Good morning, and welcome everybody to Elopak's first Capital Markets Day. Fantastic to see so many people joining us here in Oslo, and also on the webcast. My name is Christian Gjerde, and I am the Head of Treasury and Investor Relations. We have a very exciting and tight agenda for you this morning, with a lot of interesting topics to cover. Some practicalities before we move on to our program. In the back, left-hand side, there is a fire exit. We have a photographer here today, so if there are any reservations against being photographed and pictures being used, please let us know. Also, please make sure to keep your phones off. Before we start the program, let's look at this video.
More than a hundred years ago, the idea to replace glass bottles with cartons was first born. Forward-thinking dairies were already reimagining how to protect and distribute their products. In 1957, the patent crossed the Atlantic, and Elopak was founded. Since the beginning, it's been a journey of change, constantly redefining and reinventing the way packaging works. Throughout the decades, Elopak has been rethinking how to leave customers' products unchanged and the world unharmed. In recent years, they launched Packaging by Nature, aimed at reducing the carbon footprint. They reset the standard for an entire industry to make a real difference to people across the world, always with sustainability at the core. Today, the world is replacing plastics piece by piece, and Elopak is here to repackage the way the entire industry works. There is no time to sit back. It's time to act proactively with purpose and faster.
This is the moment. It's time to make it real. It's time to create real unity across borders, to influence the world, and to make real impact for the future. It's time to break boundaries. It's time to start repackaging tomorrow.
With that, I will welcome our CEO, Thomas Körmendi, up on stage. Thomas.
Thank you, Christian, and a very, very warm welcome to all of you here in Oslo, and of course, also online. On behalf of the entire Elopak team, I have to say we've been looking forward to this day a lot. Looking in the room here and seeing an absolutely jam-packed room, completely sold out, is just incredibly encouraging for us. We, in fact, thinking about another show, and one more show of this. It's encouraging because we will, of course, here be presenting to you Elopak, where we are moving, and also give you a chance to meet parts and some of the big global Elopak family. So to do that, I'm going to... We're going to run through, as Christian said, a number of points here, but let's start with actually the key takeaways.
We have three things we would like you to remember out of this day. Namely, we are already now the number one player when it comes to sustainability and carton packaging in liquid food. But we are now aiming to go one step further with this statement, because we are aiming to be the sustainability front runner in a wider scope in what we call wet products. Secondly, we are now aiming to become a 2 billion EUR company by 2030, and with that, also increase our margin level to 15%-17%. Then thirdly, we actually have three priorities that will drive this development, that will drive the growth. The first one is realizing our global growth. Secondly, sustainability front runner and driving, strengthening our leadership in core.
Thirdly, as you saw from the video, the immense trend, global trend, leveraging the plastic shift. These are going to be the themes that we will be dwelling into and explaining during the day today. Let's just start with the beginning. Interestingly, if you think about liquid food, today, in fact, there are not that many options when you talk about liquid food when it comes to packaging. Most of the liquid food we see around us will be packed in some format of plastic, PET, HDPE, or other formats. The downside of that is, of course, that the carbon footprint on that packaging is really significant.
Just to understand, if we compare the carbon footprint of a plastic container of some sort, it will vary a little bit between the plastic types. With a carton pack, you will see that actually carton will have somewhere between 60%-70% lower carbon footprint, lower CO2. With that in mind, it's of course clear that when we are looking at it, there is an obvious question we ask: Could we not use cartons in areas that are traditionally associated with plastics? That is the challenge we have set. Just a few words about who we are, so we are all on the same page here. We are absolutely already now in the business of sustainable packaging. This is what we do, and we do this by packing commodities.
Many of you will think of milk, and it's a very important part of our business, but that's not the only part we have. We have a host of different products providing nutrition to consumers around the world. But we also have technology and skills in our portfolio that actively can help us to reduce plastics and provide the world with alternatives. We are today active in some 70 markets. We're selling in some 70 markets. We are selling around 14 billion cartons. We are delivering these through some 11 factories around the world, and we have a very extensive portfolio, as I hope you saw upstairs, for those of you who spent some time there. Extensive portfolio in formats, in this field.
You can also see we've had a very solid development recent years in the business, and also you will see that we had a small break when we had Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, and we immediately left Russia. That's the gray marking on the slide. We are reporting our business essentially in two parts. We have the Americas, consisting of Canada, U.S., Central America, and Mexico, and then we have, we can call it the rest. We call it EMEA, which is Europe, Middle East, MENA, we call it, and India. We just put India in there as well. So the, we report in these two axes, and, in the total organization, we are just shy of 3,000 , around 2,700 people. So what is it we do as a company?
What is actually our business here? So we offer our customers solutions to cover the entire value chain, and very importantly, we have various models depending on our customers' needs. But on one hand, we will have filling machines, and we have the best, I, I dare to say, best and most hygienic filling machines on the fresh side, chilled side, and we also have aseptic filling machines. We have packaging material, which of course, is our consumable and will amount to around 90% of our revenue. And then we have the very, very important part of the services that enable our customers to have a good night's sleep, to have our filling machines running, and ensure that we have the high-quality delivery that we do have. So when we have aseptic and chilled, just to get that cleared, this is...
We have the chilled products, which are the products that needs refrigeration from through distribution. These are typically products which are processed at a lower temperature, and then you have products which are distributed ambiently, processed at a higher temperature, and also packed in different conditions with different kind of technology, so we would like to think, and actually, we strongly believe that we are a preferred supplier to this industry. And why we say that is that we today serve big parts of the industry with our products, and mainly in liquid food, you will find that around 60% of the milk in Europe is packaged in cartons, and similarly, 30%, so glass half full or half empty, you decide, but it certainly opens up a tremendous opportunity there as well.
Dairy and juice are currently the largest markets we have, but we also have a whole host of other things, typically, soups, food in various kinds, and also, very excitingly, the home and personal care segment. More about that later today. What is important for us and very, very significant part of the company's DNA, in fact, is the fact that we cater to different needs from consumers, different needs of customers. And we do that with our family of packs. We have three brands in the company. We have Pure-Pak, the world's largest and best-known gable top brand. We have D-PAK, which we use for the personal, the home and personal care, and then we have the Elopak roll-fed formats.
These are all split and actually organized based on segments, capacities, we have distribution systems, some chilled, some ambient, what you need. We have consumer needs, consumption situation, such as family packs, in-home consumption, on-the-go consumptions, or single-use formats. All of this, at the end of the day, we are selling filling machines, production equipment, and here we have a wide range, ranging from all the way from 3,000 to high capacity, 20,000 an hour machines. We also have a global footprint. We'd like to call it global. It's certainly very international, maybe not entirely global, but we have our business in the Americas part, where we currently have three factories, and as you have seen, we're building the fourth factory as we speak.
And also, we have then the EMEA part, with factories around Europe, in the Middle East, and also India. Together with that, we have a set of market units serving our customers in these regions and also our technical service organizations, serving customers in all of the 70 markets where we are currently operating. A widespread and a very, very important part of this business. I'm also very proud to present the GLC, and I'm doing that because we have a very experienced group, a highly... I would like to say, a highly competent group of people, and importantly, a very diverse group. We have a host of different nationalities, ranging from Europe to Americas. We have very large countries represented and very small countries represented.
We have a group of people coming from the industries of the packaging industry, the carton packaging industry, the plastic packaging industry, and FMCG at large. So a lot of a good group of people, and today you will meet some of them during this presentation. Unfortunately, not all of them. We don't have time for that. But you will also meet three other colleagues who will be presenting today, marked here in the red, in yellow, and I will, of course, present them when we get closer. Evidently, all of the GLC will be available should you want to ask questions. We're here for coffee, breaks, lunch, et cetera. Everyone is very happy to help you in that period.
Now, just a few words on history, and this is really about future, so we're not dwelling on history, but as you saw in the movie, we originate back from 1957. We've actually been around in this industry a long time. The value of that is we are extremely well known in the industry. We have a well-reputed company, and when you look at the timeline, we have, of course, a set of milestones, including the introduction and establishment of our aseptic portfolio, and all the way ranging up to 2021, when we had the IPO, which is, I guess, why we're sitting here now. The IPO, we, we'll come back to that, but today is, of course, another milestone for us, because today is the day when we are going to launch our strategy, Repackaging Tomorrow.
So I think you understood from the video that sustainability plays a very, very important part in our DNA, and interestingly, unlike many other companies who bring up this theme, we have been at this for many years. In fact, more than fifteen years, this has been the center point of what Elopak has been doing. And this, in our industry, this is, in some cases, required by customers, but it's also important for us internally to engage. All of us here are engaged around it, and we closely collaborate with our industry partners and very closely with our suppliers to drive the developments needed in the sustainability meeting the sustainability requirements. Of course, we are proud as well that we have received recognition. We have received recognition on anything from reporting, which we got the A plus now.
We have also received recognition from the global EcoVadis, where we received a gold rating, bringing us to top 2% in the world when it comes to sustainability. And finally, and very importantly, only this year, in May, we raised a green bond, NOK 2.5 billion. And the purpose of that is to ensure that we have the funding needed to drive our sustainability-driven agenda, the points that we are going to show you during this day. That green bond, by the way, is what they call dark green, and that actually means that this is the highest rating you can get of any green bond available right now. So, when it comes to sustainability, we were very early on to say we commit, and we committed to Science Based Targets initiative.
Those of you who have been following this will know that this is. There are three different scopes in this. When it comes to Scope 1 and 2, we have delivered. I'd like to say very well. We have actually reduced our CO2 footprint by 33% from 2020 to end of last year. We've partly done that by investments, investments in Montreal, where we have been able to reduce our natural gas use by more than 60% through investments in new technology. That has meant that we actually believe that we will reach the science-based target, Scope 1 and 2, before 2030, which was the plan we set out. We are very well on track on that.
When it comes to Scope 3, we are, of course, working closely with the big suppliers we have, all of which commit to reducing their CO2. So we carefully select partners, suppliers, who also share the same belief in the science-based targets. During the period since the IPO, and actually at the IPO, we presented our growth strategy, consisting of a number of elements. We actually had five elements, and for those of you who've been following us, you will have seen this slide a few times. We redesigned it, so it looks new, but same content. The thing is, we have five elements that had brought us to where we are now. It's our America strategy. You will hear a lot more about that later. It's the aseptic development we have, and here we have developed a new platform, which we call EMP.
We call it Pure-Fill. We call it Elopak Machine Platform. Now we call it Pure-Fill. It's the brand of Pure-Fill. We have installed machines in five different markets around Europe, so we are rolling that out. We are producing the machines and delivering on the aseptic strategy as we discussed it back at the IPO. Equally, we had the global growth. We are coming back to that point as well. And we had then the plastic to carton, which we are now putting much more fuel around and more energy behind it. We'll show you what we are doing in that direction. And finally, which has been a fundamental part in the development here, relates to the Commercial Excellence program.
That, for us, is a wide definition of a host of activities, ranging from operational improvement, reducing waste in all of our plants, driving the operational improvements through better OEE, reducing unplanned downtime, et cetera. Standard things you would do in a manufacturing industry has been the fundamental part in this, but also, pricing and working with a system of commercial excellence that enables us to improve our pricing and our way we handle pricing in the group. What has actually happened since the IPO until today? Quite a lot of things. Very importantly, we have exited Russia, right? We were very clear, we actually exited Russia, announced the exit at least a week after the invasion of Ukraine. This accounted for 10% of our revenue. But also, we have changed the company in other ways.
We were very dependent and on Europe to a very large degree. We now have a business that is way more balanced with a much stronger position in U.S., a number one position in MENA, and also a plant and a business moving in the high-growth areas such as India. Secondly, Americas, and this is... We're going to talk about what happens next, but we have actually increased the business and also changed the business. We used to be a converting plant, selling blanks to other filling machines, to customers. We have now moved that into being a genuine system provider and a solution provider in U.S., increasing our EBITDA from 35 to 70 in the period. More to come. Thirdly... We had a limited aseptic portfolio. In fact, we had one machine type.
