Good morning, and welcome to the 2021 Alfa Laval Capital Markets Day. I am Sara Helweg-Larsen, VP of Group Communications, and we are live from our studio at the headquarters in Lund, Sweden. In a minute, I'll leave the floor to our CEO and President, Tom Erixon, and our CFO, Jan Allde. They will take you through the status of the business and the status of our transformation. Following that, there will be two deep dives in the Marine Division and the Energy Division, where most transformation is undergoing to the portfolios. After a wrap-up by our CEO in roughly an hour, we will open up for questions. Instructions will follow when we get to that segment. Welcome again, and over to Tom Erixon.
Thank you, Sara, and good morning to you as well. We are super pleased to host you from the studio. It's our inauguration event, in fact, although I have to admit that we had a different plan in the beginning. We were hoping to take you to Kolding. I will come back to that. Maybe that's for next year. But for now, we will adjust to the circumstances, and I think it's significant in the way that we are in exceptionally turbulent and dynamic times, and we will basically talk about that today. In the short term, the turbulence is well known to you. We are partly trying to work through the post-pandemic era, how to get back to some sort of normality at the moment.
That process is somewhat slowed, and so we are not out of the woods. We managed so far. I hope we can have some sort of getting back to normal in not too far of a distance. The other aspect that is clear is, we've been struggling with supply chain for a period of time with a number of bottlenecks, that is affecting us as well as other industries. Although the process has worked reasonably, it certainly is a matter of total focus and attention from our side. Thirdly, we see a really unprecedented level of inflationary pressure in the supply lines at the moment. It's, in fact, been going on for more than a year at this point in time. In my view, it's not just a matter of, bottlenecks due to the pandemic.
We have inflationary pressure from energy systems and from other parts of the economy that will probably persist for a period of time. We are also prepared for that and try to manage that process. If those are, let's say, a little bit of headwinds or challenges in the short period of time, in the longer term, we have a more dramatic and perhaps also a more positive change, which is the commitment we've done in the world to rebuild our global energy systems and find a way to move out on the fossil fuels dependencies and into different ways of providing the world with energy. We are certainly a part in that process.
In fact, what we're trying to do and achieve today is to give you a bit of a picture in terms of how Alfa Laval is participating, driving, and innovating within the area of energy transformation, both in the marine sector and in the energy division. Now, if the main purpose today is to debate the portfolio transformation we have ahead of us, I still want to take us to the starting point in terms of the platform from which we will continue to work. Many of you have followed us for many good years. If I move back to the latest strategy period, which we initiated in 2016 and completed around 2020, I just want to remind you about what we set out to do and where we are in that process.
If you remember, that strategy process was built on three legs. We put the customer in focus, we wanted to strengthen our technology leadership in our core area, and we wanted to drive and build the service company culture in Alfa Laval that we didn't feel was right up to par at the time. Now, let me give you some words on all of those three pillars as part of the status. When it come to customer focus, we feel we advanced a lot, especially regarding lead times. We were a little bit slow and complex, and perhaps introvert at the time. We've cut all our lead times, including quotation times, including the way we deal with claims, including the decision-making close to customers in a more decentralized fashions than we did.
We feel we've taken big steps to being more agile and responsive than we were. In terms of quality, we did have a somewhat high cost of quality and too many claims not being able to meet the customer expectations, in all our deliveries. Those of you who follow us knows that I repeatedly have commented that part of the margin improvement that we've seen over the last 4 years has been a reduced cost of quality by better scoping and delivering according to our commitments. The number of claims is dramatically lower today than it was 4 or 5 years ago, and the cost level is significantly down. Now, the last part, of this journey in terms of customer satisfaction was related to the fact that we were a little bit too generic.
We'd lost our focus on specific product and specific applications, and we had become a little bit too general in terms of how we met customers. We spent significant time, money, and effort in terms of retraining and re-educating and recertifying our sales force to be a product specialist and a champion of each of the products that they were serving. That took us to a level in terms of how we deal with customers that we feel comfortable with at this point in time. Now the other leg was in terms of technology leadership. What was obvious to you from the very beginning was that we did increase R&D budget significantly, both in absolute terms and as percentage of turnover. At this point in time, we are about 50% above the R&D spend than we were five years ago.
