe on how we can use our existing expertise in areas such as air purification, specialist clinical waste management, and large-scale biophilic design to capture this growth opportunity. The session will be hosted by our Regional MD for Europe, Alain Moffroid. Alain will then go on to provide the fifth part of the answer, namely the opportunity for geographic expansion and the progress we're making in the markets that we entered in 2020.
As we increase our footprint, we build density, and we leverage our existing customer relationships. The final part of the answer is the same value-creating opportunity in M&A. Later on this afternoon, Chris will be back to provide an update on our proven model for Hygiene M&A, which of course is very, very similar to pest, our progress on building the pipeline across the new Hygiene & Wellbeing landscape, and on our new target for acquired revenues in Hygiene & Wellbeing of at least GBP 25 million per annum, whilst at the same time also, as I said earlier, being open to the potential for larger transactions. We believe this is an outstanding opportunity. It's a compelling investment case. It's the right business. It's the right business at the right time, just as the drivers of growth change as a result of the pandemic.
We've got the operational model in place. We've got a global footprint. We've got a large existing customer base. We've got a proven innovation capability and digital expertise. Most importantly of all, we've got highly motivated people and a great Initial brand. Like Pest, this is a cash compounding global subscription business with 90% of its revenues on contract. It's a low CapEx intensity business, around 13%. It's got excellent cash conversion metrics. It operates at similar net margins to Pest, and it also delivers a high return on investment. In short, everything that you love about the Pest Control business and the Pest Control industry, you see here in Hygiene & Wellbeing. This is why we believe that Hygiene & Wellbeing is indeed the new Pest Control. We've got a clear plan, medium-term targets for both organic growth and M&A.
The opportunity post-pandemic is there to be grasped. We believe that we're better placed than anyone else to capture that opportunity. Let me hand back now to Gary, who will cover the Hygiene & Wellbeing marketplace. Gary.
Thank you, Andy, good afternoon again. I'm here to talk to you in this section about why Hygiene & Wellbeing represents a very significant further value-creating opportunity for our business. As you know, Initial is the global leader in Hygiene & Wellbeing services, and we've been going for over 100 years, delivering great service now to over 280,000 customers around the world in over one million different locations. We're also live and active with a Hygiene & Wellbeing proposition in over 60 countries worldwide, of which 20 new markets have been added just in the last 18 months. We're currently market leaders and number one in 22 markets, including the U.K., and number one across Asia, Pacific, and the Caribbean regions.
In addition to what we've done very successfully in Pest Control, I'm pleased to build on the announcement that Andy has made, to say that within the next few days, actually, we'll also be opening a brand-new dedicated Hygiene & Wellbeing center here in the U.K., which will house all of our Hygiene & Wellbeing capability for innovation, for product development, and product testing across our full suite of solutions, including our connected smart hygiene products. The building itself has been designed and rated as excellent against the BREEAM standard, which is the world's first sustainability rating scheme for buildings, measuring everything from energy efficiency and carbon emissions reduction to its ecological value and biodiversity protection.
This new facility continues to build from our proven focus in pest control, where we have our global innovation R&D center and our GLP lab, using science-based expertise to develop unique and proprietary solutions, again, for our customers. This now gives us exactly the same dedicated facility for Hygiene & Wellbeing. We're obviously living in a world that has changed in some ways, beyond recognition over the last 18 months. As we look at our overall Hygiene & Wellbeing business, it's important to note three things. Firstly, our business was growing strongly before the pandemic, and looking at the H1 comparisons, has grown at a compound annual growth rate of just over 6.5%.
Secondly, through swift and decisive action last year, a strong refocus, and an incredible effort by all our regions and frontline teams, we managed to only have a small impact on our business in 2020. Thirdly, as you can see, and as Andy has already mentioned, our business is now back on track and growing again, and we believe is set to grow even more strongly in the future. In addition, it's very interesting and encouraging to see the positive contributions that come from across our regions, which all have a part to play in this success. In particular, we have specific strength in our Europe and Latin America Region and coming from our U.K. and Rest of World Region. Similarly, today, we'll be talking a lot about the three areas where we see growth opportunities on the right.
If you look at the basis of our current mix, whilst it's clear that our core washroom business dominates, we already have a good base in both the wider premises hygiene and enhanced environment sectors. Although we believe these latter two present highly attractive new growth opportunities, we want to talk to you today about the significant growth potential we see in all three of these sectors. As per the theme of the day today, we are here to talk about just how many similarities there are between the Hygiene & Wellbeing business and the pest business, and why we believe Hygiene & Wellbeing is the new pest control. That is equally true when we look at the key drivers and the factors behind the growth in this market even before the pandemic hit.
The first of these is that the general growth in world population numbers fairly obviously has an equal benefit in this area. More people means more demand for our services. Similarly, the trend of urbanization, which we talked about earlier, is also driving Hygiene & Wellbeing demand. More people living in urban areas increases the pressure to deliver clean water, clean air, and the need for sanitation services. This greater concentration also has the benefit again of increasing customer density, which is a further a proven success model for us in Pest and is something that we do incredibly well also in profitably providing a service for customers in Hygiene & Wellbeing. Secondly, economic growth has always been and continues to be a key driver for Hygiene & Wellbeing growth.
This has been particularly true where GDP growth has been a driver for our washroom business. Overall economic growth is a key driver now for our other opportunity areas as well. We've all been through a challenging 18 months with considerable economic uncertainty. What is clearly now true is that the bounce back is starting, and that investment levels and expectations are now increasingly positive. We're seeing businesses emerging across all sectors and across all countries in the world in different ways and to varying degrees, but increasingly, there's now a consensus and pathway for future growth. It's also very true to say that there is a significant amount of previous stifled, pent-up consumer spending, which is gonna have a positive effect on demand, economies overall.
This economic pickup with greater levels of spending and higher investment, along now with higher levels of hygiene and wellbeing awareness, we believe will deliver strong commercial growth for us. Not only has the population increased with more people in cities and a positive economic outlook, but more people than ever are now in the growing middle classes sector. Way before the pandemic even started, there were material positive factors driving increased hygiene and wellbeing demand. As we mentioned earlier, when talking about pest control, the rise of the middle classes with increased wealth and the increasing number of people in this sector was already creating increasing year-on-year demand. Growth of the middle classes, in particular in the fastest growing developing economies and corresponding standards and expectation changes, has led to increased legislation and attention on this area as a whole.
We're seeing this flow through into increased auditing and a desire for more measurement, more data, and more transparency. We're also seeing widespread change and opportunity with new corporate sustainability commitments towards net zero in this space. The impact of all of this flows through in our world to expectations for more premium solutions and demands for greater transparency around sustainable solutions and sustainable operations. Again, we're seeing a new regulatory focus globally responding specifically to requests for cleaner air and surface hygiene. All of this requires new solutions to be developed and new technology to be in place. It's important to note I'm talking here about factors that were in place and drivers that existed before we even knew what COVID-19 was.
All of which leads us to the final point I want to make on drivers, which is around expectations and awareness, which is perhaps now one of the most important drivers in the sense that it's the one where we're seeing the biggest changes moving forwards, and I think the biggest opportunity. We'll talk in a minute about the impact that the pandemic has had on this sector, but hygiene and wellbeing were increasingly important focus areas before coronavirus. The corporate and personal wellness markets were growing strongly with increased attention on personal wellbeing and the environmental factors that either have a detrimental or a positive impact on that.
There were a number of key drivers for Hygiene and Wellbeing sector with focus on cleaner air in our cities, on emissions, on air quality overall, on healthier buildings, and an increased expectation from employees and guests that the onus and responsibility is on their employer to provide a healthy and safe working or leisure environment. This was already leading to increased measurement, data, analysis of environments, and included focus on areas such as the benefits of a biophilic office, the benefits of natural plants and green walls, and the important relationship between the quality of the working space and sickness rates and productivity. Of course, there's the very significant matter of an unprecedented global pandemic. It's been a tragic and life-changing experience which many countries and many people are still living through on a daily basis.
From a Hygiene & Wellbeing perspective, the impact of this pandemic cannot be overstated. The change in awareness of the critical importance of Hygiene & Wellbeing standards in protecting against transmission. The understanding of how bacteria and viruses move between people has changed forever. Clean surfaces, and perhaps even more importantly, clean air, have now leapt to the top of media attention and the corporate agenda. Before, the subject and importance of hygiene was a conversation that often we started. Now, it is business and life critical, and we have a leading role to play in delivering the solutions and services in a trusted and scientific way which our customers are now proactively coming to us and demanding.
We see this in all areas through societal impact changes and the fears that people now have about their own health and wellbeing, the flow through of this onto increasing regulatory activity, the demand for the creation of new solutions and the use of technology to measure, report and solve some of the challenges, and the knock-on further increased attention on environmental factors and the importance of looking after our planet. All of these present yet further new areas for increased economic growth and the creation of new opportunities for us in this sector. The key question, of course, is whether these changes are temporary factors that will fade, or whether they represent more fundamental changes in expectations, attitudes, and behavior. It's possible, of course, that in a number of years, some of the experiences that the world has gone through may be forgotten.
We believe that many attitudes have changed permanently, and the effect of the pandemic in terms of hygiene awareness and new standards will be forever enshrined in new regulatory activity and legislation. To get a clearer view on how attitudes have changed, though, two months ago, we commissioned the largest Hygiene & Wellbeing attitudinal survey ever seen, with 20,000 respondents across 20 different markets. We wanted to get a globally representative set of views across all continents and many very different countries, large and small. As you can see on the right, this included some of the largest and more mature markets as well as some much smaller, more developing markets. All of this has only very recently concluded and provides incredible insight to just how much attitudes and behaviors have changed.
We've captured some of this in a short summary report, which we've called the Global Hygiene Reset. As you can imagine, this survey gives us a rich new understanding, much of which we didn't have before, and it's perhaps useful to give you a few brief snippets of some of the findings. To start with answering the most direct question, over 95% of those questioned around the world said that their behaviors had changed in some way as a result of the pandemic. That alone is an incredible statistic, and it's then very interesting to see some of the areas and subjects that people around the world are most concerned about. Seven out of 10 respondents said they are now more fearful of the spread of germs via surfaces they touch than before the pandemic.
Very interestingly, an even larger number of people are concerned about the quality of the air they breathe and what might be in that air. On that very same theme, as we haven't mentioned it before, I'm sure you cannot help to have noticed, at the front looking like podiums, these two large VIRUSKILLER units in the room today. They're also in the breakout room. These are one of the latest additions to our range, helping to keep customers' premises safe, and which Jill Rodgers will talk about and also Greg, our Managing Director from China, will explain a little more about later on.
Going slightly deeper, as Andy touched on earlier, when questioned about whose responsibility it is to create safe and hygienic spaces, 84% of people around the world stressed the importance and belief that their employer should be creating this safe environment for them. This research and the feedback looked at many different environments and spaces, with nearly half of all respondents saying they would leave a public venue if it did not appear to have good hygiene measures in place, and then 48% of them saying they would not go back there again. There is a huge amount of richness in and depth of detail in this study that we definitely can learn from. What is very clear is that the pandemic has profoundly changed attitudes and behavior, and this in turn has created significant new growth opportunities.
We don't have time today unfortunately to go into all the nuances and depths of this research, but we have prepared that short summary with a number of the key researchings, which is available for you all to take away and read further. As you go outside, there is a little bag for you on your way out. Please pick that up, and that report and some other bits and pieces will be in there for you. Just to give you a taste of some of the lower level and more granular insight we're able to get, it's interesting just to note some of the variances and differences that exist between countries and markets. For instance, over 2/3 of South Africans said they would likely leave a venue that did not have good hygiene measures in place.
Curiously, only around a quarter of people feel the same way in Japan. Similarly, in China, seven out of 10 people believe the venue itself is responsible for ensuring it is providing the levels of protection needed, whereas in the UAE, only four out of 10 people believe they actually have that responsibility themselves. What we're seeing here is the important cultural differences to understand between countries. You can also see from the data where the expectations are most extreme. Whereas three-quarters of respondents in some of our markets expressed the importance of having hand sanitizer available to them in public venues, in a country such as Indonesia. This is almost a mandatory requirement and expectation.
In looking at the key growth area of air quality, which we will talk about in much more detail later on, you can also see those markets for whom this really is a critical subject, therefore, for whom it potentially represents the biggest market opportunity. Again, what is true is that everywhere, even in some of the biggest markets in the world such as America, there is a very high expectation for venues themselves to be putting new measures in place to stop the spread of germs. In addition to this, we see opportunities across a very wide range of customer sectors. Some sectors have been more impacted by the pandemic and will recover at a slower pace, whereas others have actually seen a huge uplift in demand, rightly created by the associated effects of the pandemic.
In offices, we are seeing a more gradual return to normal, but still an increased demand expectation for hygiene and wellbeing provision. At the other end of the scale, sectors such as logistics and warehousing have been booming, and we have very good representation and a strong customer base in this area, as well as in manufacturing and for high dependency food production and food retail customers. For certain, each of these sectors has been affected in a different way, but demand for provision of hygiene and wellbeing service exists across all of them, and we believe this next period ahead presents an increased growth opportunity for us post-crisis. As Andy talked about earlier, we now have an expanded suite of services and solutions that can capture growth in three different spaces.