We have now expanded our portfolio to more machine types in the aseptic line, the world's most hygienic, fresh, and chilled machines just launched in Europe, and also ESL, which is extended shelf life, a longer fresh machine type, also at the highest hygiene level available anywhere in the world. Finally, when we, in, during the IPO, talked about the Commercial Excellence, we had just launched it. We just initiated it. Now we have worked on implementing it, embedding it. It's simply now a part of operating, which has helped us during the period of a lot of volatility on raw materials, cost, et cetera. We had, thanks to this program, the ability to react and implement the changes in the organization.
We have changed, for sure, but the world around us also changed while we did, and I'm going to ask now two of my colleagues to join me on stage to explain how the world looks now, both compared to what we said in 2021 , but also what we are facing in the future. To do this, let me, I will ask Runar Bakken and Emilie Olderskog to join me. I would like to say on stage, up here, at least. I'll start with Runar, who will speak first. Runar is head of our strategy office. Runar has been absolutely instrumental in developing the strategy that we are presenting. He has gained an enormous insight into markets, into the competitive field, and will run us through what that means.
Emilie has just joined us recently, in fact, very recently, I can say, and comes with extensive experience from FMCG, from consulting, and even from sustainability related to completely different industries, really providing value into us, who are so committed to this field of sustainability. So, Runar, will you. I will hand over to you. Will you give us some color of what is happening in the market?
Thank you very much, Thomas. Now, let's have a look into some of the key trends that has driven, and shaped our updated strategy. Let's start looking into the key macro trends. So both in emerging markets and in the mature markets, such as Europe and North America, that we operate in, both population, and urbanization is expected to increase going forward. At the same time, disposable income is expected to rise. If we look at the mature markets, such as Europe and North America, this is expected to have a slight increase in both population and urbanization, while the disposable income is expected to grow approximately 5% points per year. If we look at the emerging markets, the trend is more rapid.
Both population and urbanization is expected to have an increase above 1 % point per year, while disposable income is expected to rise by 7%-8% points, meaning 3 % points more than the mature markets, so if we look into interpreting that into what it means to our volumes going forward, we can see that the emerging markets we operate in, MENA and India, is expected to be accelerated by those macro trends. As you can see, both MENA and India has a significant higher growth rate than the mature markets we operate in. In addition, MENA and India are driven by some global, sorry, governmental initiatives, such as the government in Algeria promoting aseptic milk, and in India, we see stronger plastic bans and plastic regulations, which we believe will support our growth moving forward.
In the mature markets, Europe and North America, the expectation is more moderate. We expect a fairly stable picture going forward, and that is driven by the macro trends I just mentioned. In addition, both regions has seen a slow but steady decline since the seventies in drinkable dairy. That is, a trend which is not rapid, but we see it year after year over time. In addition, we expect, plant-based to continue growing more than the rest of the market, and we also expect some of what we call plastic replacement shift. That is driven by sustainability drivers that I will elaborate more on very soon. So to conclude, emerging markets is expected to create tailwinds for our industry, while the mature markets is expected to have a fairly stable outlook.
Now, let's go into a topic which is very close to our heart, sustainability. What is on our stakeholders' agenda? Well, we see continued increased focus from all stakeholders around us. Our customers, or sorry, our consumers demand more sustainable products, brands demand more sustainable packaging from us, and they even integrate sustainable packaging solutions as a part of their branding and their sustainability strategy. Last but not least, and Emilie will run us through a deep dive of this very soon, increased regulations set new standards for our industry moving forward. Let's have a look into what the customers, sorry, the consumers, think about. Well, what they are focusing on is increased sustainability awareness. So the end consumers, 69% of those say that their sustainability agenda and their awareness around sustainability has significantly increased over the last few years.
At the same time, 74 % points of U.S. adults say that food and beverage companies need to take responsibility and cut plastics in their consumption. At the same time, 53 % points of consumers say that they will pay 10 % points more for sustainable food and beverages, including the packaging it's packed in. Now, let's have a look at what the customers say about this. Basically, what we saw was that the end consumers has an increased focus on sustainability, and they demand our customers and us to deliver more sustainable solutions to the market. On our customers' agendas, the agenda looks similar. They focus on recyclability and recycling, plastics reduction, and CO2 reduction.
Recyclability and recycling is seen as one of the key solutions to our global waste problems, and hence, the bar is raised on recycling and recyclability moving forward, so some of our customers and the larger FMCG companies set even higher ambitions than what regulators do. In addition, plastics reduction and CO2 reductions, we see strong commitments to big cuts moving forward, so what we can see is that our customers are eager to have more sustainable solutions, and they... We even see many of them integrating sustainable packaging solutions as a part of their sustainability agenda and responding to the market and the end consumers. Now, I think this is the time for me to hand over to you, Emilie, to look deeper into the regulatory picture.
Thank you, Runar, and good morning, everyone. As Runar described, the global macro trends with increased urbanization, population growth, and higher disposable income will lead to increased consumption. But with this consumption follows more waste, higher CO2 emissions, and depletion of natural resources. And with that, this has increased the sustainability awareness among consumers and brands, and given rise to more regulation. So as you can see from this graph, the numbers of laws, not only in Europe but also in the U.S., has increased significantly over the past decades, and there is more to come. So on the next slide, you will see that from a regulatory point of view, plastic is the big challenge that needs to be targeted. Plastic is associated with challenges when it comes to CO2 footprint, fossil origin, and littering.
Plastic packaging is also much more widely used than fiber-based packaging. Our society needs to make a shift from plastics to more sustainable materials, and in that shift, regulation is a powerful tool. In general terms, increased regulations tend to be beneficial for companies with sustainability at its core, and that is why Elopak is supporting raising the bar in terms of regulation. So let me now share with you a relevant example of new packaging regulations, the EU Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, known as the PPWR. Since it was launched in 2019 , the European Green Deal has targeted reduced emissions for Europe. Ambitious targets. And the PPWR is a key regulation under the Green Deal, and it's the most extensive and ambitious packaging regulation in history. Approval is expected later this year, and it will enter into force by 2026 .
Importantly to note, both details and targets in the PPWR are still under development, and guidelines must be established by January 28. Since the first draft was issued in November 22, Elopak has followed the development closely and will continue to do so. Let me just try to summarize the main objectives behind the PPWR in three points. One, to reduce packaging waste and to promote circularity. Two, to boost recycling and reuse, and three, to harmonize the EU packaging rules. We believe this introduction of harmonized packaging rules will set a new standard, not only in Europe, but in other markets as well. The PPWR introduces many important topics that you can see on this side of the screen, ranging from packaging minimization requirements to so-called eco-modulated extended producer responsibility fees. I will not dive into all of them, but spend some time on design for recycling.
'Cause it follows from this, that some packaging formats will be banned from the market in the future. Design for Recycling is therefore a key milestone in the regulation, and it's also reflected in the targets that we will disclose today. And the specific thresholds are yet to be finalized, but our assumption is that packaging must be recycled at a minimum 55% average rate across all EU countries by 2035. So in sum, we believe that the PPWR represents net advantages for the fiber-based packaging industry in general, and for Elopak in particular. Let us look at the possible implications for the industry and for Elopak. Let me start with the fiber-based packaging industry. Standardized requirements across all EU member states will, over time, reduce costs, complexity, and uncertainty. One example are the coming definitions of Design for Recycling.
Standardized requirements are also likely to lead to increased cooperation and efficiency, especially when it comes to recycling. Moreover, the new regulation is expected to be a driver for innovation in packaging design and investments in recycling infrastructure. Companies that lead in adopting the PPWR agenda are likely to gain a competitive advantage. No doubt, increased regulations will also involve some challenges. Let me highlight three of them. First, the carton industry will see an increase in complexity in the short term. Second, it is important to emphasize that there are still many unanswered questions, as guidelines are yet to be developed. Third, transition costs for the industry are to be expected. These could come in areas like redesign of packaging, recertification, and testing. For Elopak, this has been reflected in our planned R&D investments.
When it comes to implications for Elopak, we believe that we have a good starting point. Let me elaborate on two examples that underpin this. First, current Elopak cartons are designed for recycling or very close to achieve the proposed grading from the PPWR. Beverage cartons for fresh milk perform well in terms of recyclability, according to third-party assessments. Milk and dairy packaging and some plant-based alternatives are exempted from the proposed reuse targets and from the deposit return scheme requirements, and around 75% of our carton sales in Europe today are milk and dairy. We also have a lot of examples to show you later on today on how we are constantly innovating to meet the new regulations. Uwe will show you more of this in a few minutes.
He will also dive deeper into how we are well-positioned to meet the PPWR, and how we work across multiple dimensions. 'Cause we are now also scaling up knowledge-sharing efforts, and we have taken a leadership role in, within agenda-setting European industry associations. Elopak holds the 4evergreen presidency and other key leadership roles in industry alliances as ACE and 4ereverg reen. Our main takeaways from the PPWR: the packaging industry is currently a part of the problem and must, in the future, be a part of the solution. Significant adaptation is needed to be able to comply with the coming regulation, both within the packaging industry, but also with national infrastructure, with collection and recycling schemes. In Elopak, we are convinced that our cartons have a natural place in the future's low-emission society.
This leads us to our new recyclability target, that our entire portfolio will be designed for recycling at 2030, the latest, and this applies for our global operations, not just the EU market. Pending the final definitions of recyclability, we will monitor and adapt to be able to meet the coming requirements. Today's status is that around 70% of our cartons are already within the proposed grading of design for recycling in the PPWR. However, of course, our target must comply with coming standards in all our global markets. And with the innovation projects you will hear more about later, we perceive the 100% goal as realistic to achieve. Elopak welcomes a more level playing field, and we work across multiple dimensions to meet the coming regulations.
We have a long history of developing sustainable packaging solutions, and we are committed to continue this journey in close collaboration with our suppliers and our customers. So, Thomas, I will leave it up to you to wrap up these external trends that are impacting us and has shaped our new strategy.
Thank you, Emilie. Thank you, Runar. And let's just see if I can get this to work. There it is. Let's just look at how we look at this in a wrapped-up format. So as Runar said, the world is changing, but we strongly see that the underlying global mega trends that we're seeing everywhere actually supports our business and will provide continued growth for Elopak. Secondly, and this is, of course, very, very important for a company like Elopak, who's so closely linked to consumer and consumer convenience. The fact that the consumer awareness and demand for sustainable solutions are increasing is a major impact for us, and it leads to an increased demand of sustainable packaging in general. We see that. We have the figures for it.
Actually, you probably all of us see it every day when you go shopping. Now, there has been a lot of talk about regulatory changes, and I think Emilie explained it excellently when saying, "we actually support regulatory change. We think it's the right thing to bring the packaging industry into a more sustainable way." And our commitment, frankly, to in this field for so many years leads us to believe that we have a good leverage here and that we can. It actually supports our business and our growth moving forward.
With this in mind, then, of course, we say, "Right, what is going to happen now for us?" And here is why I would like just to introduce you to Repackaging Tomorrow, which is the headline of the strategy and of all the activities that you will be hearing about now. There are a couple of things that are fundamental in our belief when we developed the strategy, when we worked on it, to say these beliefs are fundamental in how we look at the future. And let me share four of them with you. Firstly, we come from a world of a very resilient business model.
We are in the world of resilient foods, what we sell, and we believe that, the, that position with which we described before is going to give us opportunities to leverage mega trends in the world. I'll come back to that in a second. Consumers are changing, expectations are changing, and regulations, as we know, are changing. It is the biggest change we are seeing in regulatory changes right now, being presented in an EU perspective. We have regulated around weight, packaging in various, various regulations, but never at the extent that the PPWR does. This has impact for all packaging in Europe. But we believe, as I said before, there is a host of challenges in this. This is clear for any packaging, but also a great set of opportunities if you're on the right side of the fence, so to say.
But we also believe that what we have seen, and Runar pointed out, that all the long list of global FMCGs, who publicly make commitments based on the demands from their consumers, from their retailers, will continue, and that demand is going to drive for more solutions in cartons, because that is currently the most sustainable solution available in the market. And as we will see during the presentation, we also see, and I indicated that at the beginning, that the amount of products currently being packed in plastics that could potentially be packed in a more sustainable format, allows us to say there is room to develop technology, and there is a lot of technology already out there. So we are actually pursuing partnerships and potentially accretive M&As, which can enable us to drive into more areas and replace more plastics in areas that make sense.
We come back to that as well, so we have formalized this in three priorities. And the main point in these three, that these three priorities will bring us to the two billion target that we have set, but the three priorities work individually, but also interlink, because actually they support. The number one thing is, of course, we are going to realize the potential we have out of the investments we have made globally, the capital we have allocated, both in MENA and India, and also in U.S., with the establishment of, with the factory we are building now in Arkansas. Our main priority is to ensure that we get the full benefit out of the investments made in that, in those areas. That is number one priority.
We have a very strong core business, and we are going to see what that means for us, but we are going to expand our market share in Europe. We come from a very strong market share in fresh, but we believe that with our portfolio and our development, as you will see, we're going to strengthen that even further based on the innovations in sustainability that Emilie alluded to just before. There will be regulations, and for those who do not meet the regulations, they will be out of the market, essentially. The third one is this immense Plastic to Carton replacement shift. We call it Plastic to Carton, P2C.
It is a plastic replacement shift that we see in a host of other areas outside of our traditional areas, such as plastic cups for yogurts, such as, soups and sauces currently packed in plastics, home and personal care, that we'll hear more about, et cetera, et cetera, so these are new areas with immense potential that we are very interested in, addressing in the, plastic replacement shift part of our strategy, so we are now going to spend some time on looking into each of these in a deeper way, and I'm going to ask our parts of the organization here, my colleagues, to present to you how we look at this and what we are going to do. But first things first, and that is we will just have a cup of coffee. Ten minutes coffee. So... pretty exact ten minutes.
Maybe not really. Welcome back, and I will start with apologizing here because I understand that it's pretty hot at the back end of the room. So to be honest, we have been a little bit overwhelmed with the interest, and clearly the air condition is also overwhelmed. So it is working at its maximum, and it's promised to deliver, so we'll see. Right. So let's now spend some time in diving in what we call realizing the global growth. To do that, I would first ask our president of US of... Sorry, Americas, US president something else. Different time of year, but sorry, Lionel. Maybe another day. Lionel, please, has joined Elopak five years ago, is absolutely instrumental in, frankly, the stellar performance we have had in Americas. He-...
Joined us from a long career in, with FMCG, global FMCG companies around the world, working in Africa. Exciting moments, he tells me about, about Europe, and also now in Americas. Based out of Montreal in Canada. As you will see, Lionel is actually part of the diversity we have with his very, very international background, here in Elopak. So please, before I do that, actually, I just wanna put America's performance into context of what we are looking at when we say global growth. Because you will see here on the, your right side, my left side, the revenue ambitions that we have for, the world within the five-year period and there appear, and you can see the impact of Americas. This is a huge opportunity.
You have seen an amazing delivery up to now, and with the new plant that Lionel is going to explain, we are putting even more fuel behind that growth. Beyond that, we will also be looking at what is the plan for MENA and India, and also here you can see that the global part of our business is, in our plan, expanding to become an even more important part than what it is today and has been traditionally. We are not, just to make that clear, we are not typically reporting MENA and India separately. It's part of EMEA, but today we are diving into it to give you a better understanding of what that means and where we are, but it's not to say that we're changing the way we're gonna report about it. First things first, Lionel, please.
Merci, Thomas. Bonjour! No, I promise that will be my only two words in French. So welcome to America. As you know, this is a huge opportunity for the growth of Elopak. This is a super-sized market, a $1 billion market. For the last decades, I will say that one player in the market has almost a monopoly by selling cartons, closure, filling machine in the fresh beverage industry. For decades, this market has been a commodity market, driven by low prices without significant innovation. For decades, this market has suffered from disruption on supply chain many times, and the last one has been the one with school milk disruption last year. For decades, I guess, that this market is starving for competition, for innovation, and now for sustainability. As my colleague said, the world is changing very fast, and America is changing, too.
Not as fast as Europe, but it's happening, too. Who would have thought 20 years ago that sustainability would be so critical? Who would have thought 10 years ago that America, with Tesla, will lead the market on electric cars? Who would have thought 5 years ago that America could ban single-use plastic? This is really happening. 12 states in America already ban it. Legislation is starting to put pressure also in America, as it has been mentioned earlier in this presentation, and it's going to accelerate those changes. Currently, over 200 laws are in discussion in America regarding sustainability. Elopak had the right vision 5 years ago regarding America. This is a fast-growing market for us, and this market is a perfect fit for all innovations that we have developed so far and using in Europe.
This is a market where Elopak is already a sustainability frontrunner, and this is simply a unique opportunity of growth for us. Our competition is not investing anymore. It's running very old assets. It's closing plants over the years. They are struggling on delivering a good experience to their customers. In the meantime, Elopak kept investing. As mentioned, Thomas reduced its carbon footprint significantly in America, introduced innovation in the market as natural brown board, as brand-new filling machine, and lately, there's a cap. This is our opportunity to shine, and trust me, we're going to shine. Today, our ambition is to offer a fresh vision to American market, a strong partnership to American customers to deliver a sustainable growth.... Today our ambition is to increase by 70% our revenue within the next five years, and to double it within the next seven years.
This is maybe the most important slide in the history of America. So American market is very different from European market in many ways. We have bigger building, we have bigger cars, we have bigger cities, we have bigger streets. Okay, I'm stopping here. So how could we leverage the fact that we are the leader in fresh worldwide, except in America? How we could leverage all the sustainability DNAs that we have in this market that at first sight, doesn't seem to be that appealing for sustainability? How we can leverage all the innovation that we have developed in Europe? Because this is a different market. When you're drinking mainly one-liter size product, we're drinking, we're drinking half gallon or two-liter size product. We have bigger fridge and bigger appetite, I guess. We're also a bit fatter.
I'm only in America for the last 20 years, so it doesn't show yet, you know? So here what you see is that in 2021 , this is the turning point of our strategy, and this is why we have such an acceleration, you know, in the growth that you notice so far. We are doing now the same as what we're doing in Europe. We are supplying an end-to-end solution, a global solution to our customers. And as mentioned, Thomas, that's the best way for them to have good sleep. We are supplying them filling machines, and we have been very successful. Within the first year, we grabbed almost 50% of that market. It allows us to supply all what we could have regarding our packaging solution on cartons and on closures, and it open also opportunities on the aftermarket service for mainly spare parts.
That's the best way for us to make sure that we are in control of, of that market, and that we can also supply all our innovation on brand-new filling machine, which is makes the introduction in that market easier. Back to facts. No sustainable growth is possible without strong basis. No sustainable growth is desirable without strong profitability. For the last five years, I will say that we have established a vision of growth for America, and designed a tailor-made strategy to build solid foundation. Strategy is about 15% of the work, and 85% is about execution. At Elopak, we strongly believe that it's all about people, and that's the reason why, five years ago, we ensure that we have a very strong team to be able to deliver on what we commit to and on our ambition.
Within five years, Elopak has increased revenues by 54%, at a compound annual growth of 8%, beating each year market growth. Our profitability growth, at the same time, is over 100%, delivering in 2023 a performance of 24% of our net revenues, showing how robust is our strategy. As I told you, I move in America 20 years ago, and this is exceptional. This is a unique story. But because there is a but, this is not a story about five years ago. This is not about operational excellence, delivering high profitability. This is about increasing our market share. This is about beating the market every year. This is Elopak's story about accelerating growth in America. Today, we have a good headache, or maybe I should say we have a strong headache. We have a solid headache.
We're at capacity, and still facing a strong demand for our products. So growth has already started, as you have noticed, and it's happening now by doing what we do the best in a market that we're leading worldwide. I want to share my excitement, you know, regarding that fantastic project, and I'm blessed, I will say, and I just want to thank the board of directors and also management at Elopak, to allow us to realize that project, which is quite ambitious. So as we're at capacity, what's more normal than investing in additional capacity to support our growth and our ambition in America? So let me tease you with that, with a quick update on this fantastic, this outstanding, this exciting, brand-new plant, state-of-the-art plant in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a $70 million CapEx investment.
That reflects on our ambition and on our potential in the region. This new facility of 350,000 sq ft has the capacity to double our production over the upcoming years. This is a unique opportunity for us to complete our footprint, to reach our customers in a better way in the US, with a very low cannibalization with our existing plant in Canada. This is an investment in a first line of production that is already sold out, and this is a project that will be delivered on time and budget in 2025. Just to conclude, I'm really happy to live in America, to work for the last five years at Elopak, because I'm in front of a huge market, where we have one main competitor, who I guess is not at its best currently.
This is a unique opportunity, of course, and as you noticed, a quite significant one. We started that journey five years ago, delivering over that period, outstanding results and today, Elopak keep accelerating by investing in a new plant in Little Rock, Arkansas. Please, Thomas, if you want to join us.
Yeah. Well, I'd like to join you.
That's good.
Thank you, Lionel. Thank you, and just a couple of thoughts on highlights here. Lionel make it sound very easy. Of course, it's not, right? It is technology, it is operations, it's all of these things that have come together now and where we are really making a difference in the Americas market. What is very important for us and has been determining factor, actually, for the last couple of years, with various situations on lack of school milk board, et cetera, that you may have seen on news, is that we are the reliable partner in a world where that has not necessarily been the case from other sides. We do that with world-class services, we do that with the equipment we sell, with the material we're offering. We are driving the business through that concept or that quality concept of reliability.
Also to Lionel's point, everybody here in the room knows that E.U. is further ahead on sustainability than probably anywhere else, but they're also interested in U.S. Trust me, they're actually very interested. To Lionel's point, quite a number of states have already banned single-use plastics. They have more regulations in the U.S. than we do in E.U. Maybe not federal, but more regulations. There is a tremendous opportunity also here when you are the front runner in sustainability. We have more markets and more global growth ambitions, and one of the very exciting investments we did in 2022 was, of course, MENA. And for Elopak, it is important to understand that actually it was new and not new, to be honest, because we had been in the region through a joint venture for many, many years.
So we knew the business reasonably well, I would say. Not like we know it now, but we did know the business reasonably well. We knew the customers, and it was very clear for us that this was a great opportunity in a world where the underlying market trends were good: growing population, growing income, high consumption of milk, high consumption of fresh milk. So a lot of elements that played in favor of doing this. What we have said as an ambition is to use our local production capacity that we have through the acquisition we made of Naturepak, and expand the business into more technology, more value-added services, and more high-quality solutions.
Now, and you should know that in MENA, this, when we came there, honestly, the business we bought was a relatively simple converting business that we are now targeting to become a high-quality solution provider. Why? Because it makes sense for our customers at the end of the day. Because they get lower costs, they get lower waste, and consumers get better products on top of that. We are going to increase our revenue to around NOK 100 million in the region by 2030. And today, we have taken this relatively simple business that we bought and added the high quality, high hygiene filling machines. We have changed the way we actually manufacture the material, which allows us to get...
Higher hygiene and allows us to get a longer shelf life, meaning in a world where shelf life is really low, in some cases, three, four days in an in-pack shelf life. We're now, with our customers, able to increase a chilled and fresh product to 14 days-16 days. It makes a big, big, big difference for the customers in terms of their waste, and it certainly makes a big difference for consumers in a way, in how they, in their daily purchasing. We're not talking about aseptic products here, we're talking about chilled. Extended shelf life, improving shelf life, reducing cost, and improving sustainability. We are the market leaders now, and we intend evidently to remain being the market leaders in fresh.
We also intend to, as we are upgrading our plant and ensuring that that is up to the standards required to produce things like aseptic, expand our portfolio in the region, locally produced in our plants in MENA, and then supply the, our customers in, in that part of the world. We also, on top of that, have an immense opportunity beyond MENA. Because for those of you who know Morocco, we all know Morocco, but from a supply point of view, Morocco is now acting more and more as the entry point into Africa. So we look at Sub-Saharan Africa, we are now currently supplying markets, as you will see on the slide here, on Sub-Saharan, close to Morocco and surrounding Morocco.
We believe that with a strong footprint, including the possibility of producing aseptic, we're going to see this also as an export hub in the period to come. Even in MENA, sustainability is a very, very big topic. So also here, we believe that the strong drive we have in the company will also have a positive effect in markets, growth markets such as MENA. India. India, we've all been very excited about India ever since we entered also here in 2022, and as many of you will know, this is a joint venture. We made a big effort in finding the right partner in joint venture, and India actually has developed over and beyond expectations for us, what we defined, if set in a plan.
We are now saying India, in the period up to 2030, will deliver NOK 150 million in revenue, and within 5 years, close to NOK 100 million in revenue. A pretty amazing, at the same time, still a very small share in the big Indian market ahead of us. We are, of course, there because it is with a wide margin, the largest milk market in the world, and it's also a market with a growing middle class, with a growing retail set up, and strong demands from middle class for modern packaging, high hygiene packaging, and a lifestyle that they've been used to in many other cases and places where they have been.
So we are now extending our position into supplying Pure-Pak in India as well, and we are going to do that both for milk, which is the obvious, but also in other products where there is a demand for higher hygiene, high-quality packaging solution. This goes for example, we see it in areas related to cream, some plant-based products, smaller products, but in the scale of India, still tends to become enormous in size.
We are also here strongly believing that a market like India, which is a fresh milk market, offering a high-quality solution with a longer shelf life versus the plastic bag that they're using now, which is a plastic pouch with two days or one-day shelf life, offering a solution that can go all the way, two weeks and above, is going to be very, very attractive, and we see good traction on that as we speak. So what are we actually going to do to meet our ambitions? We have, again, three. Everything we do is three. We have three priorities here. Increasing the capacity, that is happening as we speak. We are selling Elopak Roll-fed. We are going to do that with more capacity, simply because demand requires that.
We are doing that, putting our position in the market as the quality supplier in a world where you have variations at best, we can say. Our job here, our reason for being is we come with Elopak brand. We've been around since 1957. We are the quality supplier in that world. We are introducing Pure-Pak for consumers, middle-class consumers. It's evidently not a solution for the entire Indian market, but the middle class in India, in itself, of course, means hundreds of millions of people. So a huge potential market when you start tapping into this. Then finally, equally to MENA, we also see that there are opportunities to growth outside of India with the plant we have, which is a really high-quality plant just outside Delhi. Now, I mentioned it as an opportunity.
It's not our focus because we are in India. India is enormous, and even if we're supplying well, we are still very, very, very small, and even with 150 million in revenue in seven years, it's still a very, very small potential size we have. So we have enormous potential just getting the distribution in India, just attacking and supplying India with the plant we have. So, keys to success, really, in both cases, leveraging our production capacity, leveraging local production. In these markets, this is absolutely true for India, true for MENA. Local production is a key to drive growth. For us, it's about remembering where we come from, high-quality products, high-quality technology, high-quality services in everything we do, and differentiate ourselves between a number of the suppliers in both areas of the world. We want to be a reliable partner.
We've seen it works in Americas. Reliable partners in an industry where our customers are looking for a good night's sleep. You look for reliability. This is a unique industry. You get the milk, whether you want it or not, milk arrives at the dairies. You have to have reliable partners to secure a good night's sleep. So this is what we will say about MENA and India for now, but let's then have a look at leadership in the core, and clearly, for us, historically, the core is Europe, the core is fresh or chilled, and the core is also the hub of our innovation that you will see in many of the other aspects of our strategy.
I'm very happy to introduce to you our EVP and Head of North Europe, Stephen Naumann , as well as Uwe Schulze, who is our EVP responsible for our product and development. Some call it R&D, but it is the development organization. Stephen has been with us for a few years by now.
Yeah.
Is a very trusted and experienced in the Elopak organization, having worked in Europe for many, many years, and currently also now helping us to secure that we get India exactly on the right track.
Mm-hmm.
H as also joined us recently and comes with an extensive materials background, having worked in a number of packaging companies, polymer-oriented and carton-oriented, and always working on developing materials, barriers, coatings, et cetera, et cetera. So, warm welcome to you. Steffen, I'll hand over to you.
So thank you, Thomas. Friendly introduction. Hello, everybody. I will lead you through to the second strategic initiative, strengthen the leadership in the core business, or how I would call it, how do we grow against the trend and stay the number one player in Europe's fresh milk market? Core business is best characterized as a market with rapid changes. We have seen Corona, we have seen the invasion of Russia into Ukraine, we have seen a depressed economic development. But let's not forget, and Emilie was really detailed in this, we are facing newly implemented environmental regulations like the SUP Directive and PPWR. Emilie made quite a long explanation on it.
I believe this calls for action throughout the whole industry, giving us really some thoughts which we have to implement into the reality, and as Emilie showed, 100% recycling by 2030. So there is a strong demand from our consumers going sustainable packaging, so our consumers do want it. Runar has been presenting this to us. Why is this so important for us? We want to strengthen our number one position in the fresh market, and we are working hard to utilize these regulation shifts in order to give us a tailwind to grow. This is sustainable innovations, which we are working on, shifting more plastic packaging into our fiber-based packaging. As a sustainable front runner, we will deliver above-market growth. You can see it here.
We will, with the tools of sustainable innovation, recyclable portfolio, and our flexible system offering, we will grow from EUR 800 million in 2023 to EUR 890 million in 2030. So we have just been talking about the future development of revenue. Why do you think I'm so confident? Perhaps because I'm a salesman? There, you need to be convincing. No, but seriously, let's take a short recap of the past. Mature markets are, in the best case, stable, and we have been even faced with a consumption decline. Runar was alluding to it as well. Since 1970, I was not aware of that, but at least, we have seen it over the last five years.
We have had consumption decline of 1.5%, and still we were able, as you can see here, we were able to grow. The reasons for that is our flexible system approach, combined with our sustainable innovation and the shifting consumer preferences for environmentally friendly packaging. As you can see, we have started the journey in 2019 with a turnover or revenue of EUR 646 million, and we will land in this year somewhere around EUR 816 million. I know that Lionel has presented quite some impressive figures, but I believe as well Europe has something to offer. Now, to the question: How did we achieve this growth, and how will we achieve our ambitious strategy? One answer is with the help of substrate shifts. It's not the only answer, but that's one answer.
Looking to the screen up here, we see some top European customers which we have been able to convince to change parts of their packaging from plastic into cartons. I just name a few of these customers, Freshways and Arla. Arla is a big, not Danish, but Scandinavian dairy group. Campina, the multinational Dutch dairy group, Veko, and as well, A-ware in the Netherlands. Žemaitijos in Lithuania, Saaremaa in Finland. Sorry when I spell something wrong. This is sometimes very difficult to pronounce. Levm ilk in Slovakia are all dairies which have been deciding to go Pure-Pak, switching from either plastic cups for school milk and cream or one liter PET bottles for drinking milk. Tropicana Belgium and Britvic in the U.K., and Morrisons in the U.K., have been in PET in the juice segment and changed into cartons.
Finally, H2O for you in Finland and Waterbox in Germany changed their PET bottles for water, for the water segment into cartons, so you see, the substrate shift has been working quite in our favor. Together with many companies around the world, we will make sure that their brands are packed in our innovative, environmentally friendly packaging going forward. Now, you might think that the growth cannot come only from the substrate shifts. Now, that's pretty right. During the last years, we have been as well looking for sure to the opportunities in the marketplace, and we can see here three of the latest successes where we have been able to attract customers of our competitors, or let's put it this way, of one competitor, over the last years.
as I start on the right-hand side from you, Tolnatej, with their brand, Tolle, who has changed the entire fresh milk business into gable top, coming from our competition's system. And not only that, they decided as well for our aseptic carton lately. Let me, at this point of time, explain a bit how we always see the market and our customers. If we have a chance to work with potential customers, we are looking into, logically, the possibilities which we do have. Mostly, we are not dominating, but we are the market leader in fresh, and we have something really good to offer in fresh.
And there, in Tolnatej, we made it through the fresh business, convinced with how we have been operating the projects and convinced the customer that this could be as well the way forward for him in aseptic, and he changed his aseptic portfolio as well to us. You will see it coming to the market by beginning of next year. Then I'm coming to Hochwald Foods . Hochwald Foods has been worked upon ten years from our sales force, really ten years, to change the famous brand, Bärenmarke, into our gable top system in for fresh, for the fresh business. How did we manage that? We changed him three years back in the aseptic business. Honestly, we started with aseptic, so the other way around, like I described it just before.
We changed them in for the brand Bärenmarke from competitors' system into our gable top aseptic system, and after we have been really accomplishing this project successfully, the customer decided to go as well with the whole fresh milk portfolio, which is huge. Bärenmarke is really a huge brand in Germany. We are now seeing this in the shelves, and we are super proud that we can go every day, pick it from the shelf, and have a very nice fresh milk brand now. And that's very seldom in Germany. There is no brands, there is only retail brands. Last but not least, Luxlait. Luxlait is a, as you might imagine, a Luxembourg dairy, which we have changed now as well to change their portfolio for the entire fresh milk business and their brands into gable top.
So, now I need to read this a bit more careful, because these are quotes from two customers, which I would like to read to you because I received them recently. "We were looking for a system solution that was not only robust and reliable, but also impressive, with flexibility and intuitive operation. The new Pure-Pak carton packaging also significantly reduces our plastic consumption and helps to reduce CO2 emissions," says Daniel Berger from Hochwald Foods . And Attila Koller, CEO from Tolnatej, stated: "By delivering on production and packaging efficiency, Elopak helps us meet customer high expectations in the fresh market and keep pace with constantly changing demand for healthy and balanced nutrition." With these very positive customer quotes, I would like to discuss a bit about system approach.
Even so, Thomas has been going into it, but I have it in my presentation as well, so sorry, I to repeat a bit of this. The filling machine, which we have developed and which I will just focus on a bit later, the filling machine is an integral part of the system. The system which we are selling to customers is a normal project, is this downstream, so it's conveyors, it will be a wraparound, it will be a palletizer. That's what we as Elopak offer as a project solution. But the system approach is, as Thomas explained it as well, it's a carton, it's a cap, it's not to forget the technical service and as well as the spare parts, plus the project execution. So very, very important.
The integral part of this projects are our filling machines, and we have been launching a new generation filling machines lately. So this machine hit the market 2022, August 2022, to be exact. And the first launching partners of this new generation filling machine were NordseeMilch, in the north of Germany, very close to the border of Denmark. They replaced three filling machines, followed by Hofgut for their brand, Bärenmarke, which I was alluding to before. They have been replacing four filling machines of our competitors against four of our new generation filling machines.
We see further a strong order intake for these new type filling machines, and we expect as well a growing market interest based upon shelf life of sixty-plus days, robustness, flexibility, and high hygiene standards, which gives us, our customers the possibility to fill a huge range, variety of products for the cold chain. So, to sum up, I heard that as well before, "Our growth is based on being a reliable and flexible partner." That was said by Lionel. This is the same in U.S., by the way. So we need to be reliable, we need to be flexible, and we need to offer the most sustainable and advanced technology. To do this, we must continually improve, especially in sustainability and innovation.
Therefore, it's my pleasure to introduce Uwe Schulze, our EVP, P&D, or Product and Development, who will shed light on how we are advancing daily in innovation and how we are working continuously to stay ahead of advanced technology and seeking advantage of the newly implemented regulations and the regulations that will come. Thank you. Uwe?
Thank you, Stephen, and hello to everyone. I will present you now how we address upcoming regulation by leveraging our leading innovation capabilities. Emilie has already highlighted in her part of our presentation about the new PPWR regulation, and I will now put some color behind on what we are doing. First, we are building this on our strong Elopak organization and capabilities. Second, we materialize our technology and product innovations. Third, upstream the value chain, we build on our strong collaboration with our suppliers. Fourth, the same is true downstream the value chain, where we work in close collaboration with our customers, for example, when it comes to testing our new products. Fifth, advocacy and collaboration within our industry is key, and Emilie gave you already some very specific examples on that one. Let's continue with a quick look in our history.
We, as Elopak, are very proud of our long history of innovation. It all dates back to the year 1915 , when the patent for the iconic Pure-Pak gable-top carton was granted. By the way, the same year as the patent for the Coke bottle was granted. And why is our Pure-Pak carton still relevant? Because we have been continuously innovating. And I would like just to pick some examples out of this impressive history. So when we look at the year 1957 , when the Pure-Pak carton was introduced to the market, it did not have yet resealable openings. So therefore, the year 1991 marked a huge innovation when we introduced the patented PakLok screw cap system. So it offered for the consumer a whole new level of convenience.
Also, the cartons themselves have seen huge development and improvement over time, and since the millennium, we have launched a series of new cartons, where again, I pick just some examples. If you look at the Pure-Pak Sense in 2013, we've added a new feature with the folding lines, so this makes it now for the consumer much more convenient to completely empty the carton, by this avoiding food waste, and it makes it also more straightforward in the recycling. We look at the year 2017, we introduced the Pure-Pak based on natural white board. That is, first of all, another significant step towards lower carbon footprint, but as you can see also nicely on the picture, it makes the sustainability of our carton more visible to the consumer, and to the right, you see the Pure-Pak e-Sense.
That is the first of its kind, aseptic barrier carton without aluminum, and that was brought to the market in the year 2022, together with Europe's largest producer of juice and wine, García Carrión. The development of the board was accompanied by launching also new generations of our filling machines for the fresh segment, for the aseptic segment, and now also for the non-food segment, and Stephen gave some examples in his part. Important, we will continue our journey of innovation, further driving sustainability in combination with convenience for the consumer, and it all based on the iconic shape of our Pure-Pak carton. With my next slide, I would like to dive a little bit deeper into the core elements of our carton.
In close cooperation with our customers, and depending on the specific needs of the product our customer wants to fill into our carton, we address all these areas with targeted development programs. So let me start. On the right side of the slide, you see the paper board, which is the main and core element of the carton. Together with the barrier technology, which you see in the middle part, this forms a multilayer structure, which ensures optimum shelf life and keeps the product safe for use. If you turn to the left on this slide, you see polymers from circular feedstocks. These are now commercially available on the market and offer a sustainable alternative to polymers from fossil feedstocks.
And we use this new class of polymers in our development program for barrier technology to develop further alternatives to aluminum barriers, but we use them also in our development program for more sustainable openings, which you see center top. Everyone knows the tethered caps nowadays in the market. We are working on alternatives, as just mentioned, with polymers from circular feedstocks, but our program goes all the way up to fiber-based alternatives, like the Easy Opening, the PurePaper Flip, and fiber-molded openings, and I have some nice examples for you in a minute. Again, I would like to reiterate, all these development programs are based on strong collaboration with our suppliers as well as with our customers. So let me summarize our four focus areas for innovation.
Design for Recycling, which means every component of the carton, which we are addressing, needs to be compatible with each other and needs to make the recycling process most straightforward. Second, aluminum-free portfolio. I mentioned the e-Sense, and our innovation efforts in this important area continue, because aluminum is a finite resource. It's very energy-intensive in its production, and therefore, the more we are able to reduce it, the lower the emissions, the lower the carbon footprint, and the more straightforward the recycling. Maximizing fiber yield, which is, from our technology, the logical response to reduce plastic. In area number four, I just give you some examples, replacing the plastic closure with more sustainable openings, ideally based on fiber.
And now I would like to close my part of the presentation with giving you a sneak preview on some of our latest innovations in the area of sustainable closures, and maybe some of you have already seen the examples, which we have upstairs. And I would like to start here, this slide from left. This is our new Easy Opening, and many of you might wonder that what's new with Easy Opening, especially here in Nordic, it's very well known. True, you know it for the fresh segment, but this is now the first of a kind, where we offer this Easy Opening also for our aseptic product range, and this makes then our aseptic carton the most sustainable solution. If we turn to the middle of the slide, you see our new PurePaper Flip.
This is a carton-based opening, and it brings us a little bit back to the origins, but with a whole new level of convenience. So it's easy to open, it's very nice in pouring, so it avoids dripping, and it can also be easily reclosed. So that is a next step in the development. And then further to the right, we have this one here. That is our new resealable opening based on molded fiber, and it brings then the sustainability and a molded fiber-based solution with the convenience for the consumer of a resealable opening. Molded fiber, by the way, is a material you might know from egg carton, for example. It's renewable, it's recyclable, it's even compostable. And these three nice innovations show that it's possible to overcome the dilemma of having to make choices between sustainability and convenience for the consumer.
We can deliver on both, and with that having said, I would like to hand it back to Thomas.
Sorry. Thank you, Uwe, and thank you, Stephen. Clearly, the opening and closure part is of great focus for us because this is what distinguishes developments when it comes to making big, big, big steps forward in handling and recycling. We are leveraging our position. We continue to do that. What is also very important to understand is that we have a flexible model, which means that we can actually adapt to the wishes and needs of our customers in a swift and fast way, which is unique to us versus our competitors. And then finally, of course, we are, to Stephen's point, growing our market share based on our technology, based on our services, but also exploring the new categories, such as plant-based we have.
With this, I'm going to move into the third element of the three parts, and that is, of course, the replacement of plastic. Something everyone within Elopak is very excited about, and the one who's mostly excited about this is Dirk Endlich, who is running the team and the organization behind this move. Dirk has been with Elopak for many years and has extensive experience in North, German by background, but also in other markets in North, but also Americas, in Canada and in U.S., and he is now taking the challenge to convert all the plastic into carton.
Yes, we do.
So please, Dirk.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Thomas, and thank you for welcoming me here. It's a pleasure for me to introduce the maybe most sexy initiative and strategy of Elopak to the capital market. I've been here since, like Thomas said, a long time, since nineteen ninety-nine. It's a long time, and I was present when Elopak sold a lot of carton packaging into the home and personal care market. Customers like Procter & Gamble, Henkel, Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, you name them, did buy a lot of material and a lot of carton packaging in the nineties and in the early two thousand years. And it's interesting enough that now, 25 years later, we're talking to the same clients again. Perhaps for a different reason, but we do. Or like Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, "We are back." ...
So we talked already a lot about that, but, the liquid packaging industry makes up a major part of the world's excessive plastic use. The United Nations Environment Program, the UNEP, estimates that the world purchases 1 million plastic bottle per minute. So you can count the minutes of this presentation, and then you know how many plastic bottles have been purchased in that time. And only 8% of the total plastic produced is recycled, or to turn it around, 92% is not. And looking at the share of plastic packaging, 40% of the plastic waste comes from plastic packaging. And when we look into the coming years, the UNEP expects that the global plastic waste to triple until 2060. So what does that mean, and what is in for Elopak?
The plastic bottle market in Europe and North America is estimated to be 105 billion EUR in 2030 and growing. And we, as Elopak, see a huge conversion potential from plastic into our product, into carton, of 15%-20% of food and non-food packaging. So the identified markets for cartons are 13 billion EUR-17 billion EUR. That's a large addressable market. The longer term market opportunity for liquid cartons is 7 billion-8 billion. However, this is a market more difficult to reach, as customers are using flexible packagings and packaging that is more difficult to convert into carton. The more short-term conversion opportunity is in the home and personal care market, and in food applications that have a meaningful overlap with Elopak's current customer base, such as yogurt cups, butter pots, or frozen food packaging.
The near-term opportunity in beverages, non-food, and new applications is estimated to be at around EUR 6 billion- EUR 9 billion. So what is driving the shift? We talked about that. So unlike in the 1990s, today, it is the search for the most environmentally friendly and sustainable packaging that is driving the shift from plastic into carton solutions. The top three multinationals in Europe have increased their sustainability targets, focusing on becoming net zero, recyclability, and reusability of products. To reach their targets, they are heavily investing in introducing refill solutions, focusing on both refill stations in the supermarkets, but also refill packs. That's our business. Elopak's ambition is to build on the leading sustainability position and increase the sales of our D-PAK solution into that market.
Our target is to be the leading supplier of sustainable fiber solutions to the home and personal care market, and beyond, expand product portfolio into new areas through acquisitions and partnerships. We come to this in a second. Today, we already see the first movers in home and personal care market using the fiber-based D-PAK solution. It's already on the shelf. Within five years, we will develop the D-PAK program into next-generation D-PAK packaging, also for primary use, and target sales of EUR 60 million, plus possible M&A activities. In 2030, the D-PAK program will evolve into next generations and open up new product applications with a sales target of EUR 330 million. So who has guessed that in an Elopak presentation, we show such a picture? Maybe Dagfinn. Where is Dagfinn?
Maybe you might have guessed that this is coming back again, but I'm happy that we can talk about the home and personal care market now again, so the home and personal care market is estimated to grow 4%-6% per year, and the total market is using 27 billion packages per year, where the targetable end-use areas fitting to our D-PAK is round about half, so 14 billion packages, and product segments of high interest are laundry care, liquid fabric softeners, liquid dishwashing, mouthwashing, soft surface cleaner, and a lot of products more, and more than 60% of the market is in the hand of the top-tier customers, like, again, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Henkel, Beiersdorf, and so on.
All of Elopak is again in a dialogue with all of the fast-moving consumer goods companies, and did already launch multiple products in home and personal care segments into the supermarket shelves in many countries. Watch out when you're going shopping. You already find the first launches of these products in the supermarket shelves. Buy them, please. As mentioned before, we are already partnering up with the top-tier global players in home and personal care. In fact, we have been active in these markets for many years now, again. Some of you may be familiar with these three examples you see here on the screen. Starting to the left, this is a product from McBride. I just saw yesterday night on LinkedIn, the post from McBride, so if you are interested, go on LinkedIn, look for it. It's just recently shared.
A leading co-packer in the fast-moving consumer goods world, and they are using our D-PAK solution for their own brand, Surcare, and this is a laundry liquid. A refill solutions, what you see in the middle, are also something we already deliver. And here is a photo I took from a shop outside of Oslo, of an Orkla OMO refill solution. And with Orkla's ambitious sustainability goals and a focus on reducing plastic, there are already more products from Orkla, like OMO, as I mentioned, Blenda, but also Milo, put into carton packaging. And additionally, to the right, you might recognize it, Procter & Gamble, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, recently shared on LinkedIn that they are testing Elopak D-PAK carton for their Fairy Max Power refill solution. Great! Now it's getting more interesting.
So let me share some insights into our efforts to improve our product portfolio. On the left-hand side, you see a picture of an OMO carton in 1.5-liter. That's a refill pack, which is, as I said, sold in Scandinavian supermarket and already on shelf. The package is available in sizes between 500 milliliter and 2 liter, so from small to large. The first generation, as we call it, the first generation product, comes already with all attributes of a safe and sustainable packaging solution, using 80% less plastic than a plastic bottle. It stands out on the shelf. Consumers see it. It comes with all sustainability benefits of an Elopak liquid paperboard carton, and we started with this generation one already back together with Orkla back in 2020, 2021. This is our generation one.
On the right-hand side, you see more of a draft or a sketch of a preview of our D-PAK generation two, to be launched next year. When we are zooming in a little bit into the generation two, we can quickly recognize that this is a new product group in its own right, which is different from a beverage carton. It comes with multiple opening solutions, such a child-resistant closure, special pouring caps developed for the special applications in home and personal care industry. With this extra promotional label, and I put a carton here. With this extra promotional label that you can use to promote your brands in various ways. You can imagine that you can do a lot with this eye-catching space on a carton, which the consumer has the first view on when he stands in front of the shelf.
So it allows our customers to promote their brand and to replicate the shape of the bottle on the carton. It allows to create a brand-specific packaging. Requests that are coming to us are often saying that we would like to have an individualized package for our brand. Here, we have the possibility to do that. Again, sizes are ranging between 500 milliliters and 2 liters, so again, from small to very large. To summarize, our new Plastic to Carton division is currently engaged in multiple initiatives to take advantage of the market opportunities we see now. However, we have identified three main strategic focus area, again, three, Thomas, that's to which we will dedicate our attention to going forward. First, we are committed to continuous improvement of our D-PAK solution.
This involves close collaboration with our existing customers to refine and improve our products, matching with customer needs. Second, we are actively working on developing the next generation of D-PAK solutions, which are illustrated in the slide before. This involves advancing our technology and ramp up our R&D activities. And third, we are focused on expanding and advancing our product portfolio. This strategic initiative aims to introduce new offering in adjacent markets, broadening our range and tapping into new opportunities. This is very exciting, and now I hand it over back to you, Thomas, to give us some more details on this third focus area and how we will ramp up our efforts to explore new solutions for new adjacent markets. Thank you.
Thank you, Dirk, for this insight into the world of home and personal care. There's one element which we are very excited about as well. This is a new world for us. We have been there before, as Dirk explained, but there is another world out there that we would like to address. And that is, of course, this enormity of plastics you have in your refrigerator at home, be that in yogurt cups, sour cream, the likes, not the least, the spreadables, the butters, the margarine, all of that is a plastic business waiting to be converted into carton. You see the sizes here. All in all, it's a very sizable business, and it's certainly a business where the customers are asking for solutions. So it's not a push on our side, it's very, very much a pull.
Dirk mentioned it, and I mentioned at the very beginning, we believe that with our skills, competence, experience in the group, we have the right set to attack or explore these kind of segments as well. We know this is difficult, we know it's not something you easily do, but we also know that the technology is there, it is existing. The technology, in some cases, is very, very close to what we have. Evidently, filling machines will be different, et cetera, but it's something that we can definitely build on. So we are leveraging this, and we are actively looking for partnerships in this field and/or M&As where we can find accretive growth. And the accretive growth comes simply with a number of set criteria we've set.
Because we believe that, and some of the technologies in this field are exactly similar to the ones Uwe showed when he talked about molded caps, molded fiber, which merge into our existing business. So by our innovation, we will see that the steps we do in one area is actually fully synergetic to the other areas as well. We look for areas where there is a need to replace plastic. There are many needs, but they're clearly exposed to this plastic shift. We look for areas where we have synergies with our customer base. Clearly, dairies, the examples we mentioned before on yogurt, spreads, et cetera, typical dairies, food products.
We also look at areas where our filling technology, which has been a liquid technology, but is now moving into wet product technology, expanding from the kind of filling system we have, but we have the filling technology to do that, and also the barrier technology to protect some of these products, which, in the case of grease products, needs a certain level of protection that is quite challenging. With all of these elements, and looking at these parts in our... When we select the partners, when we look for the M&As, we do a very, very tough screening and constantly look for opportunities in this direction. We are convinced that they are there. We also try to make these accretive in both strategy and but also financial, if we look at the M&A part in this.
So summing up on P2C, it's very clear that what we have here, in this case, not three, but four takeaways. We are developing here a little bit. We were the first in the home and personal care market years ago. We actually have a preferred partnership position versus the big FMCG companies. We already know them. We have very good relationships with them. They are actually coming to us, frankly, for these products. They are in the push, or rather in the pull. We have historically had the track record of seizing the opportunities, and we have also the track record of delivering on M&As, delivering on joint ventures, delivering on partnerships, which we have done in the last recent years, and also previously on the joint ventures. So we think this is an enormously interesting area for Elopak.
We are hugely excited about the opportunities that get presented and also the opportunities that are still to come.
The modern world revolves around plastic. It's everywhere, in everything. But things are changing. Regulations are increasing, consumers are choosing more sustainable products, and brands are rethinking how to sell their products. With the D-PAK carton, we're revolutionizing how essential everyday products are packaged. Made from renewable and responsibly sourced wood fibers, it offers a natural choice. Designed for circularity, D-PAK is fully recyclable and provides easy opening, pouring, and reclosing. Best of all, 97% of consumers prefer it for refill compared to alternative packaging solutions. With a 360-degree communication space, you can stand out on the shelf and elevate your branding. Today, D-PAK is helping some of the world's most recognized brands to be more sustainable. Together, we can reduce plastics bit by bit, one product at a time. We call it packaging by nature.
Good. That was clear. So this is the time when we would have had a coffee break. However, given that we are just a little bit behind schedule, I would recommend, if you need to stretch your leg, let's just stand for a minute. If not, we'll just push on. I think we push on. And to do that, we still have, of course, the, for many of you, the most interesting part to come, namely the facts and figures here. How does this all add up in from a financial point of view? And let me just invite Bent Axelsen, our CFO, to the room. Bent has been with us five years. He also has a long career, international career, having worked in Asia, Europe, head office, market unit, financial functions, commercial functions.
So really, really a vast experience and has been absolutely instrumental in not only repackaging tomorrow, but definitely IPO, post-IPO, quarterly presentations, annual reports, et cetera. So great, a lot of work. So please, Bent, stage is yours.
Thank you, Thomas. It's time to talk about the money. But I will start with a recap and maybe start with a new chapter that we entered in 2021, where we all sat in our home offices and listed a company on the stock exchange. It's been a really exciting journey, and this is showing the share price development over this period. And as you can see, we have delivered really attractive returns, significantly above that of the Oslo Stock Exchange. We had a dip in 2022, where we saw the worst raw material rally that this industry has ever seen. It was followed by the invasion in Ukraine, which affected the raw materials even more, and we also had the consequent exit out of Russia. But we showed resilience, and we regained the markets above our historical levels.
While we were doing all that, we were still paying dividends equivalent to 50% our net profit. If you look at the last dividend payment, that was 1.46 NOK per share, while we also deleverage our balance sheet down to less than two in end of 2023. This is the history where we see a stable development on revenues starting to grow quicker in 2021. Obviously, we had inflation, and we had price increases that were necessary in order to compensate for raw materials, but that's not the only driver. Lionel talked about how he was taking market share in his market, growing revenues by 100 million EUR just in two years.
We also saw that we had the exit out of Russia in 2022, but we got MENA, and we got India with inherently higher growth rates. Finally, we were also growing the aseptic business. If you look at the profitability on the margin, we see that we are now stabilizing at a higher run rate compared to history. Here, we see the dip also in the profitability in 2022, which was caused by the reason I just explained when I went through the share price. Another way of looking at this is to look at our return on capital employed, which is a more complete way of measuring profitability. Here we are delivering 17% in 2023, and we are still delivering at that level. This is not only an industry-leading return with us, but it's also significantly above our cost of capital....
It's also interesting to see that, in 2022, in the middle of the storm, we still delivered 7%. For those of you who were with us on Teams or Zoom from all of our home offices, we went through five midterm targets, and we are very happy, and we are very proud that we have delivered or outperformed on all of them. We are still, today, at the leverage level below two, and that is after paying our record-high dividend of EUR 34 million , and it's also having invested EUR 21 million in Arkansas. Great achievement, very proud, but now we need to talk about the future, our new midterm targets. Here they are. We have divided the targets into people, planet, and profit. For people, we have selected safety as our target.
On planet, we have one for climate, CO2, and one for nature, recyclability, and we have maintaining four profit targets, which is still organic revenue growth, EBITDA margin, dividend, and leverage. I will go through these targets one by one, starting with people and planet. For planet, for people, sorry, we have chosen safety. Obviously, the ultimate ambition for safety is zero injuries. That is clear. It is a key license to operate, and it's also part of being sustainable. The target for our total recordable injuries, TRI, is 3.2, and that is actually a 30% reduction compared to the level we have today. Moving to the planet target, where we aim for a 25% reduction, measured in absolute terms.
We are maintaining the target, but it actually means an increased ambition level, because over the same time period, between 2020 and 2030, we are doubling, more than doubling our revenues, but still, the target is -25%, Scope 3. The next target is recyclability, and my colleagues talk about designed for recycling. Here, the target is that all our cartons around the world are going to be designed for recycling. It is a requirement in the EU, but that is not enough. It's. We are going beyond compliance. We think of this as a competitive edge. So this will bring us top line, it will bring us business. We also think that other regions will be inspired by what EU is doing. We also have global customers with their own sustainability targets.
They want Elopak to be a sustainability frontrunner wherever we are, hence, global approach. So what is important for me, as a finance guy, is to say that people and planet target are not just add-on targets in our company. They are embedded into the strategy. It's a part of our profitable growth, and they are also prerequisites in order to deliver what my colleagues have talked about. Moving to profit, starting then with revenues. Here, we are targeting an organic growth rate of 4%-6%. Let me put that into perspective. So yes, we have a high growth rate the last three years, but we also had significant raw material increases, significant inflations. That is really, really important when you look at our targets. We need to set them in the right context.
When we are setting this target, we are assuming a normalized inflation scenario. So while a big part came from price and mix, historically, a big part of the future actually comes from volume growth. That is ambitious. If you break it down to the initiatives that we talked about, global growth is the most important top-line driver, starting with Americas, with close to NOK 200 million growth over the period. So what is this about? This is about tapping into the potential and really having Arkansas as the enabler, delivering cartons to customers we already work with, products we already know, segments that we already are serving with a proven technology, and it's margin accretive. So it's a huge part of the growth, but it's also relatively low risk.
If we move to India, that is EUR 65 million, and what is that about? That is to continue to grow the market share in roll-fed , but it is also to get started with Pure-Pak, which is really the Elopak key identity. MENA, with EUR 35 million, as Thomas talked about, it's about upgrading the offering, differentiating through extended shelf life, ESL, and also growing the aseptic business. Leadership and Core, EUR 40 million. So what is that about? That is the impact of the innovation that we are developing in Europe. It's about tapping into growth pockets. It could be plant-based, it could be other segments. And here, we are not assuming any consumption growth, so this is our own work. The last part is Plastic to Carton, EUR 60 million, and this is the organic growth part of things.
This is mainly the home and personal care area. Here we are developing, and as Dirk pointed out, the main part of that growth comes after this three- to five-year period. This really is a long-term development journey. On the right-hand side, we are going to EUR 2 billion in 2030, and that will be a combination of continued organic growth, but also proactive M&A activity, mainly in the PlPlastic to Carton space. It is an ambitious top-line target, but it's also robust because we are not betting on one horse only. Let's move to profitability here, measured as EBITDA margin. And same thing here, the global growth is the main contributor to the absolute, the margin uplift. The first driver of the improvement is actually to continue the growth, deliver the growth on, in margin accretive areas.
Americas is already margin accretive, MENA is already margin accretive, and India will become margin accretive during the midterm period. For the global growth, for a large part of this initiative, we will leverage the existing organization, which means that we will be able to grow without significantly increasing our fixed cost base. To further develop the business in Leadership Core and to drive innovation and to comply with PPWR, we are stepping up our R&D efforts. That is in this part of the chart. So in the short term, that will have a negative impact on the margin in the very short beginning, and then we will tap into the growth pockets that are margin accretive in the end of the period. For the Plastic to Carton area, we are ramping up the organization.
That requires people, resources, to deliver on the growth. But in this area, we have margin accretive growth measured in contribution and a huge potential coming in the end, of the period. We will obviously continue with our operational excellence. OEE, waste are two important drivers. We also are replacing all assets, and the combination of improvement and replacing assets is around EUR 5 million per year. Finally, Thomas touched upon it, commercial excellence. It's about how we price and position our products according to value, but also in a way that we can respond swiftly to market changes. It's also how we optimize our spend and our procurement. So if I look at the revenues and the profitability, I think we can say that we have a balanced perspective between top-line growth and bottom-line growth. Then we need to invest.
With this growth and with this ambition level, we are increasing the investment sum. The investment level will be around 5%-7% of the top line. In the first couple of years, we will be in the higher end of that interval, approaching then 5% by the end of the period. This year, in 2024, we will invest around EUR 125 million. The phasing of the annual CapEx will depend on the progress of our initiatives, and we are showing here the accumulated CapEx between 2025 and 2028. So what are we going to invest in? First, we have the US plant, which is mainly an investment in 2024, with $70 million. We are also evaluating a second line for the reasons that Lionel pointed out. The first line is sold out.
That is under evaluation. We will spend CapEx to replace multiple assets to improve profitability, waste performance, et cetera, but also add capabilities that we need for the non-food growth. We will spend CapEx to increase production capacity and technological capability in our global growth areas like Morocco and India, and we will have a maintenance program which is similar to the past, matched with our new portfolio, and that will be around 25 million EUR. All these projects are scrutinized, and we are testing them against strategy, return, risk. We're also looking at our balance sheet in order to get the right CapEx level. We also have flexibility in this program.
So of what you're seeing here, only 10% is committed, so we have the flexibility to reallocate if things would change along the way. So to, in conclusion, for the CapEx part, we have a robust plan, and we have the CapEx that we need in order to both deliver the top-line growth and the improved profitability growth. Even if we are investing, we are still going to pay dividends. We have high growth rate, we have high CapEx, but we also have a very attractive profitability, which enables us to maintain the dividend policy, which is 50%-60% our normalized net profits. The dividend will be declared in euro and will be paid twice twice per year.
We will obviously consider the financial strength of the company and the future capital need, but this dividend range is then balanced against our financial plan, so with high growth rate, with high CapEx, but also high profitability, we think that this distribution of dividends is attractive for our shareholders. Let's move to the financial position or leverage ratio. It's key for us to stay within the BBB minus rating that we received from Nordic Credit Rating. Hence, we are maintaining our leverage ratio target of two over the midterm period.
As you can see from this chart, for the next couple of years, we will be slightly above the mid-target, but we will quickly deleverage the balance sheet in a couple of years, and we will, in the end of the period, moving even below the midterm target. So high growth rate, good profitability, CapEx program, attractive dividends, but yet a deleveraging of our balance sheet. And then we need the money to finance all this, and actually, we have good access to capital in our market. We have BBB minus from Nordic Credit Rating. We got the darkest green color in the rating from Standard & Poor's.
When we issued the bond in spring, our books were 2.5 oversubscribed with a NOK 2.5 billion bond that is ranging between 3-7 years. Close to 80% of our finances is swapped into fixed, and on top of that, we have an RCF. So the organic growth plan is secured, and with our plan, we don't need any equity injection in order to deliver on the numbers that are presented in the midterm period. Coming back to the midterm targets: safety for people; planet, CO2, designed for recycling, and carbon footprint reduction; revenue; EBITDA; dividend; and leverage. A mix of targets that we have still strong confidence that we will deliver on. So with that, I will hand it to you, Thomas, for the final thoughts.
Thank you, Bent, and let's sum up the day before we open up for the Q&A session. So I hope you have got today a good insight into who we are, where we're moving, how we see the future, and really why we, of course, believe that Elopak is a very good investment case. We are a global player, and we have a resilient business model, and we work in resilient categories. We are exposed to global megatrends, but these megatrends actually work in our favor because they are strengthening our positions and are building on the areas where we have our strengths. As you have seen from Bent's presentation just now, and looked at the figures and see the development, we have a proven track record. We have been doing what we said we would do.
We have delivered on the targets we set out, and you have met today a very experienced management team, bringing you both from this industry as well as other industries. So now, we are clear with our strategy, Repackaging Tomorrow, delivering 4%-6% growth, 15%-17% EBITDA, and a EUR 2 billion company. We're doing that in these three areas, and we have been through it. We are already the front runner. We are continuing that. We are investing behind it. We are ensuring that our position, this point, will certainly not in any way decrease. On the contrary, with the developments we have, this is an area of strength for us. We are driving a EUR 2 billion company.
We have the activities in place to do that, and the three priorities that we've been through: the global growth, the strengthening of our core, and not the least, the plastic shift. So with this, let me just remind you that during this presentation, 160 million PET bottles have been added to the world. Just reflect on that, 160 million, just while we've been listening in here. And with this, I would also say thank you very much for listening in. Also, those of you who are on listening online and in the room, and now we're opening up for Q&A.
Yes, perfect. Thank you, Thomas. So we'll then invite for Q&A, starting first to take the questions from the people here in the audience. We have two microphones moving around the room. Please raise your hand, and remember to use the microphone when you ask the questions.
Thank you. Håkon Fuglu from SEB. With regards to your Arkansas plant, your initial investments there were 50 million EUR, and you upped that to 70 million EUR. So my question is: Is your first production line including that capacity increase as well?
The short answer is yes. This is including the first line, yes.
Okay, thank you. And I have two more. Yeah?
I would like just to complement that answer, because during the change from NOK 50 million to NOK 70 million is because we changed from a lease solution into a ownership solution. So that is actually not an increase of the investment, it was a better way of financing with a lower cost than what that was the initial plan in June. So NOK 50 million and NOK 70 million is basically the same commitment in money, but financed in a smarter way.
But it also included EUR 5 in capacity increase, if I'm correct?
Include five-
Of those 20 million in increase, five of those were related to capacity increases.
There were some scoping that we increased the scope slightly on the first line, that is, that is correct, to make the plant more future-proof. So that is correct.
I have two follow-up questions there. In the U.S. market, or in Americas in general, besides you guys and obviously in the market leader there, the market is rather fragmented. Are you looking into any M&A opportunities?
Our strategy in the U.S. is really organic growth, and we have very, very good traction, and we are setting up the facility, which is, in an American context, frankly, better than anything else you will find there. So it's not the prime focus to buy. It, M&A is not the prime focus there.
Thank you. And final question, it relates to basically your growth ambitions. Have you included any renewal of filling machines in Americas, in those ambitions?
Filling machines is part of our strategy in America, and as Lionel showed, it's this end-to-end solution that has been the winning formula for us now in Americas, and in our plan moving forward, this continues at full speed. Currently, as we speak, literally as we speak, actually, we are commissioning filling machines, and we are now setting up and buying, and selling filling machines to be commissioned also in 2025 and beyond.
So in your 2030 targets for Americas, that also includes filling machine sales-
It does, yes.
... not only cartons and bags.
Nope, correct.
It's the scope.
It's also the way we report our figures. When we report Americas, that always includes the income from the sales of filling machines. To add to that comment, the model for filling machines in Americas is selling the machines and not leasing them out.
Great. Thank you. That was all for me.
Thank you.
Hi. Can you hear me? My name is Alf Andersen, and I represent a company called Fresh Water Norway. And your competitor, they are in Sweden, they focus a lot on cartons for bottled water. And everything you say today is not, except those milk cartons for bottled water, but do you have any plans to move into that market going forward?
I hope you did taste this. In fact, you know, in this industry, the water part is a little bit, so to say, the Holy Grail. This is an enormous PET industry that everyone, of course, when you're in our business, would like to convert. We are doing what we can. We have in U.S., Boxed Water, which is a great brand in U.S. It's not Perrier size, but it's a very good brand. And we also have across in other markets, water-filled water. And we haven't highlighted it in the strategy, but we are definitely working on it within our sales organizations, Europe, Americas, and also in MENA, where there's quite some interest around this right now. So definitely an interesting. Why have we not included it?
Simply because we think we need to get a better hold on it to see what is going to be the potential here. But we are very happy to talk to you afterwards.
Yes, Robin Santavirta from Carnegie. First of all, thanks for good presentations, encouraging message you have. Now, I have a bigger picture questions related to your profitability. So if we look at IPO time, maybe a lot of people felt it was a high margin, the year before, but if we go five years back from now, we can see your profitability has improved quite significantly. And I wonder whether that is only or mainly driven by the growth you have had in Americas and, and maybe MENA as well, or the other stuff that we cannot see, such as improved, you know, sales or value-added margin, improved efficiency within the company. You know, so if you can sort of comment a bit on that.
Will you start?
Yes. So, my first answer to that question, we are not going back.
Good to hear.
I would like to point out three main drivers. One, America is a completely different company than it was in 2021. EUR 100 million higher revenues, doubling of EBITDA from 35 to 70. We have a sold-out line one, and we are evaluating how we're gonna expand further. That is still going to continue. Remember also that we are delivering margins north of 20%, for every revenue we are growing in America. So it's not only important from a revenue perspective, but it's also important from the EBITDA perspective. So that is sticky. Two, we were in Russia. That was 10% of our top line. The margin was 10%. So you lose Russia, you lose your top line, but that was not the sirloin of our business. In comes Mena, margin accretive to the group.
Then we have India, which is on its way to also be very margin accretive to the group. That's your second point. The third point is the Commercial Excellence program. That was initiated on the pricing side back in the days. Now it is institutionalized. What does it mean? How we price and position our products according to value, but also how do we respond where in the volatile markets? There are many reasons, but these would be the top three reasons that I would mention, and you can also throw in the Aseptic growth in the mix, which is also margin accretive compared to the fresh business.
Thank you. That was very clear. The second question I have is related to organic sales growth. Now, the target back in the day was 2%-3%, and now it's two times that, so quite a significant increase. I think you spent a lot of time sort of detailing why that is. I'm still a bit sort of curious whether there's a change in the market. The market growth rate I saw was, to me, similar to before. So essentially, you know, what has changed, you know, from three years back? You are now doubling the sort of organic sales growth target. And also, when you talk about gaining market share, is that from other materials mainly, or is it from other liquid packaging companies?
Okay, let me start, and then you add on here, because we are gaining market share, right? We are gaining market share, frankly, pretty much in all the markets we operate in. There can be exceptions, of course, in individual smaller markets, but if you look at it from a regional point of view, we're definitely gaining market share in Europe, in our core Europe, and as Stepen showed, that is partly substrate shift, i.e., formats that would have been in 100% plastic formats or significant part of the format is in plastic. There are some solutions like that. And partly it is market share, where we simply, with our portfolio, with our sales work, I would like to say, actually have been winning, the business from our carton competitors as well. So this is, in Europe, definitely the case.
In the U.S., it is market share. It's not a substrate shift. It's a move from essentially one big supplier in the market, competitors in the market into us, for all the reasons we elaborate on technology and et cetera, et cetera. And in the parts of our business in MENA, we are gaining market share simply because we have a better offering, we have a local presence in the market, which in these markets are fundamentally key, also in India, that you are there in the market and can provide this. So it is a mix of self-trade in some markets, but primarily it's a market share. It's simply growing our market share. I don't know, anything you want to add?
I agree.
Good.
The Americas growth plan is bankable. You know, the line one is sold out. To be honest, I think that Americas has gone much better than what we hoped for in the IPO. Remember, when we talked about the strategy back then, we said, "We're gonna get the position in MENA. We're gonna get the position in India." Now, we're gonna scale up this position. So having that new attractive footprint will enable the double growth that you are referring to.
Thank you.
Jeppe, Arctic Securities. You are targeting a top line in Americas of just below EUR 500 million in three to four, five years. Is that including phase two? And when can we expect an FID on phase two?
That's a good question. We have, you know, the thing is like this: when we built the factory, we scaled it, as we said, similarly to the large size plant we have in Montreal. And we wanted to phase it in a commercially sound way, get the contracts, establish the production capacity. So when you look at these figures, it does include us continuing on our development plan of adding more capacity.
Mm.
Otherwise, we can't deliver those figures with current capacity or even line one.
I mean, if you look at our CapEx plan, that includes the CapEx needed to deliver on the targets that Lionel worked at. So there will not be more CapEx to deliver the top line-
No
... that we already have communicated. It's all linked together.
Thank you, and given the growth opportunity in Americas, do you see any increased competition from, for example, Tetra Pak or other competitors?
We see the Americas is really characterized with relatively few players now. At size, you have some very small ones as well, but at size, Tetra Pak is one, Pactiv Evergreen is one. Pactiv Evergreen is in a special situation because they sold off or are in the process of selling off their plants. It's been announced that the buyer is, but it's still to be confirmed and approved by the competition authorities. So there are, of course, changes happening in the market. Tetra Pak, who's been there many, many years, are focusing on their aseptic business, and we find that they have not put a lot of energy into our kind of business in the recent years, which means technology-wise, they don't have the filling machine technology we have.
They don't have the technology in their plants, they're very old that we have. They don't get the operational efficiency that we can get, et cetera. So we think we're in a good position.
Last question from me. During your IPO, you focused on the aseptic business. Could you describe how that has developed and why you are not that focused on that going forward?
Yeah. We are, and it's developed well, to the extent. As I said, we've launched the second platform, the Pure-Fill platform. We have just placed the machine now in five different markets in Europe. We are actually in our figures, assuming also here, a higher-than-market growth. We are looking at a growth level around 6%-6.5% annually. This is way above market growth, and I've been stating that as a fact, but it's a very, very clear assumption that with the Pure-Pak aseptic system as well, we have the highest growth of any carton-based aseptic system right now. We put in the Pure-Fill. We are the only large size two-liter aseptic packaging system that exists, at least with good functionality. So there is good interest around it. We are bringing it out, and we actually have big plans on the aseptic side.
Any more questions? Yeah.
Would you dare a question from a special envoy from NAV, in other words, a pensioner? I think you have put too little emphasis on what the last guy also asked about, competition. I know it's more than Tetra Pak in this family. You have another company called SIG, SIG Combibloc, which has done a lot of acquisitions, also in the fresh segment, especially in Asia. And I think it's and if you're gonna gain market share in Europe, you have to fight with these people in Tetra Pak and SIG Combibloc, and maybe also the Chinese coming into Europe. How are you gonna do that with a stagnant market?
I think not a lot of investment capacity for dairies, since you have said that the volume of, for example, milk, is going down.
Good, great question. So I think SIG, as you say, SIG, Tetra Pak are both well-known competitors of ours. SIG is, from a European perspective, aseptic only. They have bought some, and I stress, some fresh business in China.
Korea.
Korea as well, and as they also want to start up in Australia. But it's really only these two markets. We do not see SIG anywhere on fresh beyond that. We do see Tetra Pak, of course, and when we, you know, win market share, somebody else loses it. That's how it works, right? And why are we winning it? Because we are dedicated and focused on the chilled market. The team we have, the innovation we have, means that we have a better portfolio. We have great filling machines. We have the most hygienic filling machines. We can guarantee long shelf lives, and we have a portfolio that is fit for purpose also here. When it comes to the Chinese, everybody in the world, whatever industry you're in, this is, of course, a theme.
Also in our industry, the Chinese have established capacity in Europe, have added more capacity in Europe, and we see, of course, a lot of competition from the Chinese suppliers in Europe, in the Middle East, and eventually also in India. In India, there are many, many other competitors as well, but it is clear that the Chinese are focusing on roll-fed at this moment only.
Yeah, one more. How come the competitors who are focusing on aseptic have a much better EBITDA % than you manage to have and look forward to in the fresh segment?
So, you know, historically, aseptic business has been characterized by system sales, and in some cases you would call it lock-in systems of you sell a filling machine, and you have to buy the packaging material for that specific provider. That has guaranteed, in the industry, a high margin level. In our industry, historically, on the fresh side, we are a solution seller. We sell solutions, and in many cases, you could technically use other suppliers to supply in the filling machine. In reality, we see in Europe that when we sell filling machines, by far the majority, and I'm guessing 90%, will be using our material. In U.S., it's not the case. It's an open system. You buy a filling machine, and you buy packaging material. It's a very disassociated system in U.S.
What we are selling now is we are trying to convince our customers, and Lionel, as you've seen, has done it very well, to say that, "If you buy our filling machines, you also get so much more value of choosing our caps, and closures, and packaging material," that that is actually happening, but not because they have to, but because they want to. So it makes it very difficult to compare aseptic margins with fresh margins because the fundamentals are so different.
Maybe I'll also add, Elopak has a slightly different business model compared to some of our peers. We are selling more filling machines compared to renting them out. We are into the roll-fed business that have lower margins, but low capital intensity, and this is why we have industry-leading capital return on capital employed. Many will claim that return on capital employed is an equally interesting metric as EBITDA margin. So I think different metrics have different strengths and weaknesses, and that's why we also start. We will start to report on return on capital employed as a very important complementary metric for how to assess profitability.
I just checked the SIG's EBITDA margin while I'm sitting here, and that's first half this year, 23.5%. Then a small question, a technical question: What sort of printing technology do you implement in the U.S.? Is it only flexo, or is it something else?
No, it is litho printing we typically have in U.S. That's the market requirement. As you know, in many, many other places, actually all other places, frankly, we have what we call UV flexo, which is a flexographic flexo printing, and with a number of advantages versus litho, but it's the market standard in U.S.
Thank you.
More questions?... No? So then I will move to the questions that we've received online, and we have quite a few. We have quite a few from Charlie Muir-Sands from BNP Paribas, and I'll read them one by one. What will be the major driver or target mix for your target for your targeted margin, margin expansion, geo or product mix, for example?
I can take that question. As I showed in the chart, you see the split between global growth, leadership and core, and plastic to carton. When I'm answering this question, I'm answering this in a 3-5 perspective. In the short term, the global expansion is the most important part. Why? Because we have already invested in MENA, that's EUR 83 million. We have already invested in India, that's EUR 12-16 million. So we are further in the progress. In these regions, that we have margins that are higher than the average of the group, and that is more a regional dimension, more than a product dimension, I would say.
Thank you, Bent. Then second question from Charlie. "How do you expect cost to evolve for your key inputs, especially liquid packaging boards? Is your margin target predicated on assumption of ability to pass on via pricing for whatever might happen in 2025?
I can take that too. So, typically we don't speculate on where we think raw materials are moving. But let me explain. In Americas, we have a pass-through clause in our contract, so it's a different setup. So it's rather mechanical, so here we have protected our margins almost one to one within a year. In Europe, that's where we'll always have a margin exposure, that we are also protecting ourselves through financial instruments and a little bit with the commercial contracts for some of our customers. I think the key answer to the question is that over the last three years, we have had raw material rally that nobody has seen before. We have proved that we can manage raw material volatility, and we will continue to do so.
This is a part of doing our day-to-day business, and we have demonstrated our ability to do so.
Thank you, Bent. How much CapEx is required to support your accelerated growth ambitions? Also from Charlie.
And also, Bent.
Thank you. This is fun. So you will get some, Thomas.
Oh, no, I'm fine.
Just to recap, over the time period from 2025 to 2028, the CapEx will be around 5%-7% of the expected revenue, of the organic revenue. The first couple of years we will be on the higher end of that range, and we will approach 5% in the end of the midterm period. Maintenance CapEx will be around EUR 25 million, which is, I would say, a normal, typical level, given the portfolio that we are having going in the next three to five years.
Thank you, Bent. Growth projections, and I think he is then referring to the growth projections in the market slides. So are they real, so volume growth, or are they nominal, so value growth? And how does that compare to previous decades?
Volume.
Yeah.
Volume growth. Maybe you can't hear it-
Volume
... if it's on the web. It's a volume growth projection.
Yeah.
How does it compare to previous decades? Actually, on the fresh side, what we're talking is flattish in reality. On fresh, there has been some years a little bit down, a little bit up, but the underlying assumption in our figures doesn't include any consumption increase on the fresh side.
Thank you, Thomas, and thank you, Runar. Then we have a couple of questions also from Charlie, all related to our sustainability strategy and ambitions. So first question from Charlie is, "A target 100% designed for recycling. What percentage has Elopak achieved today?
Maybe we've asked Emilie to answer that.
Yes. Thank you. We are, as I said, also around 70% within the proposed grading of the PPWR. And also, we see that we have an additional 20% that is very near this proposed grading.
Thanks.
Thank you, Emilie, and I think you might stay on for the next one as well.
Don't leave, don't leave.
Could you give an example of a carton that is designed for recycling today, and which one are not? Just to give a sort of a reference for differentiation.
Who will want to take that?
Shall we?
We can share responsibility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I would start. Of course, a lot of the design for recycling has also to do with the aluminum-free technology, which we already highlighted. Yeah, so this is a good example where we can say, "This is good for recycling." We have to keep in mind when we define for recyclability, that also recycling technology will evolve. This is what we have highlighted in one of our slides, where we work in collaboration with the industry.
Thank you, Uwe. What are the implications of Suzano buying liquid paperboard mill from Pactiv Evergreen? Do you see them as a better supplier or a potential new competitor?
We certainly see them as a supplier. It's early days. The deal has not been, as I said, ratified or approved. Suzano is a well-known company, particularly in Brazil. Huge company, actually. So, we are not looking at this as a competitive move. They're buying the paper plants, only the paper manufacturing, not the converting business, to our understanding at least. So we are believing that this will be a valuable supplier in the future as well.
Thank you, Thomas. Then, also a follow-up question from Charlie. It relates to our D-PAK. So how have D-PAK's sales performed versus flexible plastic pouches, in refill solutions aiming to reduce plastic use?
So we're going to ask Dirk to comment on that.
When we look to the D-PAK, then of course refill solutions on the market is predominantly pouch for the time being. And we have in the, let's say, past two, three years, just started to reintroduce our D-PAK solution into the market, and we have of course set plans to win market share against pouches, of course. And for 2024, we can say that we are on track, and we believe that we can finish the year as we have planned.
We could also add, as you've seen, I can't remember, it's in the video where we saw it, you showed it, that when you ask consumers, 97% prefer the D-PAK as a refill pack versus a plastic pouch.
Correct.
That is, I mean, by any standard, pretty amazing, actually.
Okay. Thank you, Dirk and Thomas. So a couple of more questions that we received. So how does the two billion ambition by 2030 reconcile to 4%-6% organic growth? 6% implies 1.7, so do you plan to bolt on 300 million of M&A?
That computes in my calculation. So the answer is yes.
And the follow-up on that question is: How would you fund this, cash or debt or equity?
Yeah, so if you look at the organic growth plan, in the midterm targets, all the organic growth plan, we will use our own balance sheet, because you see that we are deleveraging the company below two. So that's good. When it comes to... That means that for every year, the M&A capacity with our own balance sheet, will be strengthened, and, we will be comfortable, buying companies, as long as we keep, clear south of three. So we need to have a good, the good buffer to three. So we are comfortable, as long as we are south of three when it comes to using the balance sheet. If we wanna do a transformative move, then it's natural to use, equity, because we are a company that is committed to our investment grade rating.
Thank you, Bent. And then we have one final question, and it comes from Mikael Gurell
So let me just answer it by not answering it, frankly, because at this moment in time, we are not prepared to come out with that. This is a... We will come back to that in due time.
And then the second question from Marty: If I understood right, in your Indian plan, you plan to grow mainly in fresh and not much in aseptic. Is that correct? And if so, what's the reason behind it?
No, it's not correct. We are continuing to grow our roll feed business in India. What we're doing now is we are adding to that growth, the Pure-Pak business. Think of it like this: we are, as we speak, adding more capacity on roll feed because we have the growth in roll feed. The roll feed business is the foundation of the business here. The reason we are there is because it's a massive market in its own right. So with that, we will have the platform to build our Pure-Pak business.
Perfect. I think that concludes the questions that we received on the web today. Thomas, would you like to?
So once again, I know you are very hot by now. I am. But there's good news for you because there's lunch upstairs. Let me just say, on behalf of the entire Elopak team, both of those presenting here today and all the ones who did the work behind us, thank you very much for spending your morning with us. We are very, very encouraged by the amount of interest we are seeing in the company, and we want to thank you and are happy to answer questions, should you have more questions during lunch upstairs. Thank you.
Thank you.