Some of the immediate effects are obviously visible at this point in time. We have product launch activity which is two-three times higher than we were some five-six years ago, and we feel that the product leadership is there in basically all of the areas which we are participating in in a meaningful way. That has been part of our journey in technology. The other part has been related to the fact that although we are increasing our capabilities in R&D, we still feel that the pace of development now is so high that we need to rely increasingly on partnerships. You've seen a number of announcements over the last two years in terms of participation in industry consortia, in terms of forming joint ventures, and other types of partnerships that is helping us to accelerate the development in new areas.
We don't have time to go back and lock ourselves up in our own labs anymore. We need to work together to deal with some of the accelerated change processes that we are seeing. Both Thomas and Sameer will certainly come back to those issues within their presentation. Finally, what is perhaps not so visible to you is that we've also, let's say, built a highway for future R&D in establishing a much stronger infrastructure, specifically in the area of R&D and testing centers. Let me just give you the example from Denmark, which is a rather strong one. We have three very strong R&D centers in Denmark. The first one was in Aalborg, where we have a marine test center for new marine fuels and all the auxiliary systems which we are providing solutions for.
I think we have maybe the finest test center worldwide in terms of finding ways of providing the marine industry with new fuel solutions. The second area in Denmark is in Kolding, where we recently inaugurated a test center and R&D center where our customers in the food industry can run pilot tests with all of the ingredients, with all of the substances within our own facilities in order to optimize the processes before going to production. It's a great place. I hope to invite you there in years to come. I was there personally a couple of months ago, and it really is doing a lot of improvements for us in terms of accelerate future development and customer context. Finally, in terms of test centers, we also inaugurated quite recently a test center for our decanter business in Copenhagen.
Now there was a remake of the Copenhagen facility. It started with moving our production of decanters down to Kraków. It's now completed and finalized, as you know, I think. We have rebuilt that facility to more heavily rely on R&D solutions and to be able to do customer tests and product development in the decanter area in a faster, better, and more responsive way. As we look at the technology side today, yes, we are better in product, but I would say more importantly, we have a stronger organization and a stronger infrastructure to continue to drive innovation and development in the areas that we're interested in. Service. Service is perhaps in a sense the most challenging part in terms of driving change. It touches many parts of our business.
Let me exemplify a few aspects of what we've done and achieved in these last five, six years. The first one has to be in the area of connectivity. Now connectivity is in a sense product development, but the connectivity means that we can also do condition monitoring. It gives us a way to observe how our equipment is performing and being utilized by our customers. From a service point of view, the main consequence is that we've been able to drive the amount of service agreement much higher than it was before. Today, all our rotating equipment goes out with sensor technology, with intelligent systems for monitoring performance, and a high degree of penetration of service agreements. In fact, the digital part of our business is very visible in the service area, also when it comes to remote service.
In 2020, Q1, when the pandemic hit us, suddenly we couldn't go and visit our customers anymore. Both customers and we needed to find a way to support the service work to keep those plants running. The consequence of that was that from 2019, when we had zero service hours, booked in terms of remote service, in 2020, we accelerated to 10,000 hours. This development has continued in 2021. We will have another year of escalating growth in remote service. We have the platforms, the know-how, and the customer acceptance for doing that.
It has been a fantastic lever during the pandemic, but I think it's here to stay as an efficient way both for us and for customers to deal with some of the service jobs that they can perform on their own under our supervision. Now, we also done infrastructure work when it comes to our service structure. Particularly in some areas, we felt the need to industrialize and create scale advantages in service workshops was really needed. One area of concern for that was plate reconditioning for the heat exchangers. We are doing several hundred thousand reconditioning of plates every year in many of our service centers, and it was too manual and too cumbersome. We have made significant investments in our service infrastructure in a number of places in Europe and outside Europe.
We now have an industrialization and the scale advantage in those areas of service where it actually works in a good way. The technology content is increased, the quality is increased. The productivity is increased. In terms of infrastructure, we feel better off than we were a couple of years ago. Now finally, on service, it is a people's business, more than anything else. Consequently, the team and the quality of the team is completely deciding the quality of our services. We spend some effort in terms of creating strong leadership and strong management structures in the service organization globally. We feel it's paying off. We have a direct correlation where we do meaningful change to structures and competences and leadership changes and the way the service develop.
With that, partly implemented and done, we feel we are now in a good place when it comes to drive service and service growth also in the future. This is a little bit, let's say, the closing of the books on strategy process number one, finished around 2020. We are happy with where we are. The journey isn't over. We will continue along those lines, but we are managing to run according to our plan and achieve the objectives that we are setting in those areas. Now before we go to the future, there is another chapter in this book that is worth maybe a few words, and that was the fact of how we needed to deal with the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020.