Our core and strongest previous area of washroom hygiene we see as having forward potential of between 3% and 5.5% compound growth. We believe that the opportunity in premises hygiene is even higher, with a forward growth rate over 6%. This includes areas where we have previously been active with increased demand around hand sanitization and surface hygiene, but moving forwards in particular, again, around the significant new opportunity of air purification. In addition, the potential market growth from enhanced environments designed to make spaces more enjoyable for visitors, customers, and employees could be at an even higher rate. The appeal across all three areas is also back to our core business strength of adding density. The more we can add further services or solutions into one building, the more efficiency and profitability we will be able to drive.
To summarize all of this, we see a very clear path ahead for targeted Hygiene & Wellbeing growth. Essentially, to deliver this, there are three overlapping opportunities. Firstly, in the core washroom through the provision of increased services and solutions. Secondly, to the expanded opportunity that exists for Hygiene & Wellbeing service provision outside the washroom, reflecting this change in attitudes and expectations that have come as a result of the pandemic. Thirdly, by also expanding our Hygiene & Wellbeing proposition into new geographies by organic growth from existing operations or through M&A, also using M&A as a means to infill and add further density through bolt-ons. Overall, we believe there is a forward growth opportunity of between 4%-6% organic, plus a further GBP 25 million+ from M&A activity.
What we would now like to do is go into each of these areas in more detail. We'll start by explaining a little bit more about our current model in hygiene operations. To do that, I'd like to hand over to our Hygiene Operations Director in the U.K., Brian Lynggaard. Thank you.
Thank you, Gary. Good afternoon. Time to talk about washrooms. Most people that follow Rentokil Initial will know our pest control business very well, but perhaps our core washroom business less so. I'll give you a quick tour of what we do and how we do it before taking you through the value levers of our washroom hygiene business. What do we do? We start in the cubicle. We do feminine hygiene units. We do toilet tissue, toilet tissue dispensers. We do hand surface sanitizers. We do WC descaling systems. Move to the washbasin, soap dispensers, hand drying, any type of hand drying, from paper towels to high-speed electric hand dryers. If you think about the air in a washroom, we do air fragrancing systems. Importantly, we do air purification systems. We do vending units. We do nappy waste, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
In short, we supply, we service, and we provide consumables for any customer need in a shared washrooms environment. The only thing we do not do is cleaning. We are not a standard cleaning company. Anything else in the washroom Initial can provide. Let's have a quick look at the customer types that we do it for. We work across an incredibly broad customer portfolio, very similar to what you would know from Rentokil. It is the building, it is the people in the building that drive demand less than what is actually happening within the building. Of course, we have customer segments with specific demands. Of course, we have different needs in different customer types and some differences between markets. But if you look at the group distribution, where do we get our revenue from? Let's take some of the big groups.
The public sector, which includes education, is about a quarter of global revenues. Personal and professional services, which includes the care sector, about 20% of global revenues. Hospitality, one in eight of our customers are in the hospitality sector, about one in eight in retail. Those are our important customer groups across the Initial group. We do not do any work for consumers. We don't do private household. We help customers with shared washrooms. Shared by students, shared by guests, shared by customers, or shared by employees. We do that across all sectors with no significant reliance on any one sector in particular. Let me try and take you through how we do it, and I'll use the U.K. as an example. Our infrastructure in the U.K., 21 branches up and down the country.
From each branch, somewhere between 20 drivers and 40 drivers. The service colleagues will return to base anywhere between one and five times a week. They will replenish their stock. They will drop off their waste. That is the infrastructure. The logistics model and the key logistics considerations. Each customer is assigned to one service colleague. Each building, each set of services is bespoke, we have to get the same person back to the customer. One, to give optimal customer service, also to be able to complete the work in the allocated time. If you turn up at a building you have never seen before, you have to find all the washrooms, you cannot maximize productivity. That is the key logistics consideration. 99% of all the work we do in the core washroom business is done on fixed service schedules. The customer will know when we are coming.
That means all our work is pre-planned for each driver every day. The average driver has about 250 customers on his or her area. They're visited anywhere between daily and up to every eight weeks. On a normal day, each of the drivers will pull the handbrake, start a call, greet a customer, do the work, debrief a customer anywhere between 20x and 40x a day. In doing so, they will have done up to 500 units, emptied, cleaned, disinfected a waste unit, replenished consumables, delivered consumables, any one of the many things we provide in the washroom. That's what we do to deliver on time, in full, to every customer, every day. The fundamental operational model is, as you can see, very similar to Rentokil, with bespoke services provided on customer's premises. Our washrooms business is operationally more intense.
There's a higher level of repetition. There's therefore also higher returns on density, as I'll take you through in a moment. First, what does our core washroom hygiene business look like today? It's a strong business. Pre-pandemic, offered across 44 countries in the world, delivering core services that our customers need. It was in 2019 a business of just over GBP 500 million , delivering a 17% net margin. A business growing organically by 3%-4% per year. An attractive business with an attractive margin position. Let me introduce you to how we optimize margins in the core washroom hygiene business. This is the business model that we operate the business on. Three, four density levers. Product and service density, how much do we have to do at each customer's premise?
Route density, how many times a day can we get the van to stop? Support cost density, how much business can we run through unchanged overheads? Those three levers can be effectively boosted with M&A to accelerate them, to directly impact route density, to directly impact support cost density in existing markets. Let's take the levers one at a time. Here you have our product and service density. How much work we have to do when we stop the van. For as long as I can remember, that has been a recognized lever, and we've been making steady progress. We've improved our margins in low-value customers, and already today, half of our sales go into existing customer premises. That improves service density, so with every other sales transaction, we improve our service density. We now have a large ex-Cannon portfolio after the acquisition.
The Cannon portfolio had a lower product density than Initial customers. These are customers that have not yet been introduced to the much wider, better Initial product range, they represent a great opportunity for us to drive this density lever further. Perhaps most significantly, with the increased hygiene demands that Gary spoke about, customers now seek both more and better solutions from the hygiene provider. Let me talk about route density. The route density concept is the same in hygiene as it is in pest control, it's a stronger lever here. Where a pest control technician will stop 7x-10x a day, do seven to 10 journeys a day, a washroom technician will do 20 journeys-40 journeys a day, therefore making route density and planning even more significant.
As an illustration here, you have the difference between two Initial branches with very different density levels, a city branch and a rural branch. These are both our branches, so we know they're managed in the same way, optimized in the same way, so we can use them to illustrate the magnitude of route density, and the difference is significant. With density, we can cut an hour drive time for a washroom technician. With density, we can deliver 16% higher productivity, and density flows straight through to both gross and net margins. It's very value creating to sell in the right place, to have the customers in the right place. Of course, regardless where those customers are, we can only unlock that value through effective route optimization. This is our route optimization.
The challenge is different from that of any parcel carrier or other delivery company. The nature of what we do and our customer relationships is highly bespoke. No two buildings are the same. Customers take a variety of services. We have the fundamental constraint that we have to get the same person back to the same customer every time, which standard optimization systems don't do. Our Initial optimization system delivers a highly reliable service time predictor. With actual drive time data which we've collated and integrated over years, that gives us a very high degree of reliability. Firstly, that the route can be done, so we fulfill the customer's requirements. Secondly, that the route is effective. As an illustration to how and the magnitude of effective routing, lockdown gave us during lockdown, thousands of customers were closed, effectively reducing our density.
As society came out of lockdown and more and more customers needed servicing, we needed to ensure that we increased the productivity to cover all customers, and that was what we did and have done throughout this year. This year, we've seen our total hour spend increase by 6%, over the same period, through effectively making each van work more and more dense, the time each driver spend on customer sites, as in the time where they generate value, has increased by 23%. Very big benefit from driving density with effective routing. Now the third lever, support cost density. We can in Rentokil Initial drive support cost density at two levels. Our business unit structure means that we can share functions across multiple businesses, back office, IT systems, et cetera. Economies of scale in those reducing cost relative to revenue.
It's not just at a business unit level. At a local level, running a number of branch-based businesses out of the same buildings up and down this country and across the world means that we can share building cost, we can share cost of warehousing, and to an extent, we can share cost of local management. In the U.K. alone, which is a mature market for us, we have since 2018 reduced relative support cost by 8% and even more impactful at the local level, we have reduced building and local management cost by 19% relative to revenue. Support cost density is a significant profit lever when we run both Rentokil and Initial businesses across the same network. That's the three pro-profit levers. They're all significant in their own right.
Understanding them and managing them well is one of the reasons why M&A can be so value-creating, both in new and existing markets. As an example of the value creation of M&A, let me take you through our most significant acquisition in the U.K., which was Cannon Hygiene, which we began integrating in October of 2019. Clearly, people first. For us, doing the Cannon acquisition, people was mainly about training. It was about training the Cannon colleagues to our standards of health and safety, to our standards of customer focus, to how to service our products, et cetera. The people part of it was a net investment. The infrastructure. Cannon ran their business out of 18 branches, so 18 buildings, of which we today use four buildings. Out of 18 Cannon buildings, four now form part of the combined network.
Route density, probably the biggest lever. All ex-Cannon customers were integrated onto combined Initial ex-Cannon routes so that we achieve the density advantages. We did that and integrated 24,000 premises over a 12-month period and ended up with round about 100 service areas fewer than the two businesses had as separate entities. The financial outcome of these improvements, and therefore the Cannon acquisition and integration, revenue's up 31%, gross profit up 51%, and net profit up 140%. M&A has been very value-creating for us. A quick summary of the three levers. Product and service density. Washrooms are important post-COVID. We've got 26,000 premises to grow with, and already today, half of our sales go into existing customers.
If we can sell one more thing into each of our existing customers, we will have a 4% margin improvement. It's a very powerful lever. Route density. In a dense geography, we can improve our productivity by 16%. This year already, we have improved time on site by 26%, and as a proxy for long-term improvement, since 2019, per van, we've reduced the fuel consumption by 15%. Support cost density, 19% reduction in local management, warehousing. Building cost, 7%-8% reduction in support cost. The M&A. Enhanced through M&A, Cannon brought us both revenue and profit improvements. That's the business we're running. What did COVID do to it? COVID hasn't changed any of the business logics.
COVID has brought about a lot of disruption for colleagues and for customers, not only on a personal level with a very, very difficult disease, but of course also on a business level with lockdowns, et cetera. We are coming out of COVID stronger, in particular as Gary covered, because of the customer perception of hygiene. Our services have always been considered essential for the running of a shared washroom. Before COVID, we had to work hard to get anybody particularly interested in the hygiene aspects of it. Might be possible to get people interested in the design, might be possible to get people interested in the functionality, but that was as far as it would go. After COVID, we've seen a big change in customer attitude. That applies both in the cubicle, where in particular No-Touch and user disinfection has seen an increase.
It applies on healthy hands, where both hand washing and hand drying has been a big topic right since day one of the pandemic. Lately coming through very, very strongly is a general acceptance that we need clean air both within and outside of the washroom. It's not just us. For the first time in years, the press is really interested in washrooms. Public toilets, restaurant toilets, now the press is even writing about washroom behaviors, which is clearly something that for us as a washroom hygiene business is most welcome. They're right to do it. They're right to treat washrooms as an area of concern for 4 important reasons. It's the one place we all go, probably applies to all of us in the room today as well.
At some point during the day, we will all have visited the washroom. When I go to the washroom, I can't just look after myself. I rely on the user before me. Did they wash their hands? What happened in the cubicle before I came in? Did somebody just sneeze across the, the surfaces at the sink before I came in? The surfaces in the washroom are surfaces that virus particles survive particularly well on. Hard and smooth surfaces. Even if I haven't seen the person before me, the surfaces could still be contaminated. Then there's the air, 'cause washrooms don't tend to be well-ventilated. It's rare to get into a washroom that is really well-ventilated, so there's every risk that whatever the previous user might have emitted to the air is still there when I enter the washroom.
To us, four clear reasons why high washroom standards are important. Before we go on to see what the growth path post-COVID-19 looks like, let's just have a quick look at recovery. The core Hygiene & Wellbeing business. Before the pandemic, as Andy mentioned, we grew organically 3%-4% per year, reaching GBP 267 million in the first half of 2019. When COVID-19 hit Southeast Asia first in the beginning of Q1, Europe from late Q1 and right the way through Q2, our revenue suffered. Countries went into lockdown, our revenue suffered. At the end of H1 2021, we're pleased that our revenues in the core Hygiene & Wellbeing business are in line with pre-pandemic levels. That's with a number of countries in H1 of this year still in partial lockdown, and it's with the important office sector still only partially open.
How did we deliver recovery and what has it looked like? Firstly, colleagues. Colleague absence is now significantly down over where it was during the pandemic, and it's in line with previous year. Colleague retention is in line with previous years. Service delivery, services done, buildings open, buildings we can service are now higher than they were in 2019. Importantly, customers, local sales has recovered. Quarter two of this year was at the same level as quarter two of 2019. Customer retention in quarter two was stronger than at any point in 2018 or 2019. We're comfortable that we are well through the recovery. With the core washrooms business having recovered, it's time to talk about growth. To take you through growth, let me introduce Area Marketing Director, Jill Rogers.
Thanks, Brian. Hello, everybody. You've just heard from Brian that offices are one of our top sectors, and the key thing we've noticed about this sector during the pandemic is that we haven't seen terminations increase. Yes, they have reduced services, and in some cases renegotiated, but they've chosen these as opposed to going down the termination route. By working with offices directly and indirectly, we can support them in creating safer buildings. Safer buildings give people confidence to return, and it's more people returning that creates more demand for our services. You heard from Gary earlier about the greater hygiene demands that people now have. Once the office reopening does get underway, in addition to an increase in service frequencies, we're confident we'll also see a continued demand for service lines such as No-Touch and tackling the issue of air quality.
In general, the greater hygiene demands we are now seeing fall into four main categories, all of which are good news for us. Greater hygiene expectations in washroom cubicles. Healthier hands from hand washing and drying through to sanitizing. Digital solutions within the washroom space, as well as now tackling air quality. We're also finding people are wanting to deal more with sustainable suppliers. In addition, there's a growing acceptance of, as well as a growing demand for digital means when it comes to inbound and outbound customer communications with companies. It's as a result of this, combined with Initial's well-established business model, which is why we're confident there are a number of opportunities out there to grow our core washrooms business.
Gary shared with you earlier the headlines from the world's largest hygiene attitudinal survey conducted, and it showed how people across a wide range of countries now have higher hygiene expectations as we come out of the pandemic. I've pulled together for you some headlines from various pieces of research we've conducted specifically here in the U.K., and we are seeing a similar pattern. I wanted to draw your attention to four statistics in particular. 74% of people surveyed said they were now more inclined to wash their hands if the dispensers are no touch. 46% of women surveyed said employers could do more to cater for their needs within the washroom space. 68% of people believe businesses and their employers should do more to ensure that the air in their premises is clean.
62% of people felt that air purification systems should actually now be mandatory in public and educational buildings. People really are now expecting more in general from their employers, as well as businesses in this space. Greater hygiene expectations in washroom cubicles, they really mean opportunities for us in three ways. Firstly, there's been a switch to No-Touch feminine hygiene units, and these No-Touch units now account for approximately 40% of our total sales in this space. They have a good premium over the manual units. No-Touch would now be considered the go-to product with new customers. The second opportunity is by tapping into hand and surface sanitizer, as well as toilet paper dispensers and the consumables that go into them.
There are more of these products as well as feminine hygiene units than anything else in the washroom space. Because of the research we've conducted, we have a really good appreciation for what women are now expecting to see in washroom cubicles, all of which tie back to basic hygiene needs, to be honest. At the end of the day, everyone has a right to dignity and safety when they're using the washroom, and we can help with that. Now Brian took you through the margin benefit that the business gets from selling just one more additional product into a customer. All of the categories I've mentioned here are therefore a growth opportunity, not just from upselling to existing customers, but also winning with new customers. There's no doubt that hand washing and hand sanitizing are now taken a lot more seriously than before.
We can see this in Google Analytics as well as in our own research, with a big spike in the number of people searching for, as well as expecting to see, no touch hand washing and sanitizing options. We've seen a similar pattern in our own sales. It's not just that our overall sales of hand hygiene dispensers have grown, we've also seen a shift in the product mix towards the No-Touch range, which remember, have a premium over manual dispensers. With more people washing their hands, that means more people need to dry their hands, and that in turn means more opportunities for our hand drying options. If more people are washing and drying their hands, then they do tend to want solutions that are gentle and kind to their skin as well as the environment.
We're well-placed to be able to deal with that. We offer alcohol-free hand sanitizer. We have dermatologically tested and pH-friendly soap, as well as low energy hand dryers. The next area is one that we're particularly excited about. It's our brand-new high-tech, high-end washroom services range called Rapid Smart Hygiene. The range consists of the following products. State-of-the-art No-Touch taps. They've been designed to help manage and reduce water consumption. High-tech touch-free foam hand dispensers and sanitizers. Cubicle lighting systems which indicate when cubicles are free for individuals to use. A smart device which has been designed to help reduce scale buildup when you're flushing toilets. We think this range is a win-win. On the 1 side, it gives washroom users a more hygienic, sustainable, and sophisticated experience.
On the other side, it gives our washroom customers a solution that helps save their cleaners time and hassle. Why is that? Because they know which dispensers to go and top up. They don't have to go around and manually check each individual one on the premise. It can also help reduce their running costs, including a significant reduction in running water consumption. These devices can also be connected, and that can therefore give our customers valuable insight into their washroom usage. The final big growth opportunity I wanted to share with you today is around air quality, and that's a space which has transformed quite substantially in recent times. Previously, the requirement was very much for washrooms to have a product to mask those nasty, musty washroom smells.
This then moved towards a solution that combined fragrancing as well as cleaning. As a result of the recent pandemic, the emphasis is now very much on products that purify and clean the air in the washroom space. We have products covering all three categories, but our focus is very much now on air purification, and that's why we launched late last year VIRUSKILLER, which is an innovative air purifier that kills 99.9999% of airborne pathogens, including Coronavirus. We've got a couple of these, as Gary mentioned, in the room here either side of me today, you will get to hear more about them very shortly from my colleague Greg. Those are the headlines from the product and service line opportunities.
As you may recall, I mentioned in my introduction, we're also seeing a growing acceptance and demand for digital means when communicating with customers. We feel this can give us further opportunities to stand out from the crowd. We've definitely seen a mixed change in how people are choosing to get in touch with us, and by having a variety of digital solutions in place, as well as the discipline on our side to use them properly, it means we've got a wealth of data available to us which can help us understand customer behavior and demands. As a result of that, we're therefore able to meet customer needs effectively, helping us to reduce our costs in the process. On average, approximately 40% of our contact today with prospects and customers is done via digital channels.
Even before lockdown, people were searching outside of what were considered normal working hours, that trend has very much continued even now, with us being out of lockdown. Chatbots have been absolutely integral to helping us meet this need, not just in our washroom hygiene business, but also throughout Rentokil Initial U.K. It's these different chatbot applications across our family of businesses that have enabled us to share both expertise as well as cost at pace. Now, by their very nature, a speedy process is absolutely critical to making the chatbot experience really work. They also need to be considered as a natural extension of your contact center, and that's why we find the most effective communications option is when people are using a combination of humans and technology. Now, remember the importance of selling that extra service on-site.
Well, we know access to good salespeople in the current climate is challenging, but we still want to sell more, and that's why we find an effective model combining technology for targeted outbound marketing as well as handling a number of inbound sales inquiries with bringing humans into the mix at the right time. Based on our experience, chat is an attractive communications channel for new customers to use, but it's also attractive to us for a number of reasons. Firstly, the sales output we get for new customers via this channel is in line with our overall conversion rates for new customers, as well as consistent average sales values, and in some cases even higher. As I mentioned, we get the best conversions where we provide people with a combination of technology and human interaction.
It's helped us reduce our sales and marketing costs as well as our admin costs by 19% and 10% respectively. Thirdly, such an approach enables us to allocate the more expensive people resource to the higher value work. Finally, customers are getting a better experience because they get what they want faster, and we can see this reflected in the business' Net Promoter Score, which is now very close to what would be classed world-class levels. Nobody else in the hygiene space is really doing that much, in, on chat, and it takes skill and effort to really make it work, and that's why we think this is something we can build a competitive advantage in. Let's now take a look at how we've integrated technology into our existing customer communications.
You've already heard from Paul earlier about the importance of data in pest control. We're doing something similar in the hygiene space as well. We log all customer interactions, we can then analyze the reasons why people are getting in touch with us. We then use this data to build a bigger and better online portal so that our customers can get a range of information on their contracts and service history. Most importantly, at a time that works for them. We believe this is a way to continue to make us easy to do business with and also make it harder for people to leave us. That's why we've got a pipeline of developments to continue to enhance this system for our customers.
As part of our customer retention program, we also have a series of communications sent at fixed intervals, so this is for things like welcome to Initial. We just want to check in and see how the installation went, and we are also going to check at regular intervals to see how our service is going. We do this via our email platform, as it means we can send emails out at scale and quickly, but always very much tailored to the individual recipient. It also means that feedback we get is automatically shared with the right departments as soon as it's received. Such an approach means we get feedback more regularly and at scale, all of which makes us easy to do business with. In summary, we have a low-cost, high-intensity model that's designed to deliver bespoke services to our customers on time, in full, every time.
It's the combination of scale and technology across our Rentokil Initial family of businesses, as well as our M&A program, that means we have clear profit levers available to us that we really understand. Undoubtedly, the hygiene space has changed to our advantage, with people expecting more from their employers and businesses, meaning a shift towards higher margin ranges for us, such as No-Touch, as well as creating demand for new services such as air purification. Above all, our well-established business model built on a combination of product innovation, a strong inquiry model, and a cost-effective use of technology and humans, all of with a strong customer base at its core, means we're well-placed to capitalize on the growth opportunities that we've shared with you today. Thank you very much for listening.
To close the session, I have got a short video for you which shows how we bring together all of this technology for our customers. At the end of that, we're then gonna go into a 15-minute coffee break, after which we'll reconvene back in here and Alain Moffroid, our Regional Managing Director for Europe Region, will lead a session sharing with you our plans for growth outside of the washroom, as well as into new geographies. Just one final point. Don't forget, you can submit questions onto the online portal or onto the event website, and we'll then have the formal Q&A session at the end of the afternoon. Thank you very much.
[Break]
Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for coming back, and welcome back. Before the break, you heard about our new research into high levels of customer expectations for Hygiene & Wellbeing, and we focused on the opportunities inside the core washroom. This next session focuses on outside of the washroom, where through the premises hygiene, enhanced environment and geographic expansion, we will deliver the other 50% of our organic growth target. Some of the opportunities here are new, while others build from existing businesses that we have in some of our geographies. All of them are good opportunities that stand to benefit from this post-crisis world. We start by talking about how we capitalize on the opportunity in air quality, a market that stands to be defined or at least redefined in this new world.
Connected to the air quality market, we share with you how we will drive forward the specialist hygiene business we have in 6 markets for pre-pandemic annual revenue of GBP 30 million. We'll then move into medical waste, a great route-based business in the 11 markets where we operate for roughly the same size with GBP 29 million in 2019. We stay in the waste space with a smaller but really cool business with what we do in Dental Hygiene, which had around GBP 12 million of revenue pre-pandemic. Finally, we return to our Wellbeing offering with our plans in premium scenting businesses which operate in 15 markets, and which had revenues in 2019 of around GBP 170 million, with premium scenting contributing roughly GBP 17 million. These businesses are like the others, businesses with a clear role to play in creating more healthy environments.
Before I go on, I wanted to share with you a few characteristics of our DNA, the Rentokil Initial's DNA, and why we can make the best out of these growth opportunities. You will all remember that last year, in a matter of a very few weeks, just three actually, we pivoted into disinfection in a large way. In that very short space of time, we developed an offering for our customers, put together standard operating procedures, got the supply chain together, trained 7,000 colleagues to sell and provide that service safely and effectively. In short, we got it all done in less time than we had ever done anything. Beyond the GBP 225 million of new disinfection revenue we moved into last year, we did reflect on what was at the core of our business that had made it possible, the characteristics of our DNA.
We've listed six here. The fact that we are a hungry bunch with a hard commercial mindset. Mindset rooted very deeply into the desire to understand how to best serve customers and deliver the best possible experience. Experience that relies on solutions anchored in strong science and 100 years of experience in hygiene and an increasing leverage of technology. We have a strong global community, one that actually got stronger on the back of COVID. Crucially, the local delivery model ensures we empower the colleagues at the end of the chain to do what is needed to best respond to customers' needs. Altogether, that gives us a rigorous nimbleness.
Two words that don't necessarily associate easily, but for us, the key to having been able to make the best out of the disinfection opportunity. A rigorous nimbleness that we will equally play in our favor for the opportunities we are going to talk about. For none more than the air purification one for which Gregory Smith, our Managing Director of Greater China, who could not join us today, has recording the following video.
Hello, my name is Gregory Smith, and I am the Managing Director of Greater China. In many parts of the world like Asia, the Pacific, and Europe, people are really very sensitive to air quality. In some parts of the world like Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, awareness around air quality is only starting to grow. Thankfully for us at Rentokil Initial, we are present in the majority of these markets. Our route-based model and expertise lends itself to capitalizing on this opportunity. Air purification. Air pollution is a major environmental risk to health in many countries, and the pandemic has accelerated awareness and demand, as has evolving legislation and regulation being introduced across the world. Air pollution kills around seven million people, four million of whom die from indoor air pollution every year.
There is a growing awareness around the health impacts of poor air quality, such as strokes, heart disease, and lung cancer, and the pandemic has fast-tracked a global focus on clean indoor air. It is estimated that air purification devices will achieve a compound annual growth rate of 10%-12% over the next seven years. The World Health Organization supports the fact that pathogens spread in the air and thereby increase the risk of cross-infection. Indoor air quality solutions, such as air purifiers, help to reduce this risk. The concept of indoor air quality is underpinned by a number of metrics. Most popular are CO₂, carbon dioxide, PM2.5, VOCs, and humidity. Each of these have a role to play in creating clean and healthy air.
As an example, monitoring CO₂ indicates ventilation levels as recommended by the World Health Organization for safer indoor environments. Good indoor air quality does not only contribute to smart building management, but it can also improve human health and deliver cost savings through productivity and energy savings. The industry is expected to deliver growth of around 7.7% between 2020 and 2027, and has an estimated size of GBP 2.8 billion in 2020. Whether in the workplace, at home, at schools, or in other frequented guest locations, the air quality focus is increasing. There has been a realization of the need to provide good air quality for patrons, visitors as a form of differentiation and assurance.
There is an ever-increasing awareness of the productivity and health benefits of better air quality in the office and in the manufacturing environment, where employers require proof points to satisfy the employees' ever-increasing expectations. Shared workspaces are growing in popularity globally, so are the expectations of the employees who use them. 84% of them believe that it's important that the employer prioritizes creating a safe and hygienic workplace, 52% of them are now more likely to open windows and doors where possible to manage hygienic risks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the advent of COVID-19, over 70% of people are more concerned about the impact of indoor air quality on their health and the spread of germs in the air that they breathe in public spaces. However, the demand for home solutions are also steadily on the rise.
In many cases, regulation and legislation is being introduced to drive an increase in indoor air quality standards, such as Belgium and the U.K. It is expected that many more countries will follow suit. When it comes to air purification solutions, Rentokil Initial is well equipped to satisfy the growing, yet diverse customer demands through our standard and enhanced air purification offering. Offices, restaurants, hotels, as well as smaller premises with meeting rooms and reception areas are well covered by our range. The InspireAir 72 offers a mobile solution and is equipped with a HEPA 13 filtration system, providing clean air to cost-sensitive customers and contributing to healthy margin growth. The range is led by our premium VIRUSKILLER air purifier range, which combine triple filtration, titanium dioxide plates, and a UVC reaction chamber, enabling it to kill Coronavirus in the air with a single pass.
This claim ensures solid growth across sectors, this range will be launched into more than 50 markets by the end of 2022. In addition to the technical prowess of the VIRUSKILLER, which has a confirmed 99.9999% log six efficacy against coronavirus, effectively leaving only one virus for every one million in the air. This after only a single pass. Our highly capable sales and service colleagues have the expertise in an increasingly efficient route-based business to deliver a world-class level of service. From detailed surveying to professional installation, conforming to the latest health and safety standards to the full servicing of filters and UV reactor chambers. We can offer the service on time, every time. It's a sickening irony that indoor air often even more polluted than the air outdoors.
That's because our buildings are often filled with the same smog that's outside. Indoor air also stews with the CO₂ that we exhale. This is especially true inside our offices, which are loaded with coworkers. A major new study out of Harvard University demonstrates that office air doesn't just make us unhealthy. This polluted air also slows us down on cognitive tests and makes it easy to get distracted. The more polluted the office air, the worse people performed on these tests. Crucially, researchers found these results in dozens of typical commercial buildings in six countries across the globe, including the U.S., the U.K., and China. The World Health Organization launched new guidelines on the September 22nd, 2021, these provide clear evidence of the damage air pollution inflicts on human health.
They recommend new air quality levels to protect the health of populations by reducing levels of key air pollutants. As a result, the increased focus on indoor air quality monitoring, which has moved away from excessively detailed, expensive, complex reports, provides the opportunity for Rentokil Initial. Our experienced installation and route-based teams service multiple customer sectors, and our air purifier solutions, such as Inspire Air and VIRUSKILLER, support indoor air quality improvement. Informed recommendations and indoor air quality report platforms will provide assurance for customers and their guests and employees, and these solutions are currently being piloted in Hong Kong. Our proven delivery model has been trusted by proven leaders in their field, such as The Hong Kong Jockey Club and The O2 Arena, who see the benefit of a hassle-free, frictionless service experience.
Events such as the BRIT Awards of 2021, which was the first indoor music event in the U.K. for over one year, have seen the value in these solutions. In summary, we are excited about the opportunity in air hygiene around the world, and especially here in Asia. Seven out of 10 consumers are concerned about the effects of air quality on their health. Legislation is getting stronger. Our revenues in the first six months have exceeded GBP 3 million, and we estimate GBP 7 million for the full year. We're already in 19 countries with a plan to offer air hygiene in 60 markets by 2024. We are effectively creating a brand-new hygiene market.
We have an outstanding range of products, the expertise of our people, and the operational know-how already in place. There's the potential to use M&A to create further value, building scale and specialist expertise. While it's too early to calculate how big this global opportunity will be, this could be very, very exciting. Thank you very much.
As you've just heard, air purification is a key part of our air quality proposition. We have in a few of our U.K. and European countries another key part of that proposition with HVAC hygiene. It is part of what we call our specialist hygiene business. In the six markets where we operate, its core mission is to maintain and restore our customers' premises to their optimal level of hygiene. Part of what we offer includes specialist disinfection after catastrophic events, like floods or crime scenes, as well as, for example, bringing washroom back to their as near as original state in our specialized hygiene services. The services I really want to talk to you about are kitchen hygiene, water, and air. Three areas strongly aligned with our mission. Three area we particularly like because they're regulated and more relevant than ever in this post-crisis world.
A significant part of our business takes care of the hygiene standards of commercial kitchens and the fire safety risk linked to the buildup of grease. We do this for a wide range of customers that include the top-end hotel in Paris, but also leading burger chains. With those customers, we have an agreed audit regime that sees us check the hygiene and safety requirements, but also ensure the suitability of access points in the extraction systems. When required, we perform a full restore from every visible piece of the kitchen to all the invisible parts of the hood and extraction systems. A key part of our job is the quality control and relevant documentation given the regulation requirements. On the waterfront, our services aim to prevent the spread in water systems of Legionella, which leads to Legionnaires' disease.
Auditing is there again at the core of what we do, testing the water, confirming it's safe or, when needed, take the necessary steps to disinfect the system and ensure that what comes out is free of Legionella. This is a highly regulated environment that requires expertise as well as a thorough recording of every step to ensure we keep people, our customers, and ourselves safe of any issue. Air quality is the most exciting opportunity. Air purification, as shared by Greg, is a key to it. In many environments, like the one we're in right now or your office, an important driver of that air quality is the cleanliness and hygiene of the air conditioning system, including all the air ducts. Offering spans from regular inspections and audits to the full de-dusting and disinfection of the complete ventilation system throughout an entire building.
An operation that requires dedicated equipment, the right expertise, and in some markets, the right qualifications and certifications. A relevant example to bring this to life is what we do for a leading French operator of aged care with, across France, over 450 locations and growing. We have a tailored audit program that we are executing around their sites in order to drive the optimal frequency of treatment. Doing so enables them to reassure the ones they care for and their families that the environment in which they live and the air they breathe is something this operator takes very seriously. Another example, this one coming back to your Legionella proposition, is what we do for a leading retailer in Spain across their estates, stores, offices, and warehouses.
We perform quarterly audits and are contracted for a minimum of one full disinfection per year, with more being performed on a needs basis. We give them full visibility of results through an online tool, a key benefit when they are getting audited by the health ministry. In summary, through the six countries in which we operate for roughly GBP 30 million, we are well-positioned to benefit from this post-crisis environment and expect organic growth of GBP 5 million+ in the years to come. To contribute to this growth ambition, we are now looking at expanding our geographic presence on those three core services of air, Legionella, and kitchen hygiene in selected markets where we find the right conditions for entry. From those new markets as well as the existing ones, M&A is a real opportunity. Chris will come back to it a bit later.
The next opportunity in this outside the washroom section is a business we currently have in 11 countries for GBP 29 million pre-pandemic. With solid growth experience over the last five years, we can go to the next slide, if you don't mind. Well, okay. Thank you. To tell you more about our medical waste business, we have a recorded piece from Karen Kavanagh, our Marketing Director, Pacific.
Hello, Karen Kavanagh here, marketing lead for the Pacific region at Rentokil Initial. The World Health Organization mandates the guidelines for the disposal of waste management throughout the world, and additional legislation is also driven by regulatory bodies across most regions. Initial Hygiene, the responsible partner to many of the world's key sectors, specializes in the segregation, storage, and disposal of various waste streams, including sharps, clinical, and infectious waste and, of course, the significant volume of waste generated as a result of the COVID pandemic. The current market value of waste disposal is estimated at GBP 6.8 billion.
Some of the main drivers of growth of 5.6% between now and 2025 stem from an aging population and the demand for incontinence product, the growth of the cosmetic treatments industry in mature markets and, of course, the emerging legislation associated with COVID management, including PPE and lateral flow test waste. With over 20 years' experience, Initial Hygiene provides an integrated model in our approach to waste management, handling a broad spectrum of waste streams from clinical to laboratory, offensive to pharma. Meeting legislative requirements and providing robust initiatives that support a strong lens on sustainability, we offer an agile model capable of servicing customers through volatile demand patterns in a responsible, traceable, and dependable manner. The outbreak of COVID-19 has led to significant increase in the demand for waste disposal services across the globe.
As the vaccination rollout continues, growth is anticipated in the requirement of sharps waste management to the tune of $624 million by 2026. The 40% requested escalation in PPE from the World Health Organization, combined with the volume of lateral flow testing that's being conducted, will see an increase in the requirement to segregate, incinerate, and dispose of significantly increased volumes of waste as a result of the pandemic. In Australia, our commitment to sustainability is strong. Thanks to the capability of service nationally, thanks to an expansive fleet of technicians, we have cemented our position as responsible, diligent, and agile waste management service provider. With a team of 300 technicians located throughout the country, we are in a reasonably unique position to cater for unexpected demand, peak waste management, and ad hoc servicing.
The acquisition of Aces Medical Waste by the business in 2021, which has grown by a CAGR of 16% since 2015, will further enable expansion and servicing capability throughout the country. We see similar capability in the U.K. in terms of ability to service and focus on setting standards in healthcare and infectious waste management. In contrast to bulk waste management that tends to operate at lower margins, our service lines are highly profitable. This is due to our ability to carry out small van waste servicing. A key objective of the U.K. team is to ensure customers are compliant with legislation surrounding clinical waste, with a significant drive on sustainability around waste to energy, reduction of single-use plastic, the introduction of recycled materials, and paper saving via e-waste documentation. In conclusion, Initial Medical is another great example of our expertise in hygiene.
We already operate in 11 countries with combined revenue of GBP 32.8 in 2020. Over the last five years, our business has delivered a revenue CAGR of 10.6%, the post-pandemic market is set for strong growth over the next few years. Our plan is to continue to invest and grow in the 11 countries we are already in, also selectively enter several new markets through acquisitions where we can find high-quality targets. Thank you.
Staying on the theme of specialized waste, let me now talk to you about a business that is probably less well understood: our dental business. What I suspect most of you don't know is that amalgams are full of mercury, and mercury is bad for you. A health crisis in the 1960s led many parts of the world to adopt and enforce regulation around the disposal of mercury, including the safe disposal of amalgams. Amalgams are basically mercury with silver. Europe, North America, and Australia are in that camp. The translation to the local country's laws or the enforcement of those laws are still lagging in countries like France or Italy. What do we do in our dental business? We offer waste solutions, hygiene solutions, and precious metal solutions. We have a lot to offer. I will not take you through all that detail.
What I do want to talk to you about is the core part of it, our waste offering associated with metal solutions. To do so, let me tell you what happens when you go to the dentist to replace old amalgams. Where do those go once drilled out of your teeth? In the drain when you rinse your mouth and you spit it out. If you're a bit older, you also go for crowns or bridges, this precious stuff that invariably costs you lots and contains gold, palladium, and platinum. When your dentist adjusts those pieces, he will shave some of those crowns and bridges off, and that metal dust will go just the same way, down the drain. Because of the mercury regulation, the dentist in the countries where we operate are obliged to equip their drains or pipes with a recuperation system, an amalgam separator.
When they're full, we get these back through our service technicians or in some cases by post. They all contain a sludge, which we have to process first to get the mercury out. We basically distill it like a good alcohol. The rest of the material gets refined to get the few grams of precious metals, and that is where the story is really interesting for us. To illustrate the relevance of what we have to offer, an example from the Netherlands, where the key dental chains, which have grown from a few dental practices to now count multiple hundreds, trust us with servicing them and keeping them safe from any compliance issue, which could see some of their clinics get shut. The Swedish example is an illustration of the fact that authorities keep searching for ways to go even further in eliminating mercury out of the environment.
Current separators capture 98% of the amalgams. Leaves 2%, a concern that is addressed by this project in which we have been taking part with the leading dental chain. The mission is to develop an even more effective separator. Brings me to the trends in the dental market, trends that give us confidence that the growth trajectory of our business is solid. Consolidation of dental practices and the progression of chains, it favors a player like us that can keep them safe. The desire from those operators to make their life easy, having one partner, us, for various critical needs is the answer. The next one is, of course, a key one, whether regulation or enforcement or just environmental consciousness, doing the right thing could make a country like France attractive sooner than later.
To expanding to those markets, M&A will be an option. Not the richest of all pipelines, there are a few good targets worth going after. In summary, a really good business that sees us take care of hygiene conditions at dentists, as well as taking part in the removal of mercury in the environment. Going forward, we have key drivers of growth, including a recent and increasing exposure to North America, as well as opportunities to move into other markets when the time is right. A nice little business that will never be a large part of what we do, but one that is expected to be accretive to our hygiene growth and keep delivering nice 25+% margins.
The last business in the outside of the washroom section we want to talk to you about sits in the wellbeing space with our Ambius plants and premium scenting businesses. To talk to you about them, we have a message from Mike St. Clair, our Senior Vice President Sales and Marketing for North America.
Hello, I'm Mike St. Clair, Head of Sales and Marketing for North America. Today, I'm going to cover five areas that describe our approach to the wellbeing space. First, why we believe the demand for wellbeing solutions will continue well past the pandemic. Second, our service offerings that address this opportunity. Third, the data and science that support our strategy. Fourth, our demonstrated success with leading companies. And finally, our approach to continued future growth. We believe the global demand for healthy buildings and wellbeing solutions will continue well past the pandemic, especially in four key segments: offices, hospitality, facilities management, and retail. Four key points support our view here. First, the pandemic has changed the way global businesses think about health. It's now a priority, and they are thinking about proactive ways to create wellness on a go-forward basis.
The global wellness market is expected to grow at a 7% CAGR through 2028 as people search for healthier spaces to work, live, and play. Ninety-two percent of real estate investment managers expect the demand for healthy buildings to continue over the next three years. Finally, ESG investment is focusing on health and wellness due to the higher rental income premiums these properties command. Rentokil Initial, through its Ambius brand, combines both hygiene and biophilic expertise to deliver three categories of enhanced wellbeing solutions. Biophilia may sound like a bad word, but it's not. According to Merriam-Webster, biophilia is a hypothetical human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life and nature, or a desire or tendency to commune with nature. In our first service category, we provide interior planting solutions that deliver benefits related to health, comfort, and productivity.
Next, we utilize planters and green walls to provide active green air purification. Lastly, we provide premium scenting solutions that are proven to positively impact guest dwell time, spend, and brand perception. I'm now going to discuss both the data that supports how the public feels about going into buildings following the pandemic and the science that supports the benefits of indoor plants in those spaces. First, recent research suggests that people are looking for evidence of healthy buildings and that they've got four key concerns. First, they are more concerned about the impact of indoor air quality now than before the pandemic. Second, if they work in a shared workplace, they believe it's important that their employer prioritizes creating a safe and hygienic workplace. Third, following the pandemic, people are concerned about whether a venue has adequate measures in place to stop the spread of germs.
Fourth, they are concerned whether a business in a public venue has suitable systems in place to clean the indoor air effectively. What does the science say? Several studies show that indoor plants provide four key benefits. First, indoor plants improve employee creativity. Second, they improve productivity. Third, indoor air quality is improved. Lastly, environments with plants show a reduction in employee absenteeism. Two leading companies that benefit from our services are AECOM in Australia and Lendlease in North America. AECOM is a global provider of technical and management support services with $13.3 billion in revenue in 2020. At AECOM, plants were specifically designed into work areas to improve air quality and productivity. We provide over 700 individual plants with more than 10 tons of white pebbles and wooden planter boxes that were specifically designed for AECOM.
Lendlease is a leading global real estate and investment group with over 10,000 employees. Environmental efficiency, occupant health, well-being, and productivity were central considerations to their corporate office design, taking special consideration for the amount of plants they have per person. Here we have seamlessly integrated our solutions with other elements of healthy buildings for optimum benefits. In conclusion, we have demonstrated strong and sustained performance through the Ambius brand across 15 countries, delivering a CAGR of 3% over the last 5 years with average margins of 11.6%. Moving forward, considering the increased demand for well-being, we would be hopeful of consistently beating those historical growth numbers. Where we also see high-quality businesses available for sale, we will look to continue to build out the scale of our wellness business line through selected acquisitions, both within our current Ambius markets, but also beyond.
Thank you. I will now hand it back to Alain.
Hygiene & Wellbeing was the last one of the five businesses we want to talk to you about in this out of the washroom section. Five businesses that have performed strongly over the last few years, benefiting from our expertise in those fields, combined with helpful regulations for some of them. We believe they've all gained in relevance as a result of COVID-19 in selected countries only, but we look at geographic expansion and M&A for the right markets. Talking about geographic expansion, this is our next source of organic growth. We declared last year our plan to get into 20 new countries for hygiene and expand our presence from 40 markets to more than 60 markets. Those new ones are truly spread across the world and include North America and part of Europe. Let me tell you more after this video.
To get into those new markets, we have two models, both leveraging our existing infrastructure in Pest or Ambius. The first one is a traditional model with the washroom at its epicenter, the one Brian talked to us about. The second one is centered on premises hygiene and offers solutions for hand, air, and surface hygiene. A key part of this new opportunity for us is to go back into the European markets, where we used to operate in hygiene. Seven markets, from the smaller Austrian one to the big German one. Markets we exited four years ago in the very successful joint ventures transaction with CWS. We're going back with our Initial brand, the reference brand in all these markets for decades.
We're leveraging our existing resources and the many colleagues in these countries who used to take care of hygiene, understand the market very well, and are still in love with it as they once were. We have the brand, we have the people, we've got the expertise. We also have the product range, the supply chain. In short, we have everything it takes to be successful. We have reentered those markets with a full offering, leveraging our No-Touch range, centered on washroom. In this market too, we are training and certifying our colleagues to our Hygiene360 proposition, giving them the tools and expertise to offer solutions across the premises and equip our customers with hand hygiene and air purification solutions. This is not a fast game. There is a stickiness in the hygiene market that is quite significant.
Stickiness we love, of course, as winning a customer gives us a strong perspective of keeping it 7+ years. It means it takes time to win them, as like us, our main competitor in those markets has got contracts running and notice periods that run up to six months. We have nevertheless made strong progress already in getting the markets to understand that we're back and convincing a good number of businesses to rejoin us. With Shell in the Netherlands, the Antwerp Football Club in Belgium, Düsseldorf Airport, and Ford Motor in Germany, we have substantial contracts that are contributing to recreating the base density. Some of those are already getting serviced, and more will come online in the coming weeks and months, including in early 2022.
Now that we have a base of customers, we can push further on the accelerator and build density in all those places where we have presence. That density is substandard today. At the speed we see the business developing and the compounding effect of the portfolio build, it will improve substantially from next year and especially 2023. North America is a different story altogether. Though we have some small presence in Canada, we have no core washroom business in the U.S. and no plan to start building one. Beyond our pest business, we have a strong Ambius business, as you've just heard from Mike. Plans play a key role in creating healthier space, but so does air purification and hand hygiene, solution that the Ambius team in North America have very recently started to sell.
Our entire sales force is now fully trained and equipped to sell our range of VIRUSKILLER units. They are putting out quotes to American businesses and employers who will soon seek to get more of their workers back at work. The team has made particularly good progress with key accounts and have already got significant quotes being discussed with big tech companies, facilities managers, and banks. It's early days, but all to play for. We are confident we can build this market to our benefit and convince decision-makers across North America that premises hygiene is an investment absolutely worth making. Beyond Europe and North America, we'll also enter the Middle East on the back of the Boecker acquisition, which gives us a nice platform to work from, and yet again, an opportunity to expand into premises hygiene.
A model we will also leverage for the rest of the world in countries like Turkey or some of our South American markets. There again, we'll do it pragmatically, focused on cities and key accounts where both the demand and the capabilities of our sales teams are higher. In summary, we're expanding our hygiene business in over 20 new markets with larger opportunities in Europe and America. We've got all it takes to do it, including the nimbleness and pragmatism to adapt to the local conditions. The compounding effect of the subscription model will see critical mass, density, and margin build over time and add a real contribution to the overall growth ambition in hygiene. There, too, M&A is offering strong acceleration options. Chris will talk to you about it in a moment.
You heard this earlier this afternoon from Brian and Jill about the opportunities that exist inside our core washroom business, where we see excellent opportunities to sell more products and services that are relevant in this post-crisis world. Services like No-Touch dispensers and bins and digital washrooms. Growth in this core washroom business, we believe, will deliver roughly half of our new four to six organic growth. Now you've also heard about where the other half of that growth is coming from. In air purification, specialist hygiene, clinical waste disposal, and Dental Hygiene, as well as from well-being opportunities through plans and premium scenting. In addition, from new market entry opportunities. Added to this, we expect to buy at least GBP 25 million of hygiene and well-being revenues by way of acquisition. With that thought, let me now hand over to Chris.
Thanks very much, Alain. Let's turn our attention to M&A in Hygiene & Wellbeing. My colleagues have already explained how hygiene businesses operate in a similar way to pest, it's the same in M&A. I'm gonna show you our track record, the returns profile, and our plans to accelerate deals in this area. I shared our density building approach in pest earlier, Brian explained it for hygiene. We look for very similar characteristics in our hygiene M&A targets. Firstly, quality in the business, secondly, quality in the economics. Quality in the business is about well-trained and motivated frontline colleagues who are confident in front of customers, strong managers with an operational bias, focusing on the one hand on density building and high-quality service, whilst on the other, good pricing and cost control to drive profit.
Quality in the economics is about having a customer base with low levels of churn and high levels of recurring annual contracted spend. A good base is typically linked to good financial performance. We like to see revenue growth at least in line with the market, and those revenues turned into profit and cash, with some of that cash reinvested in people, training, and equipment. Integration can be a little more complex. For example, if the acquired business uses a different shaped bin or a soap dispenser, then we need to be sure that our vans can carry that before we can combine the routes. Unlike Pest, the business is a B2B only, and there tends to be less competition for them, so Hygiene deals can be a little less expensive than Pest. Brian explained the value creation story from when our U.K. Hygiene business acquired Cannon U.K. earlier.
As he explained, the Cannon business was less densely rooted. Here you can see our revenue per service head and customers served per FTE increased, but only slightly, versus the tightly rooted Initial business. The impact on service heads isn't as marked as in the Jakarta pest example, you can see the impact of the branch closures Brian mentioned, which have increased revenue per branch 2.1x , and those property savings have led to a 480 basis point improvement in gross margin. The chart on the left here shows you that we've been consistently doing around six deals a year in this space. On the right-hand side, you can see that 42, roughly one in five of the deals that we've done since 2016, have been in Hygiene & Wellbeing.
There are very few large global businesses in this space and a few regional and a few national players. There are lots of local and regional players, and this is where we've been acquiring. The average deal size is around GBP 3 million revenues, and we've spent 11% of our total M&A spend in this area. This chart shows you that Hygiene & Wellbeing revenue multiples tend to be lower than pest. You'll see that we've been paying around 1.5x on average versus 2x-2.5x in pest. I think that's for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there's less competition for Hygiene & Wellbeing assets than there is in pest. We don't see anybody trying to consolidate this market. Secondly, these businesses tend to be less profitable.
That's because they require greater infrastructure to operate, and that really comes from the hygiene providers having to invest in their own washing facilities and the kit installed in the premises, both of which carry a sizable depreciation drag in the numbers. You can also see that we target better returns from hygiene and wellbeing deals. Average IRRs are a few percentage points above pest. That's for two reasons beyond the price that we're paying. Firstly, most customer contracts are three years or longer. Attrition during integration tends to be low as customers understand it when a new service provider steps into the shoes of another. Secondly, we tend to get higher run rate synergies as there's more infrastructure to remove.
For example, we can consolidate the bin washing facilities, or we can leverage our procurement strength with the waste disposal providers. Alain and Gary talked to you earlier about the three areas we're focusing on in building our Hygiene business, and M&A complements each of them. First, we've already proven that M&A works in our core washroom business, and here we're looking for city-based bolt-ons and targets to help us rebuild capability in our former European Hygiene markets that we sold to CWS, like Germany and Sweden. We're also looking to add extra Hygiene revenues in countries where we currently operate mostly as a Pest business. There may be a few larger targets to go after as well, but I expect the bulk of these deals are gonna be regular small-scale M&A that we do day in, day out.
Premises hygiene businesses may be an attractive extension in markets where we already have a core hygiene offering. There's a very deep and wide market to exploit here, but we're being selective in targeting the sorts of businesses that Alain, Greg, and Karen talked to you about earlier. Things like air quality, medical waste, and specialist hygiene. As you'll have seen, we announced an acquisition of Boecker as part of our interims. Boecker's a leading hygiene business in the Middle East, and it's got some real specialism in food safety, hygiene, and germ control services. They've got a number of interesting collaborations and a number of regional contract contacts that we can look to leverage in this area.
On the wellbeing side, we will of course continue with our Ambius bolt-ons and premium scenting businesses as and where relevant, just like the ones that Mike described. Other enhanced environment areas are a bit different to our regular M&A bolt-ons. Here, it's more about finding interesting technologies and creating partnerships to leverage their intellectual property quickly. I'm led by Mark, Gary, and the innovation teams here, and they come across all sorts of innovations and leave it to us then to structure those, to find the right type of deal to develop and leverage those innovations as the situation requires. We've been consciously targeting hygiene deals for a couple of years now, you'll have seen the bump up in the 2019 deal numbers on one of my earlier slides. We had very good momentum into 2020 until the global pandemic hit.
That caused a number of sellers to mothball their plans. Many of them saw revenue stall, and they're waiting for their business to return to pre-pandemic levels of activity so as to achieve similar exit prices. We're in touch with a large number of potential sellers, and we have around 80 targets in the pipeline. That's a decent number, and I'm confident we'll turn many of those into deals in the medium term, but still a lot less than half of what we've got in pest. We're raising our game, and we're deploying a similar strategy to build the pipeline. We're using our own network of people to identify potential targets at a branch level with disciplined follow-up as we do in pest. In several countries, we're also using third-party experts to sift the market, identify targets, and provide warm leads.
This initiative only got going around six months ago, but the early results are encouraging. In conclusion, the Hygiene business is very similar to Pest. We know how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, and execute deals at pace, and we're going to look to increasingly do so in Hygiene. We think that will drive better returns as we follow a similar integration model, improving density and service productivity, rationalizing properties, and removing duplicate admin and overhead activities. This is in an area where prices are somewhat lower than Pest. We've been incredibly active in Pest Control, and that means we've spent a lot less time and attention in Hygiene & Wellbeing, but we're increasing that emphasis now. For the time being, we're targeting GBP 25 million or more in acquired revenues.
Of course, it could be much higher as our activities build or perhaps we'll land a bigger deal or two. In the time-honored tradition, I'll now pass over to you, Stuart, to summarize what we told them and share the financial impact.
Thank you very much, Chris. I'm gonna start once again here with the illustration of our cash compounding subscription model for the Hygiene & Wellbeing category. As you've already had pointed out, there's some key similarities between this model and the one for Pest Control, and I'll just point out a couple of these. Both models have the same focus on our employee of choice program and our need to have highly trained and committed colleagues delivering high levels of service to customers. Both categories are an essential service ensuring public safety, and both use technology and expertise in digital innovation to drive organic growth. Finally, both models reflect the fundamental importance of route density in driving improved margins and cash generation to fund our M&A program.
This next chart shows the key metrics in our Hygiene & Wellbeing category, and again, you'll notice the very strong overlap with the pest control metrics I showed you earlier. In fact, in some key respects, Hygiene & Wellbeing's metrics are better than in pest control. 89.6% of the business is subscription-based compared to 64% in pest, and customer retention is currently 86%, even better than pest. Annual pricing recovery is good at one and a half percent on portfolio, and net operating margins are strong and very comparable to pest control, driven once again by postcode density and customer penetration. Hygiene & Wellbeing is as cash generative as pest at circa 90% conversion rate.
Whilst higher than pest, CapEx to sales on a four-year average is still low at around 13% and reflects our need to purchase equipment for rental for our Hygiene & Wellbeing customers. The business has grown organically between 3% and 3.5% in the four years to 2019, in excess of our previous targets of 2%-3% and gives us confidence in our newly up-weighted targets. Like pest control, the industry is highly fragmented, providing good M&A roll-up opportunities. As Chris has just said, we're targeting at least GBP 25 million per annum revenue from 2022 from Hygiene acquisitions. Turning now to a chart to illustrate the value our operating model has created over the last five years. As with my pest presentation, we've used H1 numbers as comparator.
We've grown H1 ongoing revenues by about 29% to June 30th, 2021, a compound annual growth rate of just over 6.6% or in fact 14.2% to pre-pandemic 2019. Operating profit has increased by 123% over the last five years, including the contribution from disinfection services with a compound annual growth rate of 22.2%. Let me briefly recap on what you've been told today. Our newly created Hygiene & Wellbeing category will be around 25% bigger than our current core hygiene business, reflecting the new additions to the category of our Ambius and Dental Hygiene businesses. We're strongly positioned to grow organically inside and outside the washrooms. We're targeting high growth sectors such as air purification. We've entered 20 new markets, and we have a significant M&A opportunity.
On this chart, we try to visualize for you how accelerated growth will be delivered within the new expanded Hygiene & Wellbeing category. Roughly half will come from organic growth within our core business, and the other half will come through service extensions and new market entries. Chris has talked to you in detail about the M&A growth opportunity and how we're targeting to acquire GBP 25 million of revenues per year. In addition to small bolt-ons, there may be larger opportunities that come along, and if they meet our IRR hurdles, we will certainly be open to those as well. Let me close the Hygiene & Wellbeing section of my presentation with a growth ambition.
All the things the team has spoken about today, post-crisis attitudes, the extended category and our own innovation, combined with the M&A opportunity, means that we believe we can create a business that will reach GBP 1 billion revenues and beyond with greater density, leading to margin accretion. Moving on now to a group-wide view. Before I go into the details of this part of the presentation, let me remind you of our capital allocation model, which is shown here on this first slide. It is the consistent application of this model which has driven the strength of our performance over recent years. The key point that I want to make on this revenue slide is that we have demonstrated over the years that we can deliver continued and improving organic growth.
As you know, because of the COVID-19 crisis last year, with all its disruptions to the business, we didn't provide organic growth metrics. However, if you look at the total growth, you can see that while our target has been 5%-8%, we have regularly delivered numbers in excess of that, and indeed up to 2020, we've regularly been in double-digit growth. In fact, our total CAGR over the period is 11.3%, including the impacts from the pandemic. Our stated target for profit growth has been circa 10%, and you can see that our ongoing five-year CAGR has been 11.7%, so comfortably in excess of this target.
The chart also shows that we've grown profits from just above GBP 200 million up to GBP 384 million in 2020, including the impacts from the pandemic and disinfection services. Looking now at free cash flow. Our historic target has been circa 90% conversion. We're maintaining this guidance for the medium term. We're showing a slightly longer history here than on the two previous slides from 2013 onwards. This really shows the full extent of how we've established a track record of strong cash delivery, including a record performance in 2020 despite an unprecedented global crisis. Cash has been excellent this year also, resulting in conversion of 151% for the six months to June 30th. Turning now to net debt.
You can see that adjusted PBITA has delivered a compound annual growth rate of almost 10% over this extended period. At the same time, we've kept our net debt largely flat. Our net debt to EBITDA ratio has averaged 2x . In line with our capital allocation model, we've used our profits, both organic and acquired, to fund acquisitions and keep net debt down. This has meant we've been comfortably able to meet our commitments to keep our investment grade rating while maintaining our progressive dividend policy. This next chart shows our new financial targets. You'll be relieved to learn that as we've talked about these several times already today, I won't repeat them here. What I will talk about, however, is margins.
We've shown the strong dynamics both in Pest Control and in Hygiene & Wellbeing, which allow us to improve margins through innovation, technology, density, and through reducing costs by leveraging shared overheads across regions and categories. I should also say that our entry into new hygiene markets and M&A programs will mean that our expected improvement in group margins may be partially offset in the short term until we get those markets up to scale and the acquisitions integrated. Over time, these improvements will flow through to group margins. Hopefully, you've seen many positive things today, but any group Chief Financial Officer would take the opportunity to make the point that significant medium-term external risks still exist. I'm not gonna talk through all of these today, as many apply to most businesses, and you can read them offline.
We believe that we've got effective mitigations in place. Notwithstanding all of these risks, we're confident in achieving the targets we've set out today. I want to try and draw all this together. Here's the chart that we showed you at our last Capital Markets Day in 2018. We said then that we wanted to grow pest and hygiene revenues. We've clearly done that. Net operating margins are now higher. Free cash flow has either been in line or ahead of target. We've continued our progressive dividend policy. We've maintained our triple B investment rating. The U.K. pension scheme has been substantially dealt with. If we update that slide, taking into account everything you've heard, this is how it looks today.
What is clear is that we've established a long-term, consistent track record of delivering on or in excess of our stated targets for revenue, profit, and cash. Both Pest Control and Hygiene continue to operate in industries with outstanding structural growth drivers, and I hope we've conveyed to you our firm conviction that our new Hygiene & Wellbeing business is every bit as attractive as Pest Control. As well as giving a summary of the new targets today, this next chart also shows the changes we announced in state of the Group structure. We've talked to you already about the changes to the categories, but I do want to draw your attention to the changes we're making to our regional structure, which you may have already seen in the RNS we issued this morning.
The number of regions stays the same, five regions in total, as Latin America continues to report through Europe. The rest of world businesses, which were previously included within the U.K. and rest of world region, have been transferred to other regions to better reflect their geographic locations. This includes Poland and the Nordics, which will be transferred to Europe, our Caribbean operations, which will be moved to Latin America, and our businesses in MENAT, which will move to the Asia region, which will be renamed Asia and MENAT. Our sub-Saharan Africa operations will continue to be reported within the U.K. There'll be no major changes to our North American region, with the exception of Puerto Rico transferring to Latin America. The Pacific will stay unchanged, comprising Australia, New Zealand and Fiji.
I will leave you with our newly updated RIGHT WAY plan on a page, which features all of the ingredients that have made Rentokil Initial successful over the last few years. There's the new targets, and that's the plan. We have multiple opportunities ahead of us, and by taking our proven and scalable business model and our track record of execution, we are now ready for the next stage of our journey by making our wonderful pest control business even bigger and even better, and by taking a very good business today, our Hygiene & Wellbeing business, and making it the new pest control. With that, Andy and I and our management team here with us today will be happy to take your questions, and we will start by answering some of the questions that you have sent to us throughout the day.
I think the team are gonna come up to the, to the dais, and we'll go from there. Andy, do you wanna take over?
I do.
Thank you.
Well, I think I'll sit here. Right. Thank you, Stuart. As Stuart said, as the day's gone on, we've been collecting questions online. The brilliant theory behind this on my part was to try and cluster questions together so they wouldn't be all over the place. I've just been handed 3.5 Pages of questions that look very much like I've failed in my endeavor. We'll give it a go. What we're gonna do, we'll go through these questions first. This'll be fun for these guys as it is for me 'cause nobody knows who I'm gonna flip these questions to, not even me yet, so we're gonna see how this goes. When we get through these, we will do it quickly, then we'll go to questions from the room.
I make but one observation. It is the number of questions and the length of answers which will determine when we get the drinks in the other room. If you bear that in mind with your questions, we'll obviously try and answer them all. When we go into the drinks reception for those can stay, please keep asking us questions. I'm very happy to keep answering them, so don't feel that you have to stop interrogating, and indeed, wait till one or two glasses have been consumed. You might get better answers. We'll see how that goes. Nothing else. After Q&A, remind me to come back to this, someone, if I forget.
Just before we leave, I just want to hand out one or two of those lovely Hextio machines, and we'll talk about that in a minute. I am gonna attempt, Lord knows how, but I'm gonna attempt to shuffle the deck here. I'm gonna start with some questions on M&A. The first question is: Can you give a sense of your market position in India and China, and what is the competition for in markets like these? What's our market position India and China? Let's start by talking about how big our business is in there. Then what's the M&A opportunity?
Linked to that, we have another question, which is, whilst emerging as a high growth area for pest, M&A consideration's only been 16% of total consideration. What's the reason for less M&A spend historically in emerging pest? I'm gonna tackle those two first. I'll answer the scale of the opportunity first, and then I'll hand it to Chris to comment, what's the market like out there in terms of opportunities, but why have we spent less money? Come to that. Let's start. India, we are number one. We're number one in pest control. It's a big, big opportunity, but it's a very, very bitsy, fragmented market. The players in India are very small typically.
Our business in India, let's call it GBP 50 million-GBP 60 million in total, and we're the clear number one. The opportunity for us is really to build on that base and to consolidate. There are lots of pest control businesses in India, but they are pretty small, and if I'm honest, quite a few are a little bit challenged in terms of governance and whether or not we would recognize some of the practices. It's not the easiest market. China, we're not number one. We're in the top five. We're probably number five. I'm doing it from memory. There in our Greater China area, so Hong Kong, Macau, the Greater Bay Area, China, we're about GBP 45 million, give or take.
As I say, I think we're about number five, but we're certainly top five. Chris, how do we find it doing deals in India and China? Are the opportunities there and more broadly in the emerging markets? Why have we only spent historically relatively small amounts of our M&A bucket to spend given the opportunity so big?
Is this my development conversation?
Well, I'll let you know later, Chris.
Right. Okay. Yes. The businesses that we tend to find in China and India are relatively small. We've been doing some fairly neat little deal structures to bring in, you know, GBP 200,000 or GBP 300,000 of revenue that's quality revenue under certain contracts, under sort of commission structures in certain markets, particularly in filling stuff around the East China Sea. The size of the deals that we've done have been relatively small. I think in terms of what we've spent, Andy, we've roughly 18% of the deals that we've done by volume since 2016 are in emerging markets, and roughly 16% of the money that we've spent, I think, is in emerging markets.
Thanks, Chris. One more M&A one while you're on, while the microphone is warm. It's a question about IRRs. It said, "Could you clarify the IRRs that we showed for Pest M&A? These are based on expected returns in the year of acquisition." That's a question. Are these based on expected returns in the year of acquisition? Why don't you show the actual returns if you're tracking these to review acquisition business cases?
I think the honest answer is, if we explained how we'd calculated it, the chart would have been really quite detailed. The honest answer is those are North American actual IRRs that we've driven over the period of the plan. The reason we put expected in there is, of course, that we're doing this over a 10-year to 15- year period for an NPV purpose, so we've only got two or three years worth of actual for some of those, and then the rest is expected.
Yeah. I think what we've done, if you look back over the last few years, not every time, but quite often, in the prelims and the interims, we do give a bit of an update. We go back and say, "Of the deals we've done in the last 18 months, two years," which is what we take to the board each period, we actually say, "What have we delivered deal to date on that crop of M&A?" You'll see that we are beating the hurdle rate. If you take the last two years, for example, I think the delivered IRR rate for the crop is about 15%. We don't give it obviously by deal, and we can't You know, most of these are calculated quite a way into the future.
In terms of periodic updates, we do that, and we do that with the board in excruciating detail. I am sure Richard, the chairman, will validate that statement, but we really have a lot of detail on every single transaction we have done. The next clutch of questions are all related to PestConnect. I am going to come first to you, Phill, and then to Dave. First question is about depreciation. What is the depreciation life of your connected devices? How do you ensure that there is no margin erosion after three years when the three-year contract is renewed? We will start with that, and then I will come back to Dave’s question. To Phill.
Thanks, Chief Executive Officer. Let me give this a go. We depreciate assets in PestConnect over three years. Okay? Our experience on the ground with customer lives is on average, they're sort of seven to eight years. That's our experience. We're used to on the ground a sort of seven-year to eight- year customer life cycle with rolling contracts, and our contracts have an annual price increase in them. That's the sort of what we're used to on the ground. Clearly, what that gives us is some opportunity to invest in the customers going forward as well.
Three-year contract, three-year depreciation, customer would typically stay with us six, seven, eight, nine years. We're typically looking to get annual price increases. Over that life, if we have a customer six, seven, eight, nine years, we'll be continuing to invest in them with new products, new solutions. Certainly not one we'd expect to be reducing prices over the life of the contract. Not something that we would be overly concerned with, I think. The next question, Dave, I'm gonna come to you on this one. When a customer upgrades to Connect products and services, can the contracted revenue go up?
We said on the, on the screen in your presentation, that typically, we are saying to a customer, "You can have all of these benefits for more or less the same price," but sometimes can we get more revenue from the customer?
The short answer to that question is yes. What we do is it really depends on the pest risk view from the customer. We will define the final specification once we've done a survey of the site. The requirements of a cafe would be different to, say, this building compared to a food manufacturer. Yes, there's an opportunity for contract price to rise.
Great, Dave. While you're on, a two-part question. Maybe I'll take the second part. The first part relates to customer types, customer segments. Which customer segments do you believe will move to that 25% penetration most quickly?
I've got to say, our evidence to date is we've seen broad growth across a number of sectors, from residential through to food manufacturing, and we've made good progress in retail and small SME as well. It's pretty well across the board, frankly.
Thanks, Dave. What geographies do we think we'll adopt first? We made two attempts at deploying Connect. The earlier attempt was we made it available to all of our businesses and said, "Right, here's the technology. This is how we think you should launch it." We concluded that was actually quite difficult. All of our businesses didn't have the expertise, the experience, the training. What we did was relaunch effectively, which is why we went with the U.K.
We've gone very large in the U.K., the idea being all commercial technicians in the U.K. get trained and are upskilled, everyone in that business can now know what to do when they see a connected product, how to install it, how to upgrade it, how to deal with battery issues or whatever. That's the model we're going with. We're in 87 countries. We're not gonna go large in 87 countries. We're gonna go for the big markets. Holland is straight behind the U.K. and already pushing on very well. France is just behind Holland. Germany's just behind that. We've got a number of other markets, Australia, New Zealand. The big one will be the United States.
Those of you who are close followers of Rentokil will know that we've got a major IT replatforming project in the U.S. Only once we've completed that IT replatforming can we go large with Connect in the U.S., that will be very much one of the big markets. That is, you know, it's the bigger countries where we've got scale, where we've got deep experience, we are very much heavily leaning on Dave and his team to help the other markets. We're already off and running in Holland and France and Germany and, as I say, New Zealand, Australia, et cetera. Got some more questions on Connect. Let me see if I can pick the bones out of it here.
Can you provide more color on the margin differential versus traditional pest control? It's a little bit difficult to say because it really depends. It's very customer specific. If we've got what we call high dependency in customers, let's take a pharmaceutical company. If a pharma company says, "Hey, look, every time this device goes off, I want you to send a technician down, and I want you to send them down within four hours," that's an expensive proposition. That's a day one margin enhancing proposition. If it's Joe's Pizza Parlor and Joe says, "Hey, look, when it goes off, pick it up at the next scheduled visit," that's a lot easier and a lot different.
It really is difficult to generalize, but as Phill explained, you know, we've made the investment in the hardware, we've made the investment in the software, we've made the investment in the connected devices, in the training. You are getting a lot more for that. Trading off of that, we're gonna visit you less frequently. You put those all into the mix. It is broadly margin neutral across a range of customer types and customer needs, but that margin will improve over time. It will improve over time as the contract life goes out to six, seven, eight years. It'll improve over time. As we go large with this, the unit cost of all of those bits of clever technology comes down significantly. That's why the margin builds over time.
Other than that, it's not really, you know, without taking a specific case of a specific customer, it's not really possible to give you much more detail on the margins. There's a couple of extra questions on Connect, which I think I'll take offline, only on the basis that they're quite difficult, I'm gonna move on to another subject now. One for Stuart, I think. This is about the shared cost base between hygiene and pest. How much of that cost base can you still consolidate? How much is already done? How much is still to go? Is there further opportunity on group margins as we look out over the next few years?
Yeah. Thanks, Andy. As a number of the team have described, because of our country structure, we're already very well integrated and share a lot of costs between the categories, and they're the obvious ones, Human Resource, Finance, Back Office, but perhaps some less obvious ones, health and safety, for instance, and the disciplines around those things. We've got a good level of integration in Back Office, and actually might not be so obvious is at a branch level. Our branch infrastructure, we do a lot of sharing of property, so that gives us some good operational cost saving benefits as well. I think there is opportunity, though. We just kicking off a program actually to look at some common processes, where we can standardize and then share both between categories, but also within regions across countries.
If I think about those processes and what they might be, I'll give you an example of one where it's very integrated already and very standardized is around Human Resource. Our people management is pretty standard almost across the globe. We've got. You'd expect that. It's absolutely core to what we do. I think an area where we see opportunity is in the leverage of the connected world through digital contracting, electronic invoicing, electronic payment, where we do believe that if we can get some standardization, actually those standard processes have applicability across categories. Customers in both pest control and in hygiene would recognize and understand, and it would As long as the branding's right, then it makes no difference to them. There's benefits to be had downstream from that.
We've got significant overheads in both businesses around contract management of invoicing and, in the end, cash collection. Although we've been tremendously effective, it's a significant part of our cost base. The more we can become digital, electronic, right at the front end, setting the tone for the relationship, then we think there's significant opportunity to be had there. Sizing it, sorry, colleagues, I'm gonna stick a number out there. You know, we think there could be 1%-2% of margin there, from further integration and standardization, over the next few years. Honestly, that's a little bit of a shot from me. No doubt I'll pay for that later.
Take the microphone off you now.
No, I would if I were you.
Right. I'm gonna move to some questions on Hygiene & Wellbeing. Now we'll get through these, and then we'll go to the floor. This is a good question here, something that is highly relevant. The question is, if I look at the end market exposure in core hygiene, it seems you are quite exposed to the office sector, office buildings. What is your view on the impact of the potential reduction in office footprint and spending per square meter on core hygiene revenues and overall Hygiene & Wellbeing? I'll come to Brian and/or Jill in a second, see what views they have on how exposed we are and whether we see it as a risk or an opportunity. The point I think I would make first is, you know, we've set these targets for 2022 and beyond.
We've been quite careful to talk about these as post-crisis targets. We are still in a crisis. The world is still in a crisis. We have countries in lockdown. We have sectors that are still impacted, and the office sector is one of those most impacted. The debate here where we are in London, Central London, you've traveled up, you've all got your own view. The debate around do offices fill up to their previous levels, and if so, when? You know, that's a live debate. I don't think anyone knows the answer to that.
What we did show, though, is that we've got back to broadly the same levels of revenues at the end of H1 as we were pre-pandemic, and that's without a big recovery in offices, and it's still with some of our countries in lockdown, and some of those lockdowns continue into the, into Q3. Whether it's in Australia and New Zealand, or whether it's in Indonesia and Malaysia. What we're calling is the opportunity as we go into 2022 and beyond. My own personal view is offices do come back. Typically, if there's 10 people in the office or 100 people in the office, you still gotta have the washroom open, you still gotta have it serviced. Does it have a bearing on how much we can get for that service and how much throughput we have? I'll hand over to the experts.
It's difficult to predict, and particularly about the future. There's no doubt that should offices end up empty, we'll be impacted. I guess chances are that there's a lot of people that'll be impacted if offices end up being converted into flats. Throughput and the services that are throughput related, you could see a softening in demand and in revenue from the throughput related things. What we are definitely seeing is that the increased hygiene standards so far have at least balanced that out. It is early to call, so far, we're very optimistic about office reopening, and I think we would have all picked up in the press, for instance, when Pret says they're hiring 3,000 people to service office reopening, we are in the same camp as them. It looks positive going forward.
Thanks, Brian. Well, while you're there, another one for you. When will the full range of Initial products be introduced to Cannon, and how quickly would you expect Cannon to achieve the same number of services as Rentokil?
We took on 24,000 premises. We have integrated them operationally and taken the density advantages. Of course, we did that right as the pandemic started. We have deliberately been a little bit cautious about going to those customers as the pandemic and the conditions during the pandemic have fluctuated. We've now started, we've run a trial. We're around 5% of the customer portfolio proactively contacted. Conversion rates are bang on what it will take to get us to the same penetration. It's 24,000 of them, I would expect to be working on that throughout 2022.
Thanks, Brian. One coming to you now, Stuart. For hygiene, on average, what is the cost of sales as a percent of revenue, and what are the total overheads as a percent of revenue?
Probably easier to talk about gross margin than cost of sales, because we don't do many product sales, which that's how I'd interpret it. Gross margin is about 40% on average. That's absorbing technicians, branch costs, line management of those people up to a branch level. It's a reasonably absorbed number. The bridge to the sort of the net margins of 16%, 17% we've been talking about, is about 10% sales and marketing. A lot of that in the hygiene space is individuals on the road, selling face-to-face to customers. About 15% of admin and general management. That's the sort of shape of it.
Again, 15% as a back-office cost, you can see why we believe there's, you know, an opportunity there that's worth having a go at.
Thanks, Stuart. The next question is: What are the key considerations which will determine whether you enter the Canadian washroom market? Curiously, I could show more knowledge than I really should on this subject, 'cause it is something I've looked at in quite detail. The Canadian washroom market as regards feminine hygiene services is virtually identical to Europe. The American feminine hygiene market, there's no relation to Europe. If you want more detail on that, I'll gladly fill that in, but we'll do that over a drink. The Canadian opportunity, therefore, is one that we could look at and recognize and say, "Yep, it's a density play. It's a specialist service model." It's also a market that we've got very little existing washroom footprint in. We'd have to start from scratch.
It's a big old country. It's centered around, you know, 10 cities or so. It would mean we'll have to do some M&A to supplement organic. I think the most likely answer is what we're doing at the moment is we're doing what we call a test kitchen. We've gone into Toronto. We're surveying the market. We're seeing whether or not the Toronto market is receptive to Initial turning up and offering services. We are looking at M&A as an entry vehicle as well as that, and we'll also look at the outside the washroom opportunity in Canada. We'll know within six months as to whether or not Canada and the big cities in Canada represent a conventional washroom platform for us.
My guess is not, but we're doing the work to find out. It'll be based on what customers or potential customers tell us whether or not they see what we've got as differentiating from what they can get from their existing supplier. I'm gonna move to questions from the floor now. Apologies, I think in the sheaf of questions I've had here, I may have missed one or two unintentionally. You've still got the chance to ask the questions that I missed, if I missed any. Let me just see if we've got any questions from the floor, and the hands are going up. Lovely. Kevin, if you can-
Yeah.
Get to the first one. Lovely.
That's it.
Alan.
Hi, it's Alan Wells from BNP Paribas Exane. Just two quick ones from me. Could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing, how you're dealing with cost inflation, particularly in hygiene, but we can also talk about pest, including wages and what maybe supply chain disruption is impacting the business, as it seems to be a key topic at the minute. That's the first question. Secondly, just on PestConnect, obviously, that's a fast-moving market. Could you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape there? We know that one, at least one, maybe two of the other competitors have got their own product. You know, it's a slightly different model to what you guys are putting out there.
Just interested in a bit of an update on what you are seeing, what your customers are saying about you versus the other offerings that are out there and why you think you are still very much ahead of the curve. Thanks.
Yeah. Thanks, Alan. Good to see you. Well, we'll start with cost inflation and labor, and I'll go to you, Stu. Then maybe just 'cause it's so topical, I'll ask Dave whether he's got enough petrol to get home tonight, see what the impact in the supply chain in the U.K. business is. Stuart first and then to Dave.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Alan. In terms of inflation, I'll deal with the sort of easy ones first, I guess. Anything that's petrochemical related, plastics, those sorts of things, no doubt we're seeing pretty significant inflation in those items. It's a pretty small part of our cost base, honestly, so it doesn't really move the needle for us. The big issue is labor inflation. It's patchy, if I'm honest, and that's partly a function of the nature of openings and closures economy by economy. We're seeing some hotspots, places like, I know the Bay Area. Phill could probably talk about London. Those traditional places where labor is tight anyway, and also where there is still government support in place as at the same time as markets are reopening, that's putting a lot of pressure on.
Nevertheless, our average pay increases are still in the sort of 2.5%- 3% range. At a macro level, we're not seeing it sort of burst through. It's really quite localized. Where it's localized, it's painful. It's painful as much from an operational perspective of staff availability more than it is about inflation. As I think we've consistently said, we're good at recovering inflation through price increases to our customers, and we've got better at it as well. I think the circumstances we're seeing at the moment.
I mean, we're having to be more local, more flexible, so not a price increase across a region, but really quite local about the way we're applying price increases to reflect those local pressures. We're very much responding where we're seeing it, and it's difficult in some places, but it doesn't feel in any sense existential at the moment. The only thing I'd sort of add is from a revenue and then, and we talked about Connect a bit, PCBs, absolutely, the shortage of those are hitting us. I think the guys would say, we'd be a lot speedier about the rollout of Connect if we had free flow of PCBs. That is a constraint on the top line.
I think just really picking up on Stuart's point in terms of fuel, well, the good news is I'm gonna train home tonight, so I'm all right. Actually, you know, just picking up the localized issue. This week, in terms of fuel disruption, in terms of in the Southeast, a bit more of an issue for us, but very, very localized into very specific pockets, through to the Scottish area manager who said, "What's the issue?" You know, not picking it up. Lot more in the news, and it's again just about how we tackle, we handle that locally. Very, very localized, to be honest.
Thanks, Dave. Look, on Connect, I mean, you know I love talking about the competition, I could gladly do another 20 minutes on that. The way to think about it is, connected solutions, we believe are today primarily for commercial customers. Residential opportunity may be an opportunity for the future. Discuss. Not entirely sure we agree with that, but if it is, that's quite a way into the future. You've got some of our big competitors who are primarily resi and termite that are sort of saying what technology? Not really sure what you're talking about. I understand why they wouldn't have focused on it, 'cause it's a commercial opportunity. I think it's fair to say that, our Swedish competitors, Anticimex, have gone down a similar route to us.
I'll gladly over a glass, you know, give you a compare and contrast in terms of why we believe our products are better, why we believe they're more robust, why we believe they're cheaper, and why we believe our operating model, which Phill and Dave explained, our operating model is not, "Hey, we don't need to turn up anymore. We'll just give you this technology, and when it goes off, we'll come and see you." Our commercial proposition is very much about technology and humans working in tandem. When the device goes off, we still believe that the answer is you need a skilled technician to solve the problem. What's causing it? Where's the source? How do we stop it reoccurring?
Our model is a sort of a hybrid model between people and technology. We believe we've got the best technology. It has taken us, let's be honest about it has taken us well over five years of investment and pilots and trial and error. We would find, you know, if you put it outside and a thunderstorm came down, that stopped the machine, the device working. If somebody parked a forklift truck, it caused the Faraday effect, so we couldn't, you know, the signals weren't working. We had to solve every single one of these issues, batteries draining too quickly, all of these sorts of things, and that's what we've done. We've solved the issues one by one.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it is absolutely scalable, and we believe it's the best on the market, and we believe it is the future of pest control. Really, Alan, I think it's a question for you and the others to ask the competition. You know, Rentokil's banging on about this. Why are you not? Are they wrong or are you wrong? You know, we know our view, but it is primarily for commercial rather than resi. There may be an opportunity for resi down the road, but it's not as obvious to us at least. Jane, you obviously want to talk about the football, don't you?
Absolutely not. Thank you.
Okay. All right.
Just the first one, Stuart put up a slide containing some information that was talked about at the 2018 Capital Markets Day. Just looking back at that presentation, you obviously had some other targets in that presentation, which were around GBP 300 million of revenues in Asia Pest by 2022, GBP 150 million in LATAM by 2022, and the 18% margin target North America. Could you just talk about whether all those targets are still part of this sort of next strategic plan? Then the second question, just a clarification on divisional margins. Obviously, if you're talking about operating profit growth being ahead of revenue growth at a group level, that implies margins are going up.
I just wanted to clarify on the divisional level, is the messaging Pest goes up 'cause of route density, Hygiene, goes down a bit in the short term, and then Workwear goes up as revenue grows in that business?
Thanks, Jane. I'll let Stuart come back on margins. Great point. I mean, who would've thought you would've gone back and had a look at the 2018 Capital Markets Day? I mean, I don't know whether that's fair or not, you didn't highlight all the things that we did hit on the 2018 Capital Markets Day, there we go. No, you're quite right to raise it. There were three that you mentioned there, was Asia, was LATAM, was the 18%. Take the 18% one first. There was two parts to the American. One was the scale, GBP 1.5 billion. Second was 18%. You know, we're well past the GBP 1.5 billion.
Some of that's come from, you know, what Chris Hunt has pointed out to M&A, and a lot of that. We've done more M&A than we expected to, so we're way past GBP 1.5 billion. That M&A comes in, and it's dilutive. I don't know, you know, people would ask me, "Well, how do you think about that? You know, if you've got a dilutive acquisition, do you just not do it because of you might not get to 18%?" That's madness. You know, that is not economic. We've taken the advantage to do really good quality acquisitions, even if they were margin dilutive. Some of those acquisitions were in our products distribution business, where the margins are typically 6%-7%, not 16%-17%.
You know, on the 18%, no, we haven't come off that at all. You know, that's the target for end of 2022. We remain committed to that, but that's on an even bigger business than we were talking about back in 2018. Asia, I think, is a fair cop. I think, Jane, I think we're not as big as we wanted to be. Well, that's the bad news. The good news is the opportunity in Asia is just getting bigger and bigger. That's why we shared the per capita spend. That's why we talked about India. That's why we're focused on cities of the future, and many of those cities are indeed in Asia. We'll get to those numbers.
Well, we'll get to those numbers cheating by moving Middle East into Asia, but that wasn't really the plan either. We will get to those numbers. The opportunity is really big. We've made less progress than I wanted to in India. That, you know, you heard Phill talk this morning about, you know, moving from paper to digital. The business in India was, I mean, so much paper, it's unbelievable. It's been quite the challenge to modernize that business, but we are making really good progress. Look, I think Asia, we absolutely get there. It just takes time. Again, the cities of the future isn't about what can we put you down for next year or the year after. The cities of the future is the long-term play in this business.
I've never been more convinced of anything that if we look out 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, we will have built really, really strong, big businesses like the Jakarta example that Chris shared in city after city after city after city in the emerging markets. With that GDP plus type growth, with that emerging, burgeoning middle classes, the numbers can only go up in one direction. We are the leader in Asia. Our competitors are not typically going after these markets. So in LatAm, it's slightly different. I think we've made really good progress in LatAm, but the area that we've not moved as quickly as we wanted to was on vector control.
We called a big opportunity in Brazil, where the authorities spend a huge amount of money each year on vector control, designed to stop the spread of dengue. To be quite honest, in the last 18 months or so, the Brazilian authorities have switched their public health resources to COVID-19, and they've taken a lot of money away from the vector control opportunity. We've won a couple of nice contracts in vector in the last two months alone. Again, the vector story's not gone away, it's just been delayed. I think, ask me again in another two or three years, and if I'm still disappointing on those two subjects, then I shouldn't be. I think that's fair question. Thanks, Jane.
Do you want me to talk about margins?
Please.
Yeah. I think I'd use the analogy on margins that Andy uses about revenue and throw in six sixes. We've got a number of opportunities to improve margins in pest control, in hygiene, and in French workwear. Hygiene & Wellbeing, sorry. In pest control, the long-term prospects for a connected solution really feels like that should drive margins. As we're growing in cities of the future, gaining density, that should be a big opportunity for us. In hygiene, we've seen the opportunities and the increased density of things like the Cannon acquisition have demonstrated our ability to drive margin through density and share. I want to be clear, though, is we're not saying that margins in hygiene are going to step back. That's not what we're saying.
We're saying lots of reasons to believe they'll go forward, but we'll have some countervailing impacts from acquisitions from new market entries, which will, to a degree, offset that for a period. I think in general, you're right to identify 6%-9% of revenue and 10%+ profit suggests an enhanced margin over time, and we do believe that. Quite where that's gonna come really will depend on where we're successful in those higher revenue opportunities and where we, where we get the hits and where, you know, in some places we'll get the misses. As ever, we'll manage that operation extremely tightly year on year to make sure we're getting the best out of whichever region, whichever category we're getting it.
Here and now, all I can do really is identify the macro movements, and we'll see how those play out over time.
Thanks, Jane. All right, next question, please.
Hi, this is Anvesh Agrawal from Morgan Stanley. Just following the change in the reporting structure, French Workwear now becomes a standalone business, and now you put out the organic growth target for that. Just wondering, what are the strategic options you're thinking for that? Is there an option to exit that still exists or you plan to sort of manage it within the, within the Rentokil going forward?
Yeah. Thanks for that. Look, I think I've been both consistent and clear on France Workwear. The two big categories we have, pest and now Hygiene & Wellbeing, are core. They're categories that we will continue to invest in technology and digital, in innovation, in M&A, in capability geographically. That's the future of the organization. Our France Workwear business, in splendid isolation in France. It's the only country we have it. Workwear is essentially all it does. If there is a moment in time where we create more value for our shareholders by making that available to another party, then we do that. We're not, you know, we're not emotional managers. We're not wedded to it just because it's, you know, it's one of our businesses.
If we don't see the opportunity to create substantial value for our shareholders by exiting it, we run it. It's a good business. It's got a great management team. It's got a really good strategy. It's got a very nice position, nestled in as a strong number two to a very strong number one. It's as simple as that. For me, it's not causing any kind of headache, any kind of problem. If the moment's there, we'll take it. If it's not, we keep it, we run it. You know, it will never be a core business. We'll never go back into Workwear. You know, we're pragmatic managers, and if we make more money by running it well, which I think we will.
I'm not, "We will run it well," I don't mean to say we'll definitely keep it. That's a function of who's out there who wants it, and what sort of value proposition. If we absolutely needed another contribution of cash to put into Hygiene & Wellbeing or Pest Control, it has option value, could always monetize that. I would rather, you know, more fundamentally answer the question, you know, how do we create the most shareholder value out of that asset? That's always been the way we run the business. If we create most by selling it, we sell it. If we create most by keeping it, we keep it. That's the way to think about it. No real change.
Of course, it's in splendid isolation all on its own, so it's certainly got no hiding place, you know, if the numbers aren't good. Quite often that's, you know, that's quite a good thing for the business as well. They'll be very clear that we're reporting that asset on its own. And we've put that 3%- 4% growth target, which is pretty respectable as well. I think it's a good business. We'll see. To be continued. Thanks.
Just one on hygiene. There's not a huge amount of market data out there. Could you talk a bit about who your key competitors are and kind of what sort of market position you have at this stage in your larger end markets?
Yeah, look, that's a really good question and, you know, if you think about what we've told you here today, we've now got this new category called Hygiene & Wellbeing. You know, we'll make it even more difficult for you to try and, you know, comp across 'cause who else is in Hygiene & Wellbeing? That's a challenge. You have to look at it by end market, is the honest truth. In washrooms, you know, that core GBP 500 million business, what you tend to see is that there are a number of big country players. In the U.S., which we've already said we're not going after that market, that would be Cintas. Here in the U.K., that would be phs Group. In Germany and Benelux, that would be CWS-boco. In Australia, that would be Can't remember now.
Haven't gotten the Australians down the line yet. Alain, come on, you used to be there.
Yeah, Flick Anticimex are in there. What you tend to see is in each country we operate, there will be one or two pretty big country players. You don't get many cross-border players. What you do get, though, is lots and lots and lots of city-based players or regional-based players in the south of England or in, you know, Scotland, et cetera. Lots and lots, which is why this whole city density is so important, and it is why the industry works that way. It is quite difficult to comp in that sense. If you then go down the other lines, like this thing of beauty here, the VIRUSKILLER, this is a new market. That doesn't even exist.
You know, you know, people have been working in air hygiene, but not air hygiene to deal with airborne COVID-19. That's a brand-new situation. Unfortunately, you have to look at it by, you know, slice and again, by geography. You won't find anyone that looks really like Rentokil Initial, certainly not on a global basis. Closest to our model here in the U.K. would be PHS Multi-Service, it's a private company, again, it's more difficult for you to comp. If I'm honest, you know, reading the big studies that are out there, they don't really give you the insight. We've tried to put as much color on that today by talking about the growth drivers in the, you know, individual slices.
You won't find it terribly easy to comp us with. I guess, if you want a public market one, Cintas would be the closest, but it is a different market. Other than that, I'm not really able to give you much more other than go into each country, and that will be the answer. You knew that was going to be the answer, didn't you? Right. Any more questions? Can't see with the bright lights in my eyes. Are there any questions coming? No? No? Going once, going twice. All right. Said I'd come back to this. I wouldn't really talked about this. This is a little beauty. This is the Hextio. This is the VIRUSKILLER Hextio.
This has got the same technology as that, only this is designed for reception areas, for offices. It's also for residential. Mrs. Ransom's Christmas present last year, this is what she got. She was genuinely thrilled, to be honest, 'cause it was an upgrade on what she normally gets. All joking aside, why does she love it? Because it protects the thing that she cares about most. It protects the family. This is selling very well. It's selling, residential. It's selling, as I say, into offices, to receptions. Just for a bit of fun, when you all came in this morning, we put your names into a hat, because we've got 5 of these. Lord knows what it does for compliance. You'll have to work it out for yourselves.
I'd just slip it in your bag and not mention it to anyone. It is random, and somebody's drawn five names out of that, and I hope that they're gonna be put on the screen. There they are, you lucky five. When you leave this evening, if Laura, who's Catherine, Laura, waving arms at the back there, pick this up on the way out and, well, have fun with it and be safe. Thank you very much, everyone. It's been a bit of a marathon. We've tried to give you as much information as we possibly can. You've heard a lot about our core pest business and why it's the best pest business in an amazing industry. You've heard a lot about our ambitions in Hygiene & Wellbeing.
If we didn't answer any of your questions, we'll try and follow up with those offline. We're now gonna go straight through there, drink reception, and as I say, feel free to pepper anyone with any questions, and look forward to seeing you in a few minutes. Thank you all for attending.