Okay, that's the short pause over. It was an incredibly short pause, wasn't it? So, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome to our short capital markets event here for SIG. Welcome to everybody in the room. Thank you for taking the time and the trouble to come and see us in person, and also welcome to everybody who is watching the webcast from somewhere else. I'm Gavin Slark, I'm the CEO. I think as most of you. It's great to see so many familiar faces, but most of you will know I've been the CEO here now for about nine months. And it just felt like an appropriate time to sort of spend a little bit more time giving a little bit more airtime and conversation points about various parts of the business.
One little piece of housekeeping, there are no fire drills planned for this afternoon, so if you do hear the alarm, then obviously we have fire exits there and there. I believe it's good etiquette in these moments to let the CEO go first. So just bear that in mind. I would also just like to clarify that there's been no trading update today. We did put a trading update out just a few weeks ago. We have nothing further to add to that, to that trading update. I'm also very aware, I think we all understand, the sort of short-term market pressures that are out there at the moment, and we've deliberately, today, focused on medium-term opportunities, medium-term margin targets, rather than get embroiled in short-term market pressures.
I think most of you will be aware that I've done sort of two results presentations since I joined SIG, but at results presentations, it can be really quite difficult once you go beyond the results, to spend time talking about what we might consider to be the more interesting parts of the business, and that really is what, what we really want to try and do today. And there's something else that I really want to try and achieve, which is to break the mental default that I know still exists in some people, which is the sort of SIG really is SIG, insulation, dry lining, large contractors, house builders, UK, 'cause there is an awful lot more to SIG than just those particular elements. I'm joined today in the room by a number of our leadership team.
I think many of you will know Ian Ashton, who's our CFO. Ian's been in place now for about three years. Some of the people in the room will be presenting, some will be available at the end when we've got some refreshments upstairs if you want to pigeonhole them on a one-to-one. Julie Armstrong, who is our Chief People Officer, will be presenting this afternoon, along with Julie Westcott, who is our Group Head of HSE. Julien Monteiro is the Managing Director of our French business, and he will also be taking the stage this afternoon, as will Marcin Szczygieł, who is the Managing Director of our Polish business. Both of them will be presenting in English, which is great for us.
But I'm also hugely grateful and appreciative for them presenting to this, this audience in a language that isn't their first language, so thank you for that, guys. We've also got in the room, David Hope, who is the Managing Director of our Specialist Markets business. David isn't presenting, but obviously, you can talk to David later, along with Alfons Horn. Alfons is the Managing Director of our German business. Both of these guys have got many, many years' experience within SIG and the industry as a whole. Both actually left SIG for a short period of time, and then over the last couple of years have been persuaded to come back and pick up the baton and take us on the next chapter of growth.
We've also got in the room our Non-Executive Chairman, Andrew Allner, who is down the front of the room, and also our Senior Independent Director, Kath Durrant, who's at the back of the room, both of whom again, will be available if you want to talk to them after the presentations. In terms of the agenda for this afternoon, really, it's about putting some very simple messages out there and using real-life examples of what we do as a group. We'll start off with an overview that will involve myself and Ian and Julie W. and Julie A. Then what we've done is try to break the afternoon into four very distinct sections, which we'll explain more as we go through, but grow, execute, modernize, and specialize.
Hopefully, our four words, that when we get to the end of the afternoon, will really resonate with you. At the end of the afternoon, we will have time for Q&A. Obviously, depending on how interesting the Qs are, depending on how interesting the As are, but we'll try and make that as interactive as we possibly can. Then, as I said, we've got some refreshments upstairs for about an hour at the end of the presentation, so if you want to stay and have a drink with us, please feel free, and all the members of the leadership team will be around this afternoon. We will build into the mid of the afternoon just a 15-minute comfort break. I'm very conscious of sitting in one place for a long time.
We're not doing a full-on coffee break, but it will be a comfort break. You can get up, stretch, stretch your legs, and at least break the afternoon for 15 minutes. I think in terms of setting the background, for what we want to talk about this afternoon, it's just really important to recognize what SIG is and where the business is today. Some of you will have seen this slide before at results presentations, but I think it's really important to reinforce the fact that the profit within SIG is not U.K.-centric. In fact, if you look at the pie chart on the right-hand side there, you'll see that our largest single profit-earning geography is France, 42%, then the U.K. at 29%, followed by Germany at 22%. Actually, from a geographical point of view, our profit earnings are really quite well spread.
If you look at the map on the left-hand side, and we'll come back to some of these themes again as the afternoon goes on, the reason some are labeled as SIG and some aren't is, just to reinforce the point, we don't trade everywhere as SIG. If you look at the U.K., predominantly, our distribution businesses are branded as SIG, but we also have a number of specialized niche businesses that have different trading names, as we do in Ireland as well. If you look at the Benelux region, again, principally, it's branded as SIG, and in Poland, as Marcin will talk to you about later on, that is branded as SIG Polska. But then when you start looking at France and Germany, we don't actually trade as SIG in either France or Germany.
What we have got is two really strong indigenous brands in France with Larivière, which is the roofing specialist business, and LiTT, which is the interiors business, which Julien will talk more about later on. Then in Germany, we trade predominantly as WeGo, with a specialist technical insulation brand, which we have as VTI. So again, it's just setting that background and the recognition that although it's SIG plc, everywhere that we trade, we don't actually trade as SIG. As we go through the afternoon as well, you'll realize that these businesses, these OpCos, as we refer to them, they're at different points in their evolution, and they're at different levels of maturity. Some have had their leadership in place for quite a long time. Some have had the leadership in place for quite a short time.
As you go through, you'll see that not every part of the group is at the same point in its evolution. Talking of businesses that are doing well, businesses that we see as potential growth engines, we've got Poland and France coming to the stage later on this afternoon, and they will talk to you specifically about their businesses. But we also recognize quite openly that our UK interiors business, as an example, and our Benelux business, are still very much in turnaround mode, as opposed to being necessarily short-term engines for significant growth. What about our overall vision and our framework? Well, very simply, we want to be the best provider of specialist construction and insulation products in Europe.
I appreciate best is quite a loose measure, and the way that we look at this, how, how do you recognize as being the best? It's a customer-driven measure. So what we want is when someone says to our customers: "Who's your best supplier?" Their answer is SIG. And best can be a number of different things. It can be based around service. It can be based around product assortment. It can be based around the way that we run logistics and our delivery service. It can be based around technical advice. It can be based around price.
But it's just that very soft measure of being able to say to our customers, "We want to be the best provider of these product sectors that we possibly can be." The objective of being a partner of choice for specialist contractors really plays into what I believe is a cultural strong point of our business, which is about being a branch-based, sales-led, customer-focused business. And one of the, one of the misconceptions sometimes about SIG is that the majority of our customers are large national contractors. Actually, the vast majority of our customers are small, local businesses, and that's why having a culture of being a decentralized, federated business with local teams looking after local customers is really important in how we strive for the growth going forward and how we intend to be that, that customer's provider of choice.
Improving on our operating performance is obviously key, and we'll talk about four main pillars that we believe are absolutely critical to growing towards the 5% margin target that we have put out publicly before, we have reiterated publicly before, and we reiterate again today. But if you think about the agenda that I showed you just a couple of moments ago, and those four key words of grow, execute, modernize, and specialize, that is really what we're building the foundations of the future of the group around growing forward. And we'll also talk about growing sustainably and as a responsible business, and we will be reiterating our five key ESG commitments as we go through the afternoon. A question that's often asked in this particular sector of the construction market is: Is the distributor still relevant? Does it still have a place in the market?
Is it important to both the manufacturers and the customers? What we're trying to show on this slide here, pictorially, is that actually, we believe the distributor still plays a really critical role in the movement of materials across the whole of the construction industry. And it's about connecting quite a diverse supplier base and connecting them with thousands of customers across different European markets who actually specialize in a number of different activities. And that's where we believe we can bring real value, as well as having that winning mentality in local branches, delivering great service, making sure that our logistics is slick and efficient.
In short, as a distributor, we need to be brilliant at what we do on a local level with each of our individual customers, and that's why we believe that the distributor absolutely has a role to play in the market now and increasingly going forward. In terms of being a partner of choice for different specialist contractors, we're looking at what we believe differentiates SIG, perhaps from some of the general merchants. Being a specialist we see as really important, and in those different specialist areas, we've got some very strong market positions that I think sets us apart on day one.
We've also got specialist knowledge, not only in distribution, but also in manufacturing and in fabrication, and we will talk some more about the manufacturing and fabrication businesses that we have, which we believe bring real value and points of differentiation for us as a group. In terms of the end market, just thinking back to that map that I showed you just a couple of moments ago, we obviously have some quite significant natural geographic diversification.... Broadly, our business is also split 50/50 between non-residential and residential. It's also broadly split 50/50 between new build and between RMI, and it's around about 65% towards the interior of buildings and about 35% towards the exterior. What that means for us is that we're not overly exposed to any one geography, any one end market, any one customer type.
So I think that natural diversification as well, as we know that the market needs to recover going forward, it gives us various touch points in the recovery of the market and means that we're not overly exposed in any one sector. That really is my scene setting. That's what I wanted to do, just for the first five minutes of the presentation. Just to give you a little bit of sort of financial background to where we are as a group, I'll pass you over to Ian.
Thank you, Gavin. Good afternoon, everybody. So I would just like to provide now the group level financial backdrop to the rest of the presentations that you're going to see today. Firstly, though, I will just cover off the very near term. We published our Q3 trading update on the twelfth of October, as most of you will know, and as Gavin said, the full year guidance we gave at that point has not changed, just to be clear. I think whilst, as you all know, the market is tough at present, we're very confident we're continuing to do well against the market. I think the recent numbers we reported demonstrate that fairly clearly.
We're managing through what's immediately in front of us during what's obviously a low point in the cycle, and that includes managing costs accordingly, which of course we'll talk about a bit more when we publish results in the new year. One of the benefits we believe of the stronger operational discipline and focus that's been brought to the group over the last couple of years is that we are better able to flex the business to adapt to changing market conditions and make any trade-offs that frankly always exist between near and longer term in an informed way. We do remain very focused on making sure that we can take advantage of the opportunities ahead of us to create long-term value, and that's the main focus of today's presentations.
Our medium-term 5% margin target is a key milestone for the group, and this slide shows why. Getting to 5% can and will provide a substantial shift in SIG's value creation. Today, we're at GBP 2.8 billion of sales at around 2% margin as at H1 this year, the latter reflecting in part the current softness in the market. 300 basis points of margin may not sound a substantial step, but the financial effects of getting from 2% to 5% on roughly GBP 3 billion of sales will be transformational for SIG, as we show, on the right-hand side. Specifically, it will drive, firstly, a significant increase in earnings. A GBP 150 million of EBIT, for example, will be nearly 3 times where current consensus has us finishing this year.
Secondly, meaningful free cash flow. As a business, we're not capital intensive, we have a strong focus on working capital discipline, and all of that means that beyond 3% margins, we're sustainably free cash generative, with every percentage of additional margin, above that, largely dropping through to cash. These higher profit and cash flow numbers will, of course, build up and be delivered over time as the margin climbs to 5%. And what that in turn enables is an increasingly more dynamic capital allocation strategy, which can accelerate performance through investment, including potential M&A. And what you'll see today is more detail and color on the key building blocks that get us from A to B. Later on, I'll present that bridge, and we'll also share how we expect the different businesses in the group, to grow their margins over that time.
Next, a reminder of our current balance sheet position. This is at mid-year this year, as we announced in August, with 2022 year-end numbers also for comparison. We have good liquidity, including a currently undrawn RCF facility of GBP 90 million, and as we said before, we expect the cash number to finish higher at the year-end than at H1, due to the normal seasonality in our working capital. Our profitability in the current climate this year means that leverage has risen to north of 3x on a post IFRS 16 basis, and we expect that will remain the case at the full year. Increasing margin and profitability, i.e., EBITDA, will be the main driver that gets leverage back down to our target of 2.5x, and we remain very focused on delivering this.
Finally, looking at the right-hand side of the slide, we have financing in place until late 2026, with our EUR 300 million bond at a fixed rate of 5.25%. Our approach to capital allocation has remained consistent for some time. I'm sure some, if not all of you, will recognize this slide. I'll, I'll just address the key points. Our focus has been and remains on driving organic performance across our existing branch network and assets, and that's what you'll hear about today. There's a significant ongoing opportunity to enhance the capability of the business, and we invest selectively and appropriately in those organic initiatives that meet our returns objectives. We do, and will continue to look at selective bolt-on M&A in accretive target categories and in businesses that are performing well.
On dividends, we want and intend to reinstate a dividend when we feel we sensibly can, and sensibly is defined as shown on here. Finally, the underpinnings at the foot of the page are important. They don't mean that we would never do any small M&A before we get to the leverage targets, as an example. But of course, we take our liquidity and leverage, and indeed, credit ratings very much into account when considering any deployment of capital.
And just for those of you newer to the group, I will just mention finally that our banking and bond documents, as well as our core reporting, are on a post-IFRS 16 basis. And of course, IFRS 16 leases on properties and fleet are quite significant in a distribution business like ours. So that's the financial backdrop to what you'll hear today. I'll talk later with Marcin on productivity and on the path to that group 5% margin, but for now we'll hand over to Julie A.
Thanks, Ian. Well, good afternoon, everybody. In this section, Julie and I will talk to you about three of our five commitments within our ESG strategy, being health and safety, carbon, employer of choice, the latter of which I will focus on first. When I started with SIG in 2021, the strategic focus within the organization was mainly on the commercial and operational aspects of the business and rebuilding it around a better strategy. However, we knew that to achieve our strategic goals, we also needed to reinvest in and refocus on our people being a key enabler to our success. So what we have now in place is a structured framework around our people agenda that provides a focus for delivery and sets consistent standards. Our long-term aspiration is to be an employer of choice in our sector.
This means that if people have the choice over their next employer, we want them to choose SIG. We want them to enjoy working here, to feel committed, engaged, and of course, feel proud. Employee engagement is a core part of building solid foundations that any business needs, including SIG, to perform well. We know our customers want quality products quickly and at their convenience. This means that this business is fundamentally one that depends on the ability of its people, and with them being highly engaged to deliver that service. Simply put, the aim of the people agenda in SIG is about having really engaged people, delivering really great service at the right time and, of course, at the right cost. We also need great leaders in our branches across our regions and our countries to support our path to stronger financial performance.
Employee engagement depends on a number of things. This includes working in a safe environment, both psychologically, where people can be themselves, as well as, of course, physically. Additionally, having great leadership in place that supports and recognizes their people. Being in an organization that makes their people feel included, where they can learn and grow, as well as essentially having the right tools to do the job, also important. So therefore, we focused on four key areas of our people strategy, shown on the left-hand side of the slide. These are dedicated to employee engagement and recognition programs to drive commitment, structured learning and development to build talent, skills, and specialist knowledge. Thirdly, we realigned reward structures to drive performance and behaviours with outputs that we need. And finally, we're building a more inclusive, modern, and open culture.
As a result, these have supported the achievement of good levels of engagement in our people, where we are either close to, at, or exceeding benchmark levels today across most areas across the group on engagement. Turning to the next slide, as we continue towards being an employer of choice, getting external validation that we're making good progress on our path is also an important reference point for us. On the left, you can see we received Top Company award from Kununu in Germany this year. Kununu is a German employer rating agency that the award is based on independently by employees and job applicants. In the photo, you can see Alfons Horn, MD of our German business, who, as I mentioned, is also here today, pictured alongside our German HR director, Christian Kieser.
Now, Germany has made really good progress in people engagement over the last couple of years, and the team has done a great job in rebuilding the business with a culture and a passion to succeed. Another employee vote-led certificate based on experiences of culture and environment is one that Poland won this year, which is Great Place to Work certificate. And finally, our French business is in the process of achieving Top Employer 2023 certification, which is based on a 3-year continuous process improvement assessment. And, you know, we'll find out the results in January 2024. Fingers crossed. Before I hand you over to Julie, in summary on people, I hope that you will see from many of the presentations across this afternoon that people really are a key to our success. SIG has made good progress on the people agenda. Certainly, we have more to do.
We're definitely not there yet. However, it's great to be part of a company and leadership team that places people at the heart of its mission. Anyway, thank you very much. I'll now hand you over to Julie.
Good afternoon, everybody. My name's Julie Westcott, otherwise known as Julie W., and I'm responsible for health, safety, and environment at SIG, joining the business just over a year ago now. I'm here to take you through two more of our sustainability commitments, starting with health and safety.
SIG is committed to being the health and safety leader in our industry, and that's because we believe that a safe, healthy workplace is the cornerstone of a sustainable, profitable business. But it also gives us competitive advantage. Firstly, ensuring our people are safe and healthy at work is essential to their recruitment, retention, and engagement. And as per our people commitments, this is an enabler for our strategic goals. Secondly, across Europe, our customer base includes large national key account contractors. These customers are increasingly benchmarking their suppliers on health and safety, especially those working on large public sector renovation or infrastructure projects, which is a key end market for SIG. Being the leader in health and safety contributes to us being the partner of choice for those specialist contractors. So how do we perform on HSE?
How do we compare to the industry today, and where are we aiming to get to? Well, as you can see on the slide, we have over 7,000 employees engaged in working for us in over 440 branches across Europe. As a distribution business with some specialized fabrication and manufacturing, compared to other industries, actually, SIG has a relatively lower risk profile. Trips and handling are our most frequent incidents. However, we do have vehicles and pedestrians interfacing, and they're interfacing in our sites, at our delivery locations, on the road, and in construction locations, and this interface remains our highest potential risk. Within our sector, our health and safety performance today is in line with the rest of the distribution industry, but we aspire to be that leader.
We have made steady progress with our performance, but to build on this, this year we introduced our new Everyone Safe, Everyday strategy across our operations. It's been translated into all our languages, and you can see the German up on the screen. It's up there because I can attempt to pronounce that, unlike the Polish version, and if you want to know what that is, you need to speak to Marcin later. Our Alle sicher, jeden Tag strategy aims to improve our performance by focusing on three key areas. Firstly, visible felt leadership, where regular feedback on demonstrable leadership is gathered via our employee engagement survey. Secondly, stakeholder engagement, focusing on employee-led near-miss hazard and safety observation reporting. And of course, the continuous improvement of our best practice systems and processes, supported by group-wide working groups and governed by regular HSE assessments.
The implementation of this strategy is already seeing results as we journey to being the health and safety leader in our industry. Moving from people to planet, at SIG, we understand our impact and our role in building a sustainable future for everybody. We're aiming to reach net zero carbon by 2030. This target includes reducing our Scope One direct, Scope Two indirect, and business travel emissions by 80%. To put that into context, 80% of our emissions come from our fleet, with just over a third from heavy goods vehicles and just under a third each from forklift trucks and cars. Currently, a third of our total fleet is electric or hybrid. Reducing emissions from our fleet is central to achieving our targets. Along with the rest of the industry, we're seeking alternative fuels to decarbonize our commercial fleet.
These solutions are heavily dependent on available technology, innovation, and infrastructure. So working together with local governments, vehicle manufacturers, and innovators is essential. We will continue to take an incremental approach to our commitments in this area as technology develops and matures and the costs evolve. This is especially important as different countries are planning contrasting strategies for alternative fuel innovation and infrastructure. Currently, we're running selective trials of hydrogen, electric, CNG, biogas, and HVO-fueled vehicles throughout the group. In the photos, you can see our hydrogen H2 truck from Germany and our biogas Larivière truck below that. We also have electric Moffetts, which are currently being trialled throughout our geographies. And for those that don't know, a Moffett's an onboard forklift truck, which connects and disconnects from the trailer when we're making deliveries. And of course, we have electric fork trucks in increasing numbers throughout our geographies.
In summary, we are committed to and making good progress to reduce our carbon footprint as we bring our products to our customers, and SIG will continue to grow sustainably as a responsible business. Thank you for your time, and I'll now pass you back to Gavin.
Thank you to both Julies. That really is about giving you some background and context as to where we see the business today. But critically, to achieve the medium-term targets that we've got, we absolutely recognize and we appreciate this is about improving our operating performance as a business. And this now really is how the rest of the afternoon is going to be structured, with our sort of four pillars, four key blocks, four gems, whatever you want to call them. But by using these four key headings, this really is about making things simple, making things understandable about how we drive future value. With Grow, it's about continuing above market growth, and we do believe, as Ian said earlier, at the moment, we are outperforming the market in most of the geographies in which we operate.
Under Execute, that's about strengthening the execution and margin performance across all of the businesses. And this is what I mentioned earlier on, this is about being brilliant at what we do as a distributor. Under Modernize, greater productivity through modernization. Modernization in working practices, but also the utilization of digital technology to make our business more effective, more efficient, generate better returns. And also under Specialize, accelerating the growth in more specialist, higher returning areas. And we do believe, and we'll talk more about this as the afternoon goes on, there is a real opportunity for us in more specialist, more technical, more niche markets. So let's start with Grow. What does Grow mean for us, and how do we continue above market growth? It's a lovely combination of the Adidas three stripes and the Nike swoosh this. So we've got the kind of the Adi-Nike, SIG swoosh.
Gaining market share, it's really important for us. It's about outperforming those markets and about making sure that we are that supplier of choice. But what's really important for us is this is not about market share growth at any cost. This is about making sure that we're managing our processes well, we're managing our costs well, we're managing our margins, and making sure that we're delivering value for our customers and our stakeholders. In terms of regulation, we do believe that over the coming years, there will be a regulatory-driven tailwind in a number of the European markets in which we operate. The demand for better buildings, the demand for decarbonization of the built environment, the demand for better energy efficiency, absolutely plays into some of the core product sectors in which we operate.
And of course, also, there is a fundamental undersupply of housing right the way across Europe. In terms of the industry growth, whether you're looking at GDP, whether you're looking at growth in new build markets, we do believe that construction and construction products is, always has been, a cyclical market, and at some point, we have got short-term pressures now, but we absolutely believe that that market will turn. And critically for us, over that period of time now, where maybe the market is going along the bottom, we need to make sure that we're as positioned as well as we possibly can be to get disproportionate benefit when that market does turn. And also importantly, that little, bubble on the right-hand side there, that 80% of the revenue across the SIG group is driven from insulation and products that impact the building envelope.
Our market positions are really strong. One thing I would stress here is that actually, the market data across different geographies isn't always collated in the same way, and I would say in some cases, is not as reliable as others. So these market positions that we've got on here, just to be clear, these are based on our data and our assumptions. So just bear that in mind when you're looking here. So in France, the number one national roofing specialist, Larivière, a critical market leader in that French market, and also number two in France in terms of interiors with, with LITE. In the UK, our SIG Roofing business is the number one specialist roofing distributor in the UK market.
Then SIG Distribution or SIG Interiors, as some of you may, may know it, we believe is the number 2 in the distribution of insulation and dry lining in the UK. In Ireland, number 1 in terms of distribution of insulation and in the top 3 in terms of other interiors. We also have, within Ireland, a couple of really strong but small niche businesses. We are the number 1 installer of kitchens and bathrooms, as an example, in Northern Ireland. We also have a market-leading specialist painting contracting business, which is called JS McCarthy, that I wouldn't have anticipated anybody has heard of, but it is a profitable, good contributory business for us in Ireland. In Poland, Marcin will talk to you later, but we believe we are number 2 in both insulation and in the overall interiors market.
In Germany, we'll be in the top three of Dry lining, ceilings, and insulation, and the market leader in terms of specialist flooring systems. It's really interesting, I think, to also bear in mind when you look at those businesses, they're not all the same. So for instance, in the U.K., we're very clearly into roofing, we're very clearly into interiors. In France, very clear and distinct roofing and interiors business... In Germany, the mix is slightly different. Really strong in interiors, really strong in specialist flooring systems, but as an example, in Germany, we don't do roofing at all. And then in Benelux, we would be in the top three of overall distributors for interiors and insulation. And I'll talk a little bit more about Benelux later on, 'cause recognizing, as I said earlier, that business is very much in a recovery mode.
Trying to find a simple illustration as to where our products can actually impact the building, and I think this hopefully does it pretty well. If you look on the right-hand side and you look at exteriors, historically, our roofing businesses were really based around flat roof and pitch roof, but increasingly now, solar is playing an important part in terms of our overall roofing business. Also on the exteriors with facades, so facades, some in various markets, might recognize that more as exterior wall insulation and cladding that is actually put on buildings to aid the insulation, but that's all part of our exteriors businesses. Then on interiors, predominantly, that is about building insulation, dry lining, ceilings, and flooring systems. Then we'll also talk more in a short while about construction accessories, and that really impacts the whole of the building.
But we just really try to show in one illustration where the products in which we operate actually impact the built environment. Some of you who were with us at the results presentation will have seen this slide before, but this is about where we believe regulation and regulatory tailwinds will actually help us going forward. The examples down the left-hand column are really just to show you the kind of things that are happening in various geographies and various different governments. But if you look at that central column, and you look at the headline points in there, those are being driven by legislation at different points of evolution by different geographic governments, but that is really important to us going forward.
'Cause it is about us being much better at what we do, it's about developing and evolving as a distributor, but really taking advantage of some of these regulatory tailwinds that will come with us. So the demand for that commercial building retrofit, making those buildings more energy efficient, making them better. Public buildings, social housing, schools, hospitals, prisons, all getting a lot of attention in terms of retrofit and making them more energy efficient. Building standards and the demand for better quality buildings really plays into where we are as well.
And of course, as I mentioned a moment ago, the evolution of solar and other energy sources not only impacts what we can sell, but also, if you look at alternative heat sources, particularly in residential settings, it's not that we're gonna suddenly get into selling heat pumps, but actually, when you look at those alternative heat sources, managing the heat inside the home and managing the energy efficiency becomes even more important as domestic heating evolves. So I think there are, across a number of the geographies in which we operate, some regulatory tailwinds now and coming in future, that not only will help us, but we also need to be ready to take advantage of. Insulation is where the business grew out of. That is where SIG started, and there's a number of different aspects to insulation.
It's quite difficult to see from the pictures, I appreciate, but if you look at structural insulation, that is about walls, that is about ceilings, it's about insulation in floors, and of course, also on flat and pitched roofs. 'Cause roofs are really important in terms of insulation, as well as the actual external roofing material as well. If you look at technical insulation, and we do think technical insulation, again, is a margin opportunity for us going forward, but that is about high-performance insulation, whether that be acoustic, whether it be water resistant, whether it be thermal, or whether it be fire. And if you look at that, that picture in the center there, I appreciate it's not easy to make out, but that really is...
That's an HVAC system with very specialist technical insulation around it, and very much part of where we see the business going in future. Certainly, if you bear in mind, we've been a pioneer in insulation since the 1950s, that is where SIG grew out of. But it's not necessarily where SIG needs to stay. This is about evolution. It's about development. It's about moving forward as the markets evolve. So in terms of growth, quick summary: We have got great market positions. We've got really strong businesses in different European geographies, and definitely, I think underlines the fact that SIG business is not totally UK-centric. Our product mix is weighted towards structural growth, and there are some regulatory tailwinds there as well.
I think that Pan-European diversification that we have underlines the fact that we are not overly reliant on any one market, any one product sector, any one customer type. I think that level of diversification, along with that mix that we had of roughly 50/50 residential, non-residential, roughly 50/50 new build, and RMI, gives us a great opportunity to continue with above-market growth going forward. So moving on to execute. What does execute mean? You could substitute execute for energize, I suppose, but this is about how we do what we do, being brilliant at being a distributor, and what does that mean for us going forward? During this little section here, I'm gonna talk about our performance management priorities....
I will then invite my colleague from France to take the stage, and he will talk you through some of the things that we have done in France. And when you see the French margins and you see the evolution of the French business, I think it'll become clear why Julien is here, because we've done some great things in France, and it's probably a little bit further and ahead of the curve against some of our other businesses. And then I will also touch very specifically on UK Interiors and Benelux to make sure that everybody appreciates we haven't forgotten the businesses that are currently still in recovery as well. In terms of our performance management priorities, it's not an exhaustive list. This really isn't everything that we do as a distributor.
But what it is, it's some key areas just to reinforce that actually, we can have great ideas about market evolution, we can have great ideas about product evolution, but we've really got to be focused on what we do as a distributor, day in, day out. Customer service, being the best place for our customers, being the customer's favorite place where they want to go is really important to us. In terms of pricing and product mix, actually, it's not just about selling more, it's about helping our colleagues to sell more intelligently, and it's about helping them to sell a better mix of product that drives the margin and drives the performance of the business, as opposed to just selling more. And that's why some of these other areas become really important to us. Procurement and category management, absolutely critical.
When you think about the number of different products in which we sell, the ranges that we need to have across the different European markets, really high quality category management plays a crucial part in what we can do in the business going forward. Logistics and inventory. This might seem like a glimpse of the obvious, but we are a distribution business, and we need to be really, really good at logistics, transport and distribution. Productivity and modernization, utilizing modern technology for customer benefit, driving shareholder value, investigating how we can utilize technology to make some of the processes that we have in the business now, more effective, more efficient. Can we utilize AI in a way that actually helps us to modernize the business and continue to take it forward? And as Ian mentioned a few moments ago, the cost discipline.
As ever, we have to take care of what we do on a daily basis. We have to make sure that we have a lean structure, and that also frees up the cash to help us to invest and develop the business going forward. But that overall execution and operational excellence really is critical. And I appreciate for some of you, you might sit there and go, "Well, isn't this what distributors just do every day, all day?" But it's really important that we remind ourselves that the basics of running a distribution business on a day-to-day level, these are the things that we have to get right to start to give us the right to be the customer's favorite going forward. Couple of specifics. On product mix and category management, and I think I mentioned about selling more intelligently, not just about selling more.
Some of the things that we have to bear in mind is, we have certain product categories that are inherently low gross margin categories, and we have to make sure that we can start to sell from a specification point of view, that we can start to sell from a system point of view, that we can make sure that we are selling the right fixings, the right accessories, that overall can give us a product package that makes the margin more acceptable to us than just selling more volume of commoditized, lower margin product. But full system selling is really important to us, and that is where I think we can help our sales force, both internal and external, sell more intelligently. Private Label also plays a really important part in this.
And I know that Julien will talk a little bit more about private label in, in France, but why is private label important? When you've got certain categories that are inherently lower gross margin, at the moment, private label is about 4% in our distribution businesses of what we sell, and there's an important differentiation there. When I talk later about manufacturing and fabrication, obviously, everything that we manufacture is technically a private label. But within our distribution business, it's about 4% of revenue. Over the medium term, to really enhance the margin mix, we believe we need to get that private label up to around 10% of the turnover within our distribution businesses. And we do think that is a really fertile area for us in enhancing our performance and enhancing the margin across the group. Shop-in-shop merchandising.
In some of the businesses, again, this is quite advanced. In some of our businesses, we're a little bit behind the curve in terms of what we have in terms of trade counter, self-select product, giving the customer the opportunity to buy more when they actually come into the trade counter. And again, if we can focus that towards private label, higher margin pickup products, it all starts to impact on the mix. If you look at those brands that you can see on the slide there, then they are just a selection of some of the private label brands that we have across the group. So as an example, Hirondelle is a French brand. Prefix is a Polish brand. Fixar is one of our UK brands.
You'll see there that we've got a number of different brands that are specific to different markets and give us a specific opportunity to really drive the margin. But I mentioned that we're gonna talk about the French business and some things that they've done really well. I think now it's appropriate for me to say, you've heard from Julie A, you've heard from Julie W, but I'm gonna hand over to Julien. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you, Gavin. Good afternoon, I'm Julien Monteiro. I am the Managing Director for SIG France.
I joined SIG in 2018, so that's almost five years now. It will be five years in two weeks, actually. I'm going to cover three things this afternoon. Firstly, it will be an overview of our business, then you can get familiarized with, and the strategic evolution of our business in France. Second, how we manage our performance, what we do on a day-to-day basis to arrive where we are and to go where we wanna go. And finally, what are our ambition on the medium term? So as Gavin said, in France, we are not trading as SIG. But we are trading with two businesses, Larivière on the left and LITE on the right. Larivière is our roofing business, and it has a very long legacy on the French market.
Originally, Larivière used to be a family, I'm talking about decades ago, who were extracting natural slate from the Basin on the Basin of Angers, which is about an hour and a half on the west of Paris, and were selling natural slate all across France until maybe the 1950s. It's now 80 years, almost 80 years, more 75, 78 years, that Larivière has become a full distributor of a product for roofing, especially focused on pitch roof, natural slate, but clay tile as well. Larivière joined SIG plc in 2007, and with its 101 branches is covering the whole French territory, with an obvious stronger presence on the west, as you can see on our map here on the left.
Taking account this background, in the last few years, we have decided to reposition Larivière at its deserved leadership level in France. We will see how we've done that on the... a bit later in the presentation. With a turnover today of GBP 466 million, Larivière is uncontested number one distributors of roofing product on the French market. On the right, you have some details about LITE. LITE was created in 1918 and has joined SIG plc in 1997. LITE has more than 40 years experience now, existence on the market, and in recent years, have been focusing on deploying its new strategy, and we'll talk about that later as well in the presentation. With its 39 branches and a turnover of around GBP 218 million, LITE is the number two on its market, just behind SFIC, SFIC, from Saint-Gobain Distribution.
Both are dealing with trade customers only. We are dealing on the French market, obviously. The construction industry is representing roughly 8% of the national GDP. EUR 80 billion is the market size of distribution of building materials for the construction industry. Our accessible market, so once we exclude plumbing, electrical, and all that, is EUR 18 billion, and this is including big generalized distributors. The building material market, despite the presence of the big actor, some of the big actors, and the one I specially mentioned before, is still not yet consolidated. This is due to the customer base being very highly fragmented and also to the geography and the company's profile. There are still a lot of regional actors and family-owned business in France distributing material for construction.
So this makes our market, as mentioned earlier by Gavin, very much distribution friendly. So we have a massive role to play, and we are playing it. This market is also very well animated by our government, with regular stimulus to stimulate the market, but also regulation to make the market evolution. In regard of our performance, Larivière and LITE are two real specialists. Until 2018, there were two businesses with a lower GP than now, but with some lack of investment and slack investment into our branches and some poor systems, really. They also had, back in this time in 2018, no much room to grow, no more capacity, and they were not future-proof. They were performing, but not future-proof enough. Since 2018 for Larivière and a bit earlier for LITE, this strategic evolution has started.
I'll come back to that in a minute. It is, we have seen for the first time in 2012, both companies over 5% return on sales. As you can see on the margin on the GP line, that Larivière has grown its GP by 230 basis points from 2018 to 2022, and LITE from 100 has grown its GP by 140 basis points from 2018 to 2022. So we'll see how we've done that later. So I will now go to the strategy evolution that drove this performance. The distributor, Larivière, has been a historic pitched roof, as I said earlier, especially natural slate from its origins and clay tile roofing.
Our offer and our model was very appropriate in area with mid, small size cities or town, and this was the main type of roof, and this is the Larivière background. However, our range was narrow and was not adapted to cover the whole market. The strategic evolution of Larivière was mainly around broadening our range to capture wider customer segments and different kind of building type. We were also in need to develop our image, that was very important, and make sure our legacy were well known and was respected in our current market. So the GP evolution, through product mix and pricing, was the first focus of attention, back in 2019. To develop that, we need to adapt our offer for metropolitan area and big cities market. We created a key account team.
These sales today are representing more than 10% of our sales, which is one of the key element of our success. So now we're touching markets such as flat roofing, waterproofing, solar market, et cetera. As we can see on this slide, Larivière is now supplying a much wider range of product than the pitch roof that I mentioned earlier. We also getting involved in some innovation and ready to respond or to anticipate some new regulation from our market, like vegetated roof or solar panels, with some technical specific aspect for especially industrial building. We are growing, for example, on the solar business by 40% today. Of course, it's a lower base, but it's still 40%, and we tend to accelerate that since the last two years.
In addition to this modern roofing, we also have become recognized for supplying prestigious heritage building projects. For example, we've been involved strongly into supporting the description of the roofer profession, which is highly technical, into the UNESCO heritage through our association, Le Geste d'Or, The Golden Gesture. And the Larivière has been also... And we are very proud to be heavily involved in the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris. So we are supplying, for this job site, all the wood and the lead. And by the way, the lead have been found in the UK by the Larivière team. Another important part of Larivière's strategic evolution has been how we utilizes our branches. Yes, our business is a branch business, is a local business.
Our core historical market, customer segment, is a trade artisan, small company, 1-5, maximum 10 people. They're doing pitch roof, individual house. They're repairing after a storm. They do loft extension, stuff like that. We noticed that we are not getting the most benefit of this flow of customers who were coming every morning into our branches. 101 branches, 50% of our sales are coming from people visiting us, especially in the morning. Very short period of time, from 7 to 11, you see this lane of white van waiting for us to load their van, their truck, and then to go on their job site to repair what they have to do. That's our core, that's our customer base. That's 10-12 thousand of our customers like that. But we are not getting that properly.
So this is why we have decided to execute a strong program of branch refurbishment and redesign, using merchandising technique from retailers, because we partly are retailers, and developing a range of shop-in-shop product, easy to pick, high margin, and obviously, including some own labels and some, innovation products. This is what contributed a lot to this gross profit improvement I mentioned earlier. But not only that, it also give us a chance to, to improve our customer experience when they visit our branch. They discuss technical stuff, innovation with our team. They can meet suppliers, we can organize more training, they can just come for coffee, but also it's great as well, a better envir- better environment for our teams. If we talk about LITE now, over the last few years, we have also evolved LITE strategy.
Previously, LITE also had a narrower range of products, and it was mainly focused on ceiling, insulation, and plasterboard. As I mentioned earlier, we had not invested much in the development of LITE in any way. Today, as you can see from this slide, on this marketing image, LITE has repositioned itself as a full interior design company, supplying actually the six faces of a room to our customers: the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor, because our customers are actually working on these six areas of a room. So over the last years, over the past years, and a bit maybe earlier than LITE, than Larivière, sorry, we gradually brought a wider range of products, starting with partitioning. How we did that?
We trial partitioning in a few branches, and then following the success of that, simply we deployed in many branch. Easy. From successful trials, let's redeploy this range of products. Today, our range has more specialism and higher value product, and all this range of product include flooring, technical flooring, joinery, panels, acoustic panels for ceilings, but also paint. Obviously, to allow this development and to accelerate it, we had to do a few things. But in a similar way of Larivière, we wanted to offer to our customer a better experience. To a less big extent than Larivière, but still 30% of our sales are made by customer coming in the morning into our branch to pick up the usual product, and we said: "What can we do with these people coming in?
Let's try to sell them more." Then we invested in our network. What we can see on this slide is a before and after photos, illustrating what we've done to our branch to support this strategic evolution. So the creation of shop-in-shop, again, using technique of merchandising technique, not only tidying, but make sure we have the right product, the right pricing, the right margin, et cetera, in our branch to trick the last second purchase from our customer. And this is what also contribute to this GP development into the lead network. On the side of that, new range of product, new product, obviously, we had to train our team. That was very important phase to make sure that our people could sell this new product.
As well, to accelerate this, we opened a new warehouse, because what we've done with in early hours with partitioning were not fast enough. So having a warehouse now, we can buy in bulk and very quickly spread this new range of product in good quantity in all our branch network. So at the end of 2021, we opened our first national distribution center. Reiterating what you say, own label was a big part of this margin improvement. So high-margin, own-label products to sell in shop-in-shop, that was the first target. We revitalize what we already have in Larivière, but was a bit forgotten. But we also create a lot of new potential.
Today, the sales are under 5%, between 4, 4.5 and 5%, and we're targeting to reach, in the medium term, more than 10% as a weight of our total sales. In Larivière, we have the Galiza, which is our historical exquisite natural slate, not from the basin of Angers anymore, but from Spain, and Hirondelle, which is the brand you can see in here, with all standard, non-branded, sensitive product that you can find in our, in our branch. And as we put own label, a center part of our strategy, we had to created one, and we, Alier was born in January 2022. So we'll have two years in a month and already representing something like 1.5% of our sales.
So again, a lot room, a lot space for improvement because we're targeting to be at 10% within medium term on all these brand, by creating SKUs and by again, put them in, in a buying process of our customers. So I will turn on to focus, because we have a strategy and we believe this is the right one, how we do execute it, and how we sure that we manage our business each day to make sure that we deliver good operational performance. The success of our business is relying on the quality of the execution of our strategy. For that, we have to make sure that our people are fully engaged. And I come back on what Julie said earlier. In SIG France, we have a motto: We want to be, and we want to be perceived as a modern and ambitious company.
I intend by modernity, not only digital or technology, but also a modern style of management. It is important today to be an attractive company, not only for younger generation, but also for our longer existing collaborator. But it is to respond to expectation of our colleagues in terms of clarity of the vision, clarity of our message, clarity in our strategy, accountability, local accountability, discipline, but also personal life balance and leadership in sustainability, inclusion and social responsibility. This is what is driving a better engagement. And again, people engagement is the first driver of the success of the execution of our strategy. And so every year we survey our colleagues, and we listen to them to measure this level of engagement.
In the last three years, the score for SIG France has been between 75 and 80, regularly, slightly over the group result, and this is also over the French benchmark. So we're pretty sure we are in the right direction for that as well. We have numerous initiative to make SIG France an attractive company and to make sure we retain our best colleague. We are running for the Top Employer label, as Julie mentioned, which will be a great recognition to the effort we made. I'm gonna come back on that for a second because there's a wonderful photo of Francois, who joined LITE as a storekeeper a few years ago, and he's today one of our best branch manager in our business. I need to talk to that, of course. This slide, it set out some of my key priorities.
What are our key priorities? This is what I'm following every day, day after day. I absolutely want to be sure that with relentless, we are keeping the focus and the discipline on the execution of these four areas. I want to be sure that our branches are well-armed to perform on their local market, where the right team is in place, and we closely monitor that performance. Since 2019, we have lowered the number of low performers from 26 to four today in 2023. The second one is about branch profitability. This is the key drivers. Pricing, obviously, is driving GP, but also product mix.
So every branch has a clear target in term of applying the pricing process, compliance to the pricing process, but also very clear target on this many new range of product, own label we deploying in every branch of our businesses. So we need to make sure our team are performing in those key area. On the third column, you can see the productivity. We use. Now we have the capacity to use a lot of KPI that we read on a some of them on a daily basis, weekly, monthly, but quarterly as well, to make sure we are incentivized, we manage, and we clearly know where we go. They're not that many, but they're very focused on what we're trying to achieve in the end.
And finally, to keep on improving our productivity, but also our reliability, our quality, where we develop a lot in, technology and in modernization. A few will be mentioned later, in the second part of the presentation. With the right strategy and the right processes in place, I will now turn to look on, our ambition for SIG France, looking ahead. Looking ahead is about medium-term target. Our ambition is very clear, absolutely very clear for all of our people, and every one of them, every one of us, know exactly what is their own contribution. We want to grow to become a EUR 1 billion company, currently at EUR 800 million, and we think we can further grow our margin with all the space we have in growing own label, shop-in-shop, added value product with a higher margin that I mentioned earlier.
So where we support our new growth and margin looking ahead, firstly, we will drive our growth through our branch network and further market share potential. In Larivière, we have some area, like solar, where growth could be bigger than we think, and Gavin will discuss that later. We'll be also developing the omni-channel capability. It's something we haven't explored yet. Martin will go a bit more into details of what we try to copy from our colleagues in Poland. We will continue to reinforce our specialist market, specialist positioning on our market, with room to grow further into very specialist product niche market, and things we are currently exploring as well to grow. Key account is an area for more growth, more specific market, more prestigious job site, as I mentioned earlier.
Pricing management, own label development, and shop-in-shop is something we do now since 3 years in an intensive way. It doesn't deliver everything it should have because we're still ramping up, so that's a guaranteed room for growth in our margin. Finally, we will continue to bring more value-added and innovative products into our range, including sustainable innovations, and you heard about that a bit later. For example, in Larivière, today, we are working on a new lower carbon slate tile. I invite you to ask me a question about that later, if interested. So I again, we have built this capability, and we have proved them because I've been working for the last 2 years. We are, as a French team and me as a managing director, extremely confident we will achieve those target in the midterm.
Thank you very much for your attention, and I will now pass back to Gavin.
Thanks, Julien. I think there's just something intrinsically more interesting about someone talking about France with a French accent than listening to me talk about it. So much appreciated, Julien. In terms of the French business, look, it's an example, and we're just trying to bring to life here with a few examples of things we believe that we can deliver across the group. I think the French business really is one of the ones in our group that is much further down the line of evolution than some of the others.
That performance management culture in simplifying messages and making sure that our colleagues right the way across the business understand the role that they play in each part of that evolution is also really important. I think as Julien very eloquently put there at the end, we believe that France has got further to go. We do believe that France can get to EUR 1 billion of revenue in the medium term. We do believe that France can get to a 7% EBIT margin. I think it's also worth bearing in mind here, even with that further development scope, today, France is the largest profit earner that we have within the SIG group. I did say earlier that I would just spend a few minutes talking about UK Interiors and Benelux. I think we'll start with sort of UK Interiors.
What we've been working on in recent weeks is kind of restructuring the way that we look at the UK business, restructuring the way that we manage and report that UK business. UK Interiors going forward, and I, I will share some margins with you in just a moment, but UK Interiors, going forward, will be a pure interiors business. Historically, we've reported the UK as interiors and exteriors, and we will now be reporting that as three separate businesses: interiors, exteriors, and Specialist Markets. I think particularly with the UK Interiors business still very much in recovery, it gives greater transparency, gives greater visibility, gives greater accountability in terms of the way that that interiors business is managed. We've now got MDs appointed for each of those three operating businesses.
We've also streamlined through a retirement and some other changes that we've made across the UK, the reporting line across the whole of the UK. So actually, the three OpCos that we have in the UK, now interiors, exteriors, specialist markets, the managing directors of each of those businesses report directly into me, which also means that I think Ian and I can get much closer to understanding the real levers of opportunity that we have within those UK businesses. We've also taken some cost out of the UK infrastructure so far this year. We've taken about GBP 3 million worth of annualized cost out. We do believe there's more efficiencies that we can drive, both in the UK and across the group. Probably more to say about that when we talk on the results in the early part of next year.
But really making sure that not only have we got a shorter management structure, but also it's leaner, it's more efficient, and hopefully make the managing of the business more effective. In terms of realigning the U.K. from three—from two OpCos into three. On the left-hand side of the chart there, you'll recognize that is how historically we have reported our U.K. business. So the interiors business for 2022 had revenues of just over GBP 700 million, and in the first half of this year, we reported an EBIT margin of 1.7%. And then we also reported the exteriors business, which last year had revenues of GBP 445 million, and in the first half of this year, an EBIT margin of 2.7%.
Now, within those two businesses, there was quite a significant element of specialist businesses, construction accessories, some fabrication, some manufacturing, that we believe needed more oxygen to enable them higher returning businesses to grow and to develop, hence, giving that greater transparency in terms of the UK. So going forward, we will report the UK in three very separate OpCos. If you look at that interiors business, you'll see the revenue. This doesn't change any numbers. This is purely the way that we have reported it. But the revenue for 2022 would have been GBP 566 million. The EBIT margin in UK interiors, 0.8%. So as I said earlier, clearly recognizing that that is a turnaround situation and a business that we believe we need to significantly improve the performance of in the medium term.
The exteriors business, slightly lower level of change in terms of revenue. Its revenue last year would have been GBP 363 million, with an EBIT margin of 2.5%. But what that does spin out of those two original reporting lines is the specialist markets business that we have within the UK, which last year accounted for revenue of about GBP 220 million, with an EBIT margin of 4.6%. And this is part of the reason why we believed these particular group of businesses needed more oxygen to grow, 'cause we've actually got a starting point of higher returns today that we believe, A, we can grow in terms of scale, and B, we can still develop the actual returns.
So if you look at the far right-hand side there, what we're being very public about today is what we believe the medium-term EBIT margins of those three UK OpCos can get to. So in terms of interiors, we believe we can get that business to being a 3% return. Important to recognize, 3% shouldn't necessarily be seen as an endpoint, but I think from where we are today, at less than 1%, in the medium term, to move that to 3% is a reasonable and realistic target to give the management team and to have across the group. The roofing business and the specialist markets business, we both believe that they can get to a 7% operating margin in the medium term. And I'm very conscious putting these numbers out there gives you guys something to measure our progress against going forward.
It's very deliberate. It's very much part of wanting to be transparent and give greater visibility to what we have. And we will talk more about those specialist markets and the opportunities that that brings going forward in just a short while. But that is how we'll—we will report 2023. We will report in those three operating companies, giving, like I said, that greater level of transparency to each of the UK businesses. In terms of UK Interiors, just to remind ourselves of what it is, about GBP 566 million of revenue, number two in the UK insulation market, around about 2/3 in terms of new build, 1/3 in terms of RMI, and then split almost 50/50 between residential and non-residential.
Appreciating that this is the historic base of where SIG, when it was known as Sheffield Insulations, which by the way, the name was changed in 2005, so it's like quite a long time ago, that it hasn't been Sheffield Insulations and known as SIG, but appreciating this is where the group grew out of, and recognizing it's one of the more margin-challenged parts of the group that we have. Hence, we can give it greater visibility as we continue to drive the improvement in that business going forward.
In terms of what it does and where its products land, again, some of you may know this very well, some of you who are newer to the group may not recognize this, but in terms of where the interiors product is used, you've got about 37% of its revenue is pure insulation, being structural insulation and technical insulation in terms of acoustic, fire, and thermal. About 40% of its revenue is dry lining. Again, for those of you who may not know, dry lining, simply translated, is plasterboard and the accessories and metalwork used to hang the plasterboard within the business. And then general interiors in terms of partitioning, flooring, ceilings, and then, adhesives, sealants, and fixings, making up the other 23%.
But that is structurally how that UK Interiors business is made up, and that is very much part of what we'll be focusing on to improve that business going forward. I think the evolution of that business is quite interesting as well. Again, I know some of you have followed SIG for quite a long time, and before 2019, I think from a strategic point of view, there was an element of looking at this as maybe a centralized business, something that could be driven from larger distribution centers with a narrower product range. And I think it probably didn't achieve the aspirations and the results that was anticipated at the time, and it did result in some market share loss and a little bit of loss of focus, particularly on those local customers.
From 2020 onwards, when my predecessor, Steve and I, Ian, arrived, very much looking at reestablishing that sort of local market, getting more clearly focused on local customers, making sure that our branches were really important, making sure that our colleagues in the branches felt that they were playing a really integral part in the evolution of the business, and then rebuilding market share, and more importantly, rebuilding credibility in the market as a really high-quality interiors distributor.
And then going forward, we absolutely see that the process efficiency, as I mentioned earlier, product sales mix, margin management, looking at private label, looking at whole system sales, really important in driving the quality of the earnings in that business going forward, while maintaining and strengthening that local branch network and making sure that the colleagues in the branches appreciate that the branches really are the center of this business, and that is where the business will be driven from. And just to reiterate across this business here, if you think about the large UK house builders, around about 5% of our group revenue ends up in those large UK house builders. And that's just to reinforce this message that the vast majority of what we do is smaller, local contractors and smaller local customers.
But UK Interiors will have absolute transparency going forward, and you can measure us against the margin progress of that business. In terms of how we do what we do and strengthening the margin, then a lot of the areas that we mentioned earlier on about the pricing processes, making sure that we simplify pricing processes at a branch level. Historically, there has been some complexity around these pricing processes. We need to make sure that they are simple for the guys to understand and make sure that they are workable and deliver competitive prices. In terms of operational efficiency, this is where we get back to doing what we do on a daily basis and doing it really well, and wherever possible, using technology to drive improvements and to drive efficiencies. And then back to that point again about product sales, mix, margin, private label.
And I think what's really important for us is the position that we hold in terms of being the specialist in insulation and interiors, driving the refurb of buildings, which is obviously key in the decarbonization of the built environment. So Richard Burnley is the name of the man who is gonna be running the UK Interiors business. Richard, unfortunately, couldn't be with us today, but very much hope to introduce him to you at maybe one of our results presentations going forward. The other business that we recognize is in need of turnaround is Benelux, and you'll see there we have a number of branches across the Netherlands, and then some branches that are branded as Isolartec, which is a technical insulation business in Belgium. Again, quite a different mix to some of our businesses.
So over 60% involved in new build, but actually the split on residential and non-residential, a little bit more even at 45-55. But in terms of the new build market in Benelux, it's a much more important part of what we do. It does have revenues of just over GBP 115 million, and obviously, as we stand here today, is a loss-making business and one that needs to be turned around.
I don't think it serves any purpose for us today to go into why the Benelux business got into the point that it has got into, but I would just say, look, there's been a number of issues that have arisen over a number of years that probably means this, this particular business lost a little bit of focus within the group and certainly suffered from a little bit of a lack of leadership and clarity and management within the Benelux region itself. What we have done within the Benelux business, even over the last few months, we've got new management in place. So Bert De Roo joined us last month. Bert's got huge experience in our industry, huge experience in our sector. He's very well known to some of our management already because of the businesses that he'd been involved in across Europe.
He is absolutely, as far as I'm concerned, the right man to drive that sort of operational and commercial performance improvement, rebuilding the market position, and very similar to the UK in terms of rebuilding credibility within that Benelux business as well. The improving of the organization and performance, employee engagement, this is all driven by good quality leadership. And I think when you're trying to get a business turned around, the business itself needs to look at the leadership of that business with real credibility, and I think with Bert De Roo, we absolutely have the opportunity to do that. And again, and you'll hear this many times this afternoon, but managing mix, managing category, selling more intelligently.
We have got a very good technical insulation business in Benelux already, run by a very capable lady called Esme, and we see that as being, again, higher margin potential going forward and to help us to turn the Benelux business around. You'll see later on as well, you know, we're looking at Benelux with a realistic viewpoint in terms of where we think it can get to from an operating margin point of view going forward. In terms of execution, it was actually quite interesting looking at the working notes for this presentation this afternoon, 'cause at one point it just said, "Execute, CEO," which just kind of makes you feel a little bit nervous at times.
But anyway, in terms of where we were from an execution point of view, we do believe across the whole group, we have got a lot of opportunities, not only to drive market share, but also to drive margin performance, to sell more intelligently, and to drive the margin and to drive the mix overall. You'll have seen from what Julien spoke about, if you have the right plan, if you have the right strategy, if you execute it well, if you've got your colleagues involved, if you've got your team bought into the plan, you can actually achieve great things. And also, that transparency level of what we're doing with UK Interiors in separating it out with the opportunities that that delivers in terms of specialist markets, which we'll talk about shortly, and also the turnaround that we need to execute in Benelux.
All of those gives us an opportunity for being operationally and performance-wise, a better business going forward. At this point, I think it's probably appropriate to break for a comfort break. Almost exactly quarter to four. So if we literally do a 15-minute leg stretch, I think for those of you in the room, you know where the facilities are outside. For anybody on online, we'll have a countdown going on the screen that runs us down for 15 minutes, but we'll start again at 4:00 P.M. Thank you very much.
Okay, again, let's kick off the second half. So hello again. I'm delighted to be joined in this section under Modernize by Marcin Szczygieł, who runs our Polish business.
which she's done very effectively for quite some time now. And in a few minutes, Marcin will give a brief overview of that business, and more specifically, we'll talk in a bit more detail about the great strides that they've made in developing a genuinely omni-channel business offering. Firstly, I'll talk about how we're progressively modernizing the business as a whole, and on the opportunities that technology offers to help drive productivity. Productivity is a key plank of our margin improvement plan. After the progress made in rebuilding growth and momentum in the business in the last two or three years, I think it's fair to say productivity is now even more front and center in our thinking and priorities, and the use of modernizing technologies is key to that.
Modernization includes many things, of course, including e-commerce, which tends to be the focus of questions we get in this area. Also, within that modernization bucket for us, as I guess for most companies, would be digital automation and AI, which clearly has vast, albeit yet undefined potential, for us, as for most. We're exploring various technology-led initiatives across all these areas, but for today, we wanted to focus on the four elements that are shown here. So this shows you a broad range of technology platforms or applications that we're operating today. Firstly, what I've termed here, organizational systems, i.e., ERP and more standard BI.
In line with the more federated structure that we operate, each country operates its own ERP, which is, for us, a much more nimble and cost-effective approach than having group-wide platforms, as we've mentioned on occasions over the last couple of years. So ERP and BI platforms are upgraded or changed when required and/or when we can benefit from the latest technology innovations. In the other areas on here, I would say we're less mature, but very much on the journey with a great deal of opportunity. So if you think about the branch, for example, the core processes of a branch in our business, the levers that we have for operational productivity are basically about enabling us to push greater volumes through our network more efficiently, i.e., with the same or less resource or cost, which benefits the P&L and also the balance sheet.
So warehouse management technology, especially for our larger warehouses, is critical to that, to enable quick and accurate picking and packing, which helps both inventory and cost management and higher service delivery levels. Of our larger businesses, Germany and France have made good progress in their initial deployment and adoption of WMS. The UK has the technology in place, and I think fair to say, the opportunity to use, utilize it more effectively in the future. As regards customer-facing technologies, notably e-commerce platforms, they are, as I said, probably the most externally visible example of modernization. In some of our markets, our customer base is, is very actively seeking and increasingly expecting more capability on this, in others, less so. But whatever the current customer expectations, we have great opportunities to drive efficiencies and enhance customer experience over the long term.
Marcin, as I mentioned, will cover this in more detail. Finally, on here, delivery, clearly a key part of our operation, and we've made good progress embedding transport management systems within most of the countries. And shown here are some examples of that, all of which are improving the customer experience and/or enhancing our productivity, and often both. Although there are certainly similarities in capability and output, they're all using different technologies or processes as best fits their market. These systems enable us to plan delivery routes and vehicle loads more efficiently, and for example, they give, in most cases, customer live notifications about the delivery and timing thereof.
They help us to communicate with the drivers while out on route, and in some cases, for example, in France, can assist with measuring and incentivizing more eco-friendly driving, which has both regulatory and financial benefits. All of these applications and projects can vary cost-wise, but are generally quite inexpensive to implement, with good and very quick returns. In Ireland, for example, Track My Order, which you can see there on that smartphone, was developed by the Irish IT team themselves with our existing systems and partners, and it cost less than EUR 20,000. So now, you know, that's an extreme, but very positive example of how cost-effective these sorts of enhancements can be.
More importantly, that project, like all of these, has helped the continued improvements in our customer net promoter scores across the group. The key point in areas like this is that we can be, and increasingly are, agile and responsive, testing and learning as we go, improving our operations and our customer experience. So the businesses are all at different stages as regard modernization. Each country's progressed technologies at different stages, based on their local needs, and to some degree, their past and current priorities, as you can see from this slide. I won't get into detail of every green blob on here. My overarching comment is that we're solid on the core platforms, with room to improve and utilize automation over time.
So under the other three headings, you know, there's no cookie-cutter approach to this. We've made good progress, and there's great opportunity for more. And finally, just to comment on our group-wide internal KPIs on productivity, and how we think about the impact of modernization. It's not an exhaustive list, but it does show the key metrics we look at under the three main buckets we've just seen. So where practicable and meaningful, these are measured and reported on a branch basis, as Julien was alluding to earlier, others at regional or OpCo levels. We can compare and benchmark across our own OpCos, which is always meaningful and informative, and of course, some healthy rivalry and debate is always very productive and helpful.
Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to operating margin or operating profit and conversion of that profit to cash flow. Two of the measures on the right-hand side. One of our jobs is to make sure that those two overarching financial goals and the reasons for having them are well understood throughout the organization, and to ensure that everywhere in the business, we do have the right KPIs and incentives in place for the right people, i.e., measures that people can really drive and influence every day that help us hit those twin goals of improved profitability and cash flow.
As with much else that you've heard about today, I think we've made good progress over the last couple of years on embedding productivity targets and measurements, but with clearly more to go, and we'll be continuing to push that hard, over the next year or two and beyond. So that's it, from me for now. I'm very pleased now to hand you over to Marcin.
Yes. So good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marcin Szczygieł. I'm with SIG for over 20 years, and whole my professional career is linked to the construction industry and building materials, materials industry, so companies like Saint-Gobain before, before SIG. What I would like to present today... Here we go. There are basically three things. The first one is the brief overview of SIG activity in Poland and the Polish construction market. Secondly, the-- I would present the SIG unique omni-channel model that we developed in Poland. And thirdly, what opportunities are related to this model if we, if we, implement it in other geographies? So let's start with, with SIG Polska. This slide provides the snapshot of our operations in Poland today.
The map shows that we've got rather good geographical coverage across the country, from border in with Germany in the west, you know, Czech Slovakia in the south, up to eastern border with Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania. However, we still see some pockets of opportunities on the local markets to open more branches in the near term, in the future. SIG Polska was established in 1996 and was acquired then by SIG plc as a part of bigger German acquisition of company, WEKA. Since then, the company grew through greenfield branch expansion and consistent acquisitions. All acquired businesses were merged and integrated under one SIG name in Poland. SIG is a multispecialist with leading market position in key segments of external insulation, technical and industrial insulation sector, as well as interiors and finishing systems.
SIG Polska serves quite diverse customer base, mainly contractors, mainly specialized contractors, but also general builders, some big general contractors, and to a lesser extent, some merchants and OEM manufacturers, so original equipment manufacturers. What is the construction market in Poland? In euro terms, it is one-third, one-fourth of French or UK markets, but at the same time, it is larger than Czech, Slovakia, and Hungarian markets combined, so it's a decent size market. The specific of Polish market is the fact that this is slightly weighted towards new build, and this is a result of kind of catching up that took place in development of Poland after big economic change and political change that took place in early 1990s. This is growing market due to a few reasons.
In residential, we've got unfulfilled demand for the new apartments and, and flats, as well as increasing quality of living standards expected by by Poles. In non-residential, we've got all types of investments, so public, private, EU-funded, in all market segments, so offices, shops, hotels, education, healthcare, and so on. The latest trend that we see, that we hear about, is the trend for nearshoring investment in manufacturing in Poland. That means that big companies are investing more in our part of the world rather than Far East. And a good example of this, would be the Intel investment, in chip manufacturing in Poland, which was announced a few months ago, with the value in excess of $4 billion. Of course, we've got now, as you are, I'm sure aware, quite a lot of, defense-related investments as well.
Building materials market distribution in Poland, it's very fragmented. Majority of our competitors are small, local, family-owned companies, which were established late 1990s, early 2000s. What we see is that the market is quite price sensitive, but at the same time, the customer would like to get the best possible service. There is strong trend towards high-performance products. Mainly this trend is resulting from increasing construction standards, building efficiency standards. So you cannot increase the thickness of insulation forever, you have to use more efficient product, better system. Another feature of Polish market, which is presented in those three pictures on the left, is that due to our political history, there is a diversity of architectural styles, and our range of product at each branch has to be tailored to capture the local building mix.
So those examples show you some, you know, very historical building. Then in the middle, less historical building, which is the post-Soviet block of apartments or flats, and on the top, it is the built maybe three years ago, the philharmonic building in Szczecin, northern Poland, very modern... and our branches are delivering products to all these type of buildings, so our product range is slightly maybe wider. Overall, Polish construction market has a good mix of characteristic, providing long-term growth opportunities for us. SIG Polska is a multi-specialist with three differentiating principles. We are meeting customer needs locally by offering locally right, full specialist product range. We are developing globally expertise in sales, customer service, and logistic management, and we've got unique sales model, to which I will come back later.
We understand very well our role in the construction process between manufacturers and contractors, and how we are adding value there. And we understand well how we are adding value there. We are focused on recognizing our customer needs, so we listed, you know, main key criteria for customers' cooperation with distributor. And we are focused very much on being easy to deal with, which is one of the key criteria for our customers, to which I will come back again in a few minutes. And we are also building strategic relationships with our suppliers. Majority of them are same global companies like for the rest of the groups, of Saint-Gobain, Rockwool, Knauf groups, and so on. And we understand well what value we add in this cooperation. I mean, we give them access to thousands of the local customers, and we also can provide them with increasing volumes.
But what is more important, we give them ability to introduce new products on the market, and there is nobody better in Poland that could deliver new product to the market all over country. These activities leads to us to continuous focus on productivity improvement to ensure that our growth is a profitable one. So what our omnichannel model is? First of all, we put in this model experience of the customer in the center, as we want SIG to be as easy to deal with as it is possible. Traditionally, B2B distribution business, businesses are based on the personal contact between people from different companies and building trust in the cooperation over time. Some traditional B2B distributors entered into e-commerce by opening separate e-shop in parallel to their traditional activity. And in this e-shop, customer can order product.
Usually, those channels, as I said, operate in parallel, and in other words, you can buy either in the branch or through e-commerce, but not really mix those two routes to the customer. SIG Polska developed different and unique model, which is based, as I said, on omni-channel approach. It allows customer to engage with us through a number of different channels, whichever, whenever is most convenient for them. So our e-commerce platform was designed from the beginning to be an integral part of whole customer, what we call ecosystem. The e-commerce sales is served therefore by our branches, so it is not separate channel. It is served by our branches, and our salespeople can interact with customers through the e-commerce site. E-commerce customers can also then interact by phone, on construction site, or at the branch with us.
The e-commerce platform offers the same purchasing experience to them. Customer service support is the same, delivery options are the same, as well as individual pricing and product availability. But actually, e-commerce is much more than just a web shop. It is an organization and information hub for us and our customer. It gives customer many additional functionalities, like access to all the history of transactions with us. It gives them opportunity to monitor orders if they run different construction sites, so they can monitor orders and payments from all the sites they run, if the customers are bigger. There is ability to use the building system, which help them to calculate which amount of products they would need for specific project.
Also we can set, or customer himself can set in a system, different authorization levels for his employees as far as orders are concerned or access to the data. Another popular functionality is the fact that customer can download, with just one click, all the product sheets related to specific order or specific sales, which is very useful at the moment of commission of the project. So we don't have to look for those information and deliver to customer. He can, with one click, get all these documents which are necessary himself. So, as I mentioned, the customer can interact the same time with us in all the traditional ways. So he can visit the branch and collect the products, he can send us email, he can call us, he can, you know, use all the traditional ways.
He can be visited by our salesman, but at the same time, he can use the platform with the functionalities that I described. So this whole system presented on this slide is providing customer with kind of what we call seamless purchasing experience, regardless of selected sales channel. We clearly see some benefits from operating omnichannel, and some of them I'm presenting on this slide. So when we compare the omnichannel customer, which is a customer that buys traditionally and on e-commerce, versus customers which are traditional only, we see that omnichannel customers, they buy more products. The basket is bigger. They spend more money with us... They also buy more of our private label products. Our salespeople, if they use omnichannel, if they've got not only traditional, but also omnichannel customers, they are more efficient as well.
They can serve more customer in the same period. So these things, in return, help our profitability and productivity by driving wider product range that we are selling, including own label, better cross-selling, and better sales efficiency by our team. A little bit of the history of development of our e-commerce platform. So as you can see on the graph, the e-commerce platform was established in 2017, and it is continuously developed since then. As you can see on the graph, in the past few years, we grew both sales in traditional channel as well as in e-commerce. The e-commerce sales, as we call it, assisted and not, non-assisted together, in total revenue, reached 17% last year, and we are tracking similar, actually slightly level this year.
the same time, traditional sales grew, sales grew as well, and we opened some traditional branches as well in the additional locations. So actually we are growing both traditional and new channel at the same time. Since 2017, we have done some just small marketing of e-commerce site, but mainly through our branches and by giving omni-channel routes of interaction to customers. The factor that led to growth of the share of e-commerce sales has been the additional functionalities that we added. This has been generally well received, majority of those functionalities, as they were meeting customer needs very well. And majority of customers who switch to omni-channel, they usually stay there, stay there. They are not coming back to branch-only service.
To give you an example, one of the widely used functionalities, our product system calculators. So for specific solutions, is it the drywall or external insulation, the customer can just put, you know, what he needs, and the calculator will give him amounts and the, and the prices of the products that he will... he needs. And those calculators were viewed 120,000 times last year, so they are really, really widely used. You can also see that the, in the period 2020 to 2022, and the COVID supported step up from 7% to 13%, 13% of sales, we noticed, and we kept it since then, so it's sustainable now. The platform, on the other hand, now offers, and will offer even more, additional functionalities to our employees.
So not to customers only, but also to our employees. And by this, it will become kind of digital meeting point between our customers and our people. And the two examples that I'm mentioning on this slide is online offering module. That means that our sales representative can pre-make an offer on the platform, customer can see this offer, and with just one click, the offer comes to our system, confirmation comes to the customer, you know, much less work to everybody, you know, in the process. Another one would be electronic proof of delivery. Again, when our driver, the driver delivers product to construction site, he's just confirming the delivery in his application, and straight from this application, information or the confirmation comes to our... on the platform, to our branch and to the customer in the same moment.
At the beginning of this year, the decision was taken to use Polish experience and create kind of SIG omnichannel excellence center, and as a result of it, our omnichannel director, Bartosz, was promoted to the group position at the beginning of the year. The aim of this organization change was to use SIG Polska experience and learnings since 2017 in establishing e-channel in other operating companies, and use support of team based in Kraków, and check if the technology we are using in Poland would be good enough and is transferable to other geographies. There are, of course, expected benefits from this approach, and some of them are quite basic, like quick sharing knowledge, achieving cost and time benefits, and also the reduced risk of future projects.
Our approach is very practical, as described previously by Ian, and for omnichannel project, to be successful, there must be a local management, leadership, and local resources to deliver the project, while the central Polish Kraków-based team will give the support and experience. So where are we now? As we are standing today, we have very advanced project that we are doing together with WEGO, so our sister business in Germany. The project is actually run by WEGO management, so my colleague, Alfons, and the local leader, Christina, the local e-commerce leader. It has started by collecting local German business requirements for e-commerce platform and for omnichannel, and later comparing them with what is available on the existing Polish platform. The good news is that majority, estimation, says 85% of front-end functionalities required by WEGO are met on the Polish platform today....
Obviously, the integration with other local systems, including ERP, will have to be done locally and separately because we are running different ERPs. So basically, to show how it works, this is a Polish site, and this is how the German site looks like now. So not far away. Another project, which is being considered now, is e-commerce for LITE, our French interiors company, which was introduced earlier today by Julien. Again, throughout the evaluation of local French requirements, this has been conducted locally by LITE, and actually today, in this moment, the LITE team is meeting with Polish team in Kraków, and again, looking at French requirements versus what the platform can deliver and trying to match them and see if it can work for LITE.
Of course, there is more potential to come in other geographies when the time is right for them. To summarize my section today, I would like to say that SIG omnichannel model helps to modernize our sales system. This brings higher customer satisfaction, which is confirmed by our NPS. Omnichannel customers are happier, they say, and supports our revenue growth. The customer surrounded by this kind of ecosystem buys more, and our sales force is also more efficient and productive when they use the system. We clearly see development in the future, possibility in growing this digital meeting point for our customers and our people, and of course, in transferring potentially the model to other geographies. That's all from me, and I will now pass to Ian. Thank you.
Thanks, Marcin. So just very briefly, just to summarize this, modernization is clearly going to be key for us, going forward. I think, you know, by design, Marcin was pretty brief on his, on his own business today, but we're very happy to have what is a very strong business in what we think is really a, a very good market in Poland. In terms of e-commerce, we're leveraging what the good work that's been done there across, across the rest of the group, which we're pretty excited about. And I think modernization generally, as hopefully we give a flavor today, there's really great opportunities for us to continue to leverage those sort of technologies, in, in the years ahead. So that's modernization. With that, I'll hand it over to Gavin again, who will talk about specialism.
Brilliant. Thanks, Ian. We are heading towards the home straight here, so, appreciate your, your attention as ever. In terms of that sort of last plank that we spoke about, specialize and what does specialize mean in terms of SIG as a business? And I appreciate, and it's quite deliberate, you look at a photograph like that, probably doesn't make you think of SIG when you see a nuclear power station being built. But this is the kind of end project that our specialist businesses are very, very much involved in. And we'll, we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about that sort of UK special market in just a moment. But what I think is really important for us as an organization is to make sure that we continue to accelerate in these specialist, more technical, niche, higher, higher re-returning areas.
Just a few examples on one slide. If we talk about innovative roofing, and we will talk a little bit more about it in just a moment, but there is something really quite interesting, quite exciting happening in terms of solar roofing in France. If you look at our specialist flooring systems in Germany, we mentioned that Germany doesn't have a roofing business, but it does have a specialist flooring business. To give you some context, our specialist flooring business in Germany is about EUR 125 million a year of the German business is through that specialism area. Construction accessories in the UK. There's one really important fact I want to make here about our construction accessories business. Our construction accessories business is not Screwfix.
This is very much about specialist products going into civil and infrastructure projects, and I'll clarify a little bit more about that in just a moment. And then also specialist fabrication, which again, is about more niche, more technical product that, generally speaking, brings higher returns. So these are all areas that we see having really good potential for us going forward across the whole of the SIG group. In terms of the UK specialist market, which I appreciate, is probably the one that's more interest today, having separated that UK business into three opcos. We can really separate that specialist markets business into two quite clear sectors. First of all, being construction accessories, which is about GBP 78 million of revenue.
Again, many of you will remember the Miers acquisition that was made by SIG in 2022, and that construction accessories piece is really driven by the specialism that, that Myers brought into the group. Then the other Specialist Markets businesses is made up of 13 separate, small, niche fabrication and manufacturing businesses, which we'll talk about some, but we just can't talk about all 13. It really is quite interesting when you start to sort of peel back that, that onion, looking at the different businesses that we have, the specialisms, and the kind of returns that we can generate. We see within that Specialist Markets business, the fabrication and the manufacturing, and the construction accessories business in the UK, driven predominantly by, by Myers, both as being great earnings growth potential for the group going forward.
To try and sort of put a little bit of color around that sort of specialist around the construction accessories market, just again, a little bit like we did with the building envelope, but trying to show sort of in one picture, the kind of areas that we are going into with this particular business. And when you look at really infrastructure, and you're talking about transport, you're talking about power, you're talking about infrastructure, you're talking about the water industry, these are all areas that within our construction accessories and specialist markets businesses, that we absolutely get involved in, which is quite a long way from where you would traditionally see SIG with insulation for a building and also dry lining and plasterboard.
But all of those areas on one page, and by the way, the presentation will be available online later on, but all of those key areas for our specialist businesses as we see going forward. In terms of the kind of projects that we get involved in, it is that sort of public infrastructure, large-scale projects. The two photographs that you can see there, the one on the left, by the way, I appreciate as a picture, it's difficult to work out what a half-built nuclear reactor can look like, but that is Hinkley Point. And I think it's fair to say, and from a management perspective, we would say the group was fairly late to the party in terms of Hinkley Point and our construction accessories business.
But that is a project that currently now we are selling millions of GBP worth per year into Hinkley Point. In exactly the same way with phase one of HS2, we are now selling millions of GBP worth of product into HS2, and there's a lot of years left in that first stage of HS2, irrespective of what happens in terms of the second stage. And when you look at a project like Hinkley Point and the relationships that we're building with those core tier one contractors, stands us in very good stead for projects like Sizewell B going forward as well. But really specialist product dealing into very, very specialist markets.
In terms of that collection of businesses and that collection of brands, and I'm sure some of you will find the time when you're sitting just to scribble these names down and then sit online and have a look at the individual businesses and realize just how interesting they really are. But if you look at some of these brands, so as an example, across the top line, Ockwells. Ockwells supplies temporary protection for new build and certain rent renovation projects. So some of you may think if you go onto a new build housing development, you go into a house that's almost finished, there'll be protection around things like staircases, kitchen units, sanitaryware. We manufacture and sell all of that, protection equipment going out to new house builders.
We also have approval here from the IMO, the International Maritime Organization, as we actually have some specialist products that go into cruise ship refurb as well. If you look at the bottom line, Ocula, that is our own private label, partitions manufacturing business. If you look at AIM in the middle there, Acoustic Insulation Manufacturers, very, very niche business based on an industrial estate in Crawley, not far from Gatwick. Very profitable, great returns coming out of that business and something that is very technical, very niche, and quite different to what we do. Steadmans is an interesting business. If you look at the right-hand column, halfway down. So historically, Steadmans was predominantly involved in manufacturing steel-based agricultural buildings, which I think even in anybody's world, is quite niche in its own right.
But recognizing the skills that Steadmans had, and then you look at it and say: What else can we do with that expertise that we developed in Steadmans? That's a CGI of a gull wing canopy that's holding solar. We are now manufacturing these canopies at Steadmans because basically it's a steel manufacturing business. And if any of you are ever passing Carlisle and want to pop in and see the manufacturing facility we have there, I'm very happy to meet you in Carlisle. Actually, it's also got on the roof of the Steadmans building, it's got our largest single solar installation in the group on the roof of Steadmans as well. But we have got. That's a CGI of a large one.
We have got a real one at the manufacturing plant in Carlisle, and we recently started taking this product to market for the first time, and the level of inquiry, the level of interest is really quite staggering. We're also making the frames for ground-mounted solar farms. So sometimes if you drive past certain fields, you'll see a solar farm. They still need a steel framework underneath. So this is not about us getting into the sort of lower margin areas of solar panels in the UK in large quantities, but it really is about the steel frames, the canopies, the building work, the construction that actually goes around it. But really very, very technical, very niche, great margin potential for us.
In terms of sort of what we would term performance technology businesses, but driven by specification and differentiated by their technical characteristics, but really fabricating and customizing materials involved in acoustics, involved in vibration, involved in isolation, involved in fire. What's quite interesting about these as well, you might automatically think, well, this is vertical integration, and it's being sold via the UK interiors business. If you take a business like AIM, that Acoustic Insulation Manufacturers business, only about 20% of its output is sold through our own outlets. Everything else, we're selling third-party direct into the market. So these really are quite key standalone businesses and very much driven by specification and project-specific. So very few of these businesses are sort of working capital intensive. It's not really about making product and holding them on a shelf.
This is about specification, project-specific, and really building to order and really commanding a very nice return across the group. I mentioned earlier about some sort of innovation in solar panels that we've been working on in France. When I think it was the very first time that I met Julien, when I was down in Paris and started talking about this super lightweight, semi-flexible solar panel that we've been working with the manufacturers in France. It's about a quarter of the weight of a standard solar panel, which means particularly on flat roofing, you don't need to reinforce the roof to use this particular solar panel. It's incredibly lightweight, it's incredibly easy to fit, it's incredibly effective, and we've been working with the manufacturers in France in how can we bring this to market?
I'm sure if any of you talk to Julien afterwards, having a drink later, he will give you some kind of indication as to how big solar is for us in the French business. Even though it's growing from a lower base, it's still tens of millions EUR that we're selling in solar, and innovative products like this really play a part. We've also been working very closely with the manufacturer to help them to get the right approvals to bring it into the UK market, which would obviously give us a head start in terms of getting that particular product into the UK market.
Not every one of these ideas that people have around the world are always successful, but a lightweight solar panel is really quite innovative, and the fact that you can put it onto a roof without having to do strengthening work is quite a differentiating point as well. I did mention our sort of EUR 125 million specialist flooring business in Germany, and again, from an acquisition point of view, some of you may remember the group made an acquisition of a business called Thermodämm. Thermodämm brought more specialisms in this particular area into the group, and now in Germany, absolutely seen as the market leader in this particular area.
There's a couple of really interesting nuances here as well, whereby in certain of our locations in Germany, we can take waste polystyrene of a certain grade, we can grind the polystyrene into sort of tiny pieces, we mix that polystyrene with a binder, and then that product is actually used as the base layer underneath screed flooring. So you're actually utilizing waste polystyrene as an insulating material in something that is quite differentiated. It's quite a Germanic characteristic in the way of building, utilizing screed flooring.
But again, when you're talking to your customer base, and you can then talk about, not only can we bring you these specialist flooring systems, but also something quite unique and innovative in terms of the way that the insulation is brought to market, it sets you up as a great specialist. The barriers to entry in this particular market are also quite high. So having that EUR 125 million a year starting point is a great place to be. I don't know whether you can make it out, but the Thermodämm blower vehicle that's there on the bottom, it's a specialist vehicle that you have to have to use this particular kind of product. And in terms of barriers to entry, those blowers are about EUR 400,000 each.
So because of our market scale, because of what we've got already, it makes sense for us to have those and actually separates us and differentiates us from other people in that similar market. So in terms of specializing, one of the things that I think really can set us apart going forward is that we already have a very attractive portfolio of specialist businesses, and by separating out the reporting of the UK, I think this gives us real visibility and real transparency over some of the positive aspects that SIG have got in terms of growth in specialized markets going forward. We already have, in those businesses, a real depth of expertise and specialism into these different kinds of markets. And I think particularly in that public infrastructure sector going forward, it gives us something that is quite clearly differentiated.
It also creates opportunities in different geographies, where, you know, we're in the early stages of discussions with Julien and his team about some of these construction accessories in the French market, but we are already now, from Miers Construction Products, moving certain products into the Irish market that we didn't have the ability to trade in before. So it's not just about these businesses in isolation in the UK, they also bring future potential going forward. And it's really important for us, as we continue to look to grow the operating margin across the group, that these niche businesses maintain that differentiated margin profile. So making sure that we continue to develop and evolve in the areas where the margin that we can deliver is above the group average, and continue to move the group's margin going forward.
Certainly, those organic growth opportunities, as we mentioned earlier on, looking at some of the sort of legislation and regulatory tailwinds and what it means in terms of specialist products, we think specializing, being involved in more niche, more technical, higher returning areas, is definitely a major contributory factor towards moving towards that 5% margin target. The specialized businesses, what's really important is they really aren't driven by volume. They are driven by technical expertise, and they are driven by being a real expert in the market in which we do. So very much in the home straight. I'll ask Ian if he would. I'm sure Ian will be delighted to join me at the other lectern, because that one hasn't been used yet this afternoon. We've saved it especially for the CFO.
Just to summarize what we've been talking about this afternoon before we, before we sort of move into Q&A. Ian?
Great. Thank you, Gavin. So we're now going to summarize what's been presented and wrap up the formal presentation before we take any questions. So I think, certainly hope, that we've provided substantially more color on what will drive the group margin up to and beyond 5% over time. Firstly, I'd clarify and remind you that we do see 5% as a mid-cycle medium-term target. What that means in reality is that delivering on these initiatives would enable the business to sustain margin performance in a range of around 4%-6% in the medium term, depending on where we are in the economic cycle. I think it's also important to be clear that we don't see 5%, or indeed 6%, as a longer-term ceiling on our margin potential.
So turning to this slide, and the first lever there, and the driver is growth. Gavin set out the growth drivers that we see in the market, and our own capabilities and plans to grow in excess of that. In a model like ours, growth and the resulting operating leverage will always be a key driver of margin, and we think we're very well placed now to leverage our fixed costs and drive extra capacity through our existing network and infrastructure. And in this bridge, we're assuming an average top-line growth rate over coming years of 4%-5%, just for context, alongside normalized levels of inflation within our OpEx. Of course, if we can deliver more growth than that on the top line, there will be upside to that leverage. Secondly, under execution.
So execution of those specific turnarounds that are already in progress in UK Interiors and Benelux, we expect and are assuming here, as we've mentioned before, this afternoon, that both get to a 3% margin. Over time, as Gavin said earlier, we'd expect higher, but given the starting points, we want to be realistic as regards the medium term. Thirdly, as you've seen, the modernization that Marcin and I talked about is very much about making us a better business to supply to, buy from, and, and work for, and ultimately to help drive growth. But it will also boost productivity.
Whereas operating leverage is more about leverage of the fixed elements of the cost base, productivity clearly is about firstly reducing the more variable or semi-fixed elements of the cost base as a percentage of sales, and secondly, reducing the more fixed elements of the cost base where that can be done. On the latter, we've started on that recently with some simplification in the corporate center and the U.K. leadership structure, as Gavin mentioned, and both elements will continue to be a focus. And lastly on here, Gavin just talked about specialism. So gross margin improvement, driven by that acceleration in specialism we that he talked about, as well as optimizing mix, including own brand, as you've heard, and continuing, continually improving our disciplines around pricing, all will be key drivers.
So these waterfall bars show the relative significance of these different drivers on that 3% bridge from 2 to 5. We don't think it makes sense to publish specific numbers for each, given the time frames involved and the inherent variability in some of them. But as you can see, they all contribute meaningfully. All of these elements are distinctly achievable in our view. So that's the bridge to the 5% and now Gavin will talk about how things break down for each business and then wrap things up.
I think it's important that we recognize that to get to a 5% group margin target, there's got to be a structure that actually makes sense across the individual OpCos when you've got a business that's sort of decentralized and federated in the way that we have. So what we've done is, with the individual management teams, is agreed what what their medium-term EBIT target should be within each of those businesses. And this is a huge level of transparency in terms of where we are, 'cause we very clearly recognize that you can measure us against this going forward in terms of progress, but that is exactly what we wanted to do this afternoon. And you can see there that quite clearly, we've got some businesses that we believe up around that 6%-7% operating margin level.
As we've said about businesses like Benelux, businesses like UK Interiors, getting to 3%, we think, would be a reasonable and sensible stepping stone. But overall, if we can move from where those margins were in the first half of 2023 over the medium term to those margin targets on the right-hand side, that will enable us to get the group to a 5% margin level. And as Ian said earlier on, that 5% margin level, transformational in terms of the profit generated across the group, but also the cash that would come in on the back of that. So I think in terms of an overall summary of this afternoon, and it's, you know, it's interesting, sort of two and three-quarter hours, I think has, like, rapidly gone by.
But if I can summarize a few thoughts just to take away with you. What do we think about SIG? A differentiated pan-European specialist distribution business with some elements by giving greater transparency that probably weren't appreciated before. Great market positions, and if you look at the geographies in which we operate, we're in really strong positions, basically in the top two or three of all of the markets in which we operate. And we do believe that in the medium term, there are structural tailwinds there that will benefit us as well.
Improving and increasing the operational excellence within the business, having that performance management culture that we believe has worked so well in France, and generally getting to a point where we can look in the mirror and say, "Are we brilliant at what we do?" Really getting to grips with the basics on a day-to-day basis. Making sure that productivity and modernization stays high on the agenda. Productivity can come in a number of different ways, but utilizing technology, thinking about the way that Marcin talked about his omni-channel offering and the increased spend you get from the customers, the increased loyalty you get from the customers, but really looking at modernization and productivity across the group for those efficiency gains.
And then, as I talked a moment ago, about specialization, but really focusing on growth areas where we believe there are greater returns from those more specialized niche and technical areas, where expertise and service certainly play a greater important part than just volume alone. And we think that over the medium term, from a shareholder's perspective, that really does create meaningful value creation.... That, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of our presentation. Now, we are going to move into Q&A. I'm sure you'd be disappointed if I didn't have to tell you about the logistics of the Q&A and how this is going to work, which is really important when you've got people following on a webcast. So, I'm gonna start with questions in the room.
If you have got a question, if you can raise your hand, we'll bring a roving mic to you. If you can give us your name and the organization that you represent, then ask your question, and then if it's a difficult question, I'll decide which one of my colleagues is the right person to answer it for you. So as a starting point, will you just come down the middle of the aisle here with the microphone, please? Thank you.
Charlie Campbell at Liberum. Just one question to start with, please. On the UK Interiors business, 0.8% margin and target is 3%. What happens to the margin if you get kind of all the branches performing in line with the best performing branch? Is that the sort of the number you're looking at? Is there a wide range of performance amongst the branches, or is it more than that?
No, there is a wide range. And with some of the branches are turning over a few GBP million, and some of the branches are turning over tens of GBP millions. So there is quite a spread. And I think UK Interiors, in particular, it's, we think 3% is a reasonable place to aim for. I don't necessarily see 3% as an endpoint in that business. So it's not just a case of equating all of the margins to the best one, and do you get to 3%? Technically, you would get to a higher number there, Charlie.
But I think we just need to work our way through where we are, and from an overall point of getting the group to 5%, if we get that UK Interiors business to 3%, then it's playing its part in moving the group to 5%. But there is quite a wide variance of performance levels, but driven primarily by a really wide level of turnover levels as well. I think, Ainsley, just in front there.
Thanks. Aynsley Lammin from Investec. I think I've got three, actually, if I could just go through them. First of all, obviously, operational leverage on the upside for volumes. Can you just give us an idea of where volumes are relative to, you know, pre-pandemic or normal year? It's quite a diverse group, so interested to see where they are. Secondly, just in the UK, the three OpCos, how independent are they? Are they sharing the same branch? I know you mentioned 20%. Is, was that across the whole specialist, but you've split out that GBP 200-odd million, or are they actually very separate with, you know, separate branches, et cetera? And then, thirdly, you mentioned the federated nature of the, the group. I mean, just interested, how much synergy is there across the different businesses?
Could they all get to those target medium-term margins without belonging to SIG? Interested in how the kind of group benefits work.
Okay.
Thanks.
I'll work backwards to the point where I'll let Ian answer the question on volumes at the end, and I'll start with your question number three and work backwards from it. So I think in terms of synergies, I think there's two different ways of looking at synergies, Ainsley. One is, well, is there a pure financial synergy? If you look at our supplier base, is there something that we can do there with regard to purchasing terms, with regards to the way that we actually buy? And I think most people would recognise that getting those international purchasing synergies is really quite difficult. However, it does strengthen the relationship we have with that supplier base. So I think from a purely financial point of view, there is a level of synergy, but it's not something that is transformational.
What I do think we get a benefit from in terms of synergies, and back to your point about, would they, would they get there without being part of SIG, in particular, when you think about... We talked about Julien and those, those really innovative solar products, getting those into our UK business, that wouldn't happen if it wasn't part of SIG. If you think about when Martin spoke about the omni-channel business that we do in Poland, transferring that into Germany, transferring that into LITE, then that's all part of that sort of synergy base. So I think you've got to look beyond synergies as just being a number. You've actually got to look and say: What value are we bringing to the different parts of the group by looking at where we do things really well and taking those examples forward?
In terms of the three UK OpCos, three quite different customer bases, so in terms of roofers, interiors, and construction accessories in the special market. So from a point of view of we've got three managing directors and predominantly three separate customer bases, and in the vast majority of cases, they are separate branches. So when you look at, say, Myers Construction Products, it was an acquisition. Myers had its own branches. There are a small number of the SIG Interiors business in the UK that have almost like a subset of construction accessories within them. But primarily, we think there's value to be had across the larger contractors and on the infrastructure projects, but it is pretty much three separate businesses, three separate MDs, and three separate sets of customers.
Just on the first one, Ainsley. Very broadly, group wide, about... It's obviously moving as we speak, but broadly flat sort of versus pre-pandemic, and obviously within that, there's some moving parts. It varies a bit by geography. I would say broadly, things sort of net, net went up a bit and obviously have come down a bit this year. But broadly speaking, it's flat in terms of overall volumes versus pre, pre-pandemic.
We've got a microphone just right the way down the front there, Steven.
Thanks. Steven Sheridan from Applied Value. Gavin, you've been about here about nine months. Could you just... I was very interested in what's going on in Poland. If I go to other distribution meetings like this, there's a lot of emphasis on IT. IT, both as a means of efficiency and as a means of selling and a means of differentiation and a means of support for your sales teams.
Are you content with what you've seen so far in SIG? Are you content with the rate of progress that you believe you can make, and the rate of differentiation that IT developments might give you? Because it, that hasn't been the same degree of emphasis today that I've seen in others. And just one related question, there are some online-only building materials distribution people, but who you're far more familiar than anybody else in this room, I'm sure. Would you do order fulfillment on their behalf? Would you? Do you? And is that something that you would see as being able to replace if you are doing it? So-
Crikey! That's a.. Yeah, it's a good question. So in terms of, like, pace, in terms of what I've seen and have we got the right momentum in the business? Look, across most businesses, most CEOs would stand here and say, "Look, it'd be great if we could just go harder, faster, quicker, cheaper, more." But I think from what I've seen, the reaction I've had from the management team, we've made really good progress in the nine months that I've been here. And what I think, what the guys have really helped me to do is to understand what we've got.
I think what was really important coming in as a new CEO is really understand what we've got, so that we can make really good, informed decisions and informed choices on businesses, on people, on structure, on how we take the business forward. I think, one of the first people that I met when I came in was a guy that Marcin mentioned, who's a guy called Bartosz, who really drove that omni-channel development within the Polish business. It's a very, very quick decision to say, "Well, Bartosz having a broader group role," because when we were talking to Valerie, who's the Managing Director in Leeds, who reports into Julien, she was saying, "I've got customers who are now asking me, 'What can we do from a portal perspective?'
What can we do from an e-commerce perspective?'" Which I don't think had really happened before. So I think a lot of what we've been doing and that development driven by technology, I think we're actually making really good progress. And flipping the end of this year to the beginning of next year, but sort of like very end of 2023, beginning of 2024, we will have those systems live in France and in Germany, as well as in Poland. So I think we are making really good progress there, but driven by what the customers want.
One of the benefits that we have, of course, in having separate ERPs across the group, and there's swings and roundabouts on that as well, but we're not sort of driven by, you know, every three or four years, the whole group has to have a refresh in terms of ERP systems as well. So we can actually pick and choose where we do that development based on the fact that their ERPs are in good shape, that they're well invested. We've generally got pretty good systems across the group. And I would say from a, from an information point of view, there's nothing that I've asked for since I came, that I haven't been able to get, and that is actually really good.
Some of it is down to consolidation in the center, and we've got some of the guys in the room today who work on that. But in terms of management information, everything that I have wanted, I've been able to get. So I think from where we are when I came in in February to where we are today, I think there's a lot of very good decisions been made, but importantly, I think well-informed decisions, and I think we're in the right place. In terms of fulfillment on internet only, it's very small, and I think one of the things from... You'll pick up from, you know, the conversations that we've had today, hopefully conversations that we'll have upstairs, this is driven by: Where can we make the margin?
Where can we get a differentiated margin, rather than just doing more volume? There is a slight issue in some of those fulfillment businesses, where it can be relatively low margin. You've got transport costs, you've got logistics costs. Doesn't always give you the level of differentiated margin that we would want going forward. We come all the way down the front to Kirsten.
Brilliant. Thank you. Christen Hjorth from Numis. Two questions from me. First of all, on the UK, is there sort of any particular structural reason or challenge that it might be more difficult to get to target margins? And I'm thinking maybe the Interiors business, particularly, where that starting point is. And then second, just for Ian, I know there's 1.5x leverage is the target over the medium term. I suppose if I look back, you know, SIG's earnings have been quite volatile, so just sort of trying to understand why 1.5x on a sort of normalized basis is the right number. Thanks.
Do you want to go?
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Kirsten. So I mean, so it's 1.5 on a pre IFRS 16, 2.5, 2.5 post. You know, we think that - we still think that's the right number. I think we've kind of explained why we are where we are. I think that's sort of fairly, fairly clear. You know, we've got lots of room, et cetera, from a, from a kind of leverage perspective. So we want, you know, we want to get that down. Now, clearly, you know, the market's variable, that the, you know, our earnings this year are going to be lower than last year. But, you know, we've got, we've got room. I think as we look forward, we don't, you know, we, we will keep a very close eye on that.
You know, we manage, you know, we manage the balance sheet very carefully and diligently. And we'll, you know, we'll see what the market, you know, looks like next year. But, you know, we, we don't, we don't have concerns on that front, and we think 2.5 is still absolutely the right, the right target.
Just in terms of your margin targets, and do I think things will be structurally more difficult? I mean, operationally, there are some different challenges in different businesses, but that is why we've got different margin targets. So, you know, to get the group to 5%, you know, we feel very confident about France getting to 7%, but that's why we set the 3% target in terms of UK Interiors. So it's why there just isn't a blanket 5% target, 'cause we do recognise you've got different challenges, the businesses are at different points of their evolution, and different gross margin structures as well across different geographies and product groups. So I suppose the short answer to your question is yes, but that's why we've got different margin targets across the opco that build towards the overall 5%.
We got a Clyde? Is it Clyde? Difficult with the lights on.
Yeah, Clyde Lewis at Peel Hunt. You very kindly put those margin targets up by sort of business unit. It'd be fascinating to get some sort of idea of how much variation there is in terms of return on capital. Because obviously, you know, margins times asset turn is going to give us-
Yeah
that sort of, that very important metric as well, and clearly, the implication for sort of working capital, following up on Christian's question, I suppose, in terms of the cash flow, you know, are you going to have to put, you know, chunks more capital into some of those 3% margin business rather than 7% margin businesses? Obviously, has an implication for that. The other sort of questioning area really was around M&A. I suppose where are you in terms of your thoughts, thought processes? I mean, obviously, the multiples have gone up. We can see quite a few sort of holes in some areas, less so in others. Clearly, you're excited by the opportunities in construction accessories.
So, it'd be useful to sort of understand your, I suppose, your appetite, but bearing in mind, again, those questions around leverage.
Yeah. I'll let Ian come back to you on the ROCE Point. Just in terms of M&A, look, I mean, we've not made any secret of the fact that there's a level of capital that we can spend at the moment, you know, but until we start generating the higher margins and generating that free cash flow, we are limited in what we can do. That free cash flow would give us all sorts of optionality, whether that is returning cash to shareholders through dividends, whether it's paring down debt, whether it's M&A.
But I think what I can say to you is, it would be more likely that we'd be looking at niche specialist and sort of differentiated businesses in terms of M&A that would bring us something different, both to the group and to the business, as opposed to, you know, going out and buying another business that, say, just sold more plasterboard or sold more insulation. So I think there are some quite interesting opportunities. A lot of these businesses would be privately owned, so there's quite a long courtship in terms of getting to know them, getting to understand the owners, understanding the value that they can bring. But I think anything that we do on M&A, Clyde, we would be incredibly careful.
We set incredibly high barriers, but more likely to be sort of leaning towards those specialist markets rather than anything to do with sort of high volume.
On ROCE, I think, no, I mean, the short answer on the second part of that question, Clyde, is, you know, do we need more capital into those lower margin businesses today? Short answer is no. I think the, you know, it's really about execution and all the things we've been talking about today. In terms of the variability of ROCE, I mean, yes, there is variability. It, it's quite considerable across the piece, as you can imagine. It, you know, very largely mirrors the different ROCE piece of that and the margin. But UK Interiors is, you know, is low. I mean, Benelux obviously a bit different, making a loss today, but UK Interiors is a bit different. You know, the key driver there is obviously getting the margin profit up.
The capital employed bit is a bit more, is a bit heavier in UKI as well, just given some of the legacy sort of estate that we've got, and the commitments there. But so UKI, you know, much as in the margin, UKI is the area we need to focus on from a ROCE perspective.
I'm very conscious that people in the room will have the opportunity to question us upstairs. I'm just looking at my colleagues at the back and saying: Have we got any questions that have come down the phone line? And do we have any questions that have come online via the webcast? Excellent news. In that case, Mark, we'll take your question before we sort of break, break the afternoon up and move upstairs.
Yeah, thanks. Mark Harrison from Downgate Capital. Just to... You have to help me, I'm a bit of a thickie. Just, I'm just going back through my notes that I scribbled down. That specialism, specialist business, what portion of your revenue is it now, and where do you see it going by the end of the period?
Okay. I mean, if you look at the UK specialist markets business, it's about GBP 220 million of revenue. But then, if you look at other specializations, I mean, like in Germany, you got EUR 125 million of sort of specialist flooring business. So I think with where it is now, adding it all up, you're probably getting somewhere, you know, up towards that kind of GBP 500 million mark. But I think the shape of the group will change, Mark, in terms of if we can continue to grow in those higher margin niche areas, improving the margins in businesses like UK Interiors, but not necessarily by trying to improve the margins in UK Interiors by just taking more volume. It's about doing what we do better.
When Ian showed the numbers at the very beginning, you'll notice we haven't significantly changed the way that the group is put together in terms of overall turnover. We're talking about. We talked about GBP 3 billion at 2%, and then what GBP 3 billion at 5% might look like. I'll leave bright guys like you to do the math if it's kind of GBP 4 billion at 5%. But I think we do see the shape of the group changing, but I wouldn't want to get into specifics now of exactly what I think those specialist businesses could be over that three- to five-year period, but I would say significantly greater than they are today.
I think at that point, ladies and gentlemen, as we've got no questions online and people in the room have the ability to join us upstairs, I would say thank you for your attention over the last three hours. Really appreciate your interest in SIG. I would encourage you to question some of my colleagues, particularly Alfons from Germany, Julien from France, Marcin from Poland, and David from Newcastle. And I'm not, I'm not even going to get drawn into an argument as to which one you might find harder to understand, but, you know... Really appreciate your attention, really appreciate your interest, and look forward to sharing a drink with you upstairs. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.