Now, when we met in February in the management team in 2020, we could see that the consequences would be significant when it came to global pandemic, but we were very uncertain as to exactly how it would play out. I've described to you how we built our service team, our sales team, and R&D team over the last five years, and we made an early and quick decision that nobody would lose their job from the team of Alfa Laval as a result of the pandemic. We decided to hang on and keep all of those dedicated employees that had found the foundation for what we were gonna do in the future. Instead, we looked to bring down the cost levels in all other areas that we could. We took part-time solutions. We used various government-sponsored tools. We took voluntary pay cut reductions.
We eliminated consultant work. We brought down the traveling, et cetera. All in all, we cut our fixed cost with about 20% in 2020, amounting to about SEK 1 billion out of the 6+ billion SEK we had in fixed cost, without asking anybody to leave. Now, the importance of that was partly in 2020. The year didn't turn out so catastrophic that we were afraid of in the beginning. In fact, it was more of a normal business downturn. The numbers played out in a way that was manageable. We invoiced 6% less in 2020 than in 2019. Our order intake was down about 10%, but overall, we managed to strengthen the margin somewhat in 2020 over 2019. We came out of it in a decent shape.
The important part of our strategy for the pandemic was that as the economy came back in 2021, we were up and running already. The growth that you see from Alfa Laval in 2021 compared to 2020, but also compared to 2019, is completely due to the fact that we kept our team together. We held out, and we were ready to run when the market came back. My experience over the decades is the time you can move market share is after the business downturns. If you are ready and your competitors are not, it is an advantage. I think we have seen some of those effects in the results of 2021 so far.
Now, that gives basically the story up until today, and then we will spend most of the day here thinking about what's gonna go on in the future. When I speak about the future, it is the preparations that we are doing over the next four years up until 2025. You know, the foundation we have and the platform we have will financially serve us up until 2025. From 2025, we realize that we'd need partly a different portfolio and a different outlook in terms of where we're gonna do business, and those preparations have started. Last year, largely, and certainly it's continued in accelerated way in 2021 and onwards. Now, the problem for us is not to understand the direction.
What does a decarbonized society look like, and where are some of the opportunities related to that? In fact, many of our technologies and platforms are very relevant for addressing and enabling some of the changes that needs to be done and implemented. The problem is more specificity. Exactly when is hydrogen starting to play a major role and exactly in what applications? Energy storage is obviously important, and batteries can't do it all. What will be the exact technologies that proves most valuable and efficient in order to handle energy storage? Carbon capture will play a role. Will that be carbon capture at source, or will it be large scale carbon capture installations, and what does that mean for our product offering in the future? Biofuels clearly has a role, and we are already big into that area. However, how big will it be?
Will we have feedstock problems down the road, and will the capacities be limited? In that case, where will the biofuel be best utilized in order to create the best outcome for the planet? All of those questions that you need to have an answer before you have a concrete business plan, they are a little bit up in the sky still. We know the direction. We are getting super prepared for a lot of scenarios and a lot of opportunities. We are playing the piano a bit broad at this moment because we don't know the exact answers. Knowing the direction for now is good enough, and we are prepared in multiple ways, and we will demonstrate that to you today. We are looking forward to sharing those reflections with you.
I will come back later on to wrap up this session. For now, I hand over to Jan for a further review of where we've been and where we're going. Jan?
Thank you, Tom, and welcome also from my side. In my presentation, I will give an overview of the development of our volumes, our profitability, and also our capital development during the last five years. I will also give you some more details on the investment program that was launched in conjunction with the Q3 report. Now starting with the volume development. Despite the economic slowdown in 2020 caused by the COVID pandemic, we have achieved a growth CAGR of 7% in orders since end of 2016. After the slowdown in 2020, orders have seen a clear recovery this year with an organic growth of 17% year to date. We have also rebuilt our order backlog during the year, which is up 27% versus end of 2020, with the largest growth in food and water and energy divisions.
This will enable us to gradually grow our sales volumes into next year. This graph shows the orders received development in the non-cyclical product we use in the company, i.e. businesses with no or limited exposure to the marine or the oil and gas industries and excluding service. These businesses represent 40% of the total company volume, and as reported, the growth CAGR of 9% during the last five years, and a growth of 20% this year versus last year, but also versus 2019. As can be expected, it is in these businesses that will make a majority of the investment that are part of the forward-looking CapEx program to ensure we have the capacity to grow and meet the expected market demand.
This graph shows the development orders received of the service business in Alfa Laval, which represent 30% of the total company volumes. This business showed a healthy growth up to Q1 2020, with a growth CAGR of 7%, but was then negatively impacted by the COVID situation. This changed gradually during this year with a growth of 10% year to date. Today, our total service portfolio includes 60% spare parts, 20% repair work, and 20% field service and value-added services. The spare part business has shown a steady growth during the last five years. However, the largest growth has clearly been visible in the field service and value-added services as the number of connected products and service contracts are increasing fast and our digital offering is being strengthened.
As an example, we now have approximately 1,700 connected assets versus less than 1,100 last year. We also continue to invest in our service business, both in terms of service resources and also in terms of CapEx investments in our service centers in terms of scale and automation to drive down cost, improve service levels to our customers. Now, let's look at an outlook here of the different industries that we serve. In the Energy Division, we see that the overall strong market in HVAC and ref will continue, driven by the heat pump market, growth in data center cooling and semiconductors, new refrigerants being used in cooling and refrigeration applications, and governmental stimulus in district heating. These markets represent approximately 40% of the total order intake in Energy Division.
The outcome for the traditional markets in process industry, refining, and oil and gas is fairly flat. However, here we see clear opportunities driven by the clean tech applications. The outlook for the remaining industries in energy division is positive, including sectors such as power and mining. For the food and water industries, we see an overall positive outlook in all end markets, but particularly in sectors where we see a change in the consumer behavior, such as alternative proteins, plant-based drinks, or renewable applications such as biodiesel, ethanol, as well in pharma and biotech. In marine, the ship contracting market picked up in 2021 after a five-year downturn and expected to gradually increase as supply tries to match demand. In service, we see an increased activity level.
For the marine environmental portfolio volumes are expected to remain stable in 2022, and then decline gradually to more normalized levels thereafter. The outlook for the remainder of the environment portfolio, such as PureCool or dual-fuel boilers, will grow, although from low levels. Hence, the outlook for most of our industries looks quite positive. Now, let's switch and talk a little bit on the profitability development. The adjusted EBITDA margin has increased from 15.5% to 17.5% during the strategy period, including a 50 basis point improvement during 2021, despite the 10% lower sales volume during that time. This improved profitability has been driven by improvement in gross profit margin and a reduction S&A percent of sales. Let's go then to the next slide to have a closer look at those KPIs.
This chart here shows the development of gross profit margin, the S&A expenses of sales, and adjusted EBITDA margin during the last five years. The improvement in the gross margin, gross profit margin is due to an overall product mix, with higher sales of transactional volumes as well as higher share of service sales during the last 18 months. The reduction in S&A expenses in % of sales is due to productivity improvement as well as good cost control. We initiated the short-term cost reduction program in early 2020, which was followed by the restructuring program that was started in the second half of 2020 to manage the more structural changes in the marine and oil and gas sectors.
These programs have been key to protect our profitability during the last 2 years, and at the same time enable us to maintain our, most of our employees and competencies as we now start to grow again. Let's have a look then on the profitability outlook. On the positive side, we see that sales volumes will increase, partly coming from the overall good market situation and partly coming from the execution of the order backlog that was built up during 2021. Secondly, we expect this volume growth to be fairly balanced between capital sales and aftersales, which is important from a profitability point of view. The restructuring program is progressing as planned and will result in savings of approximately EUR 30 million when fully implemented next year.
Furthermore, the renewal of our product platform are progressing well, and for example, the new gasketed plate heat exchanger platform will be completed next year. Finally, we do expect positive productivity improvement from the more digital way of working. On the other side of the equation, there are challenges, including the overall inflationary environment. We believe we can offset most of this cost inflation with price increases. However, the inflationary pressure is unusually high, at least in the short term, and part of the order backlog, primarily in marine and energy divisions, which have businesses with longer lead times, was priced prior to the large material cost increases. Secondly, the S&A activity level in the company is gradually returning to pre-COVID levels. Finally, we are stepping up investment, both to support the continued growth of our existing product platform, but also support the new growth opportunities.
This means that we will see additional R&D expenses as well as higher OpEx associated with the new CapEx program in the next 3-4 years, while the positive volume impact from the new growth initiatives will primarily come at a later stage. Hence, in total, we see a fairly balanced picture in terms of opportunities and challenges impacting our profitability going forward. Now let's switch to the last part of my presentation, looking at the development on the capital side during the last 5 years. The graph to the left shows the development of return on capital for the company, where the yellow line shows the reported returns and the blue line excludes comparison distortion items, which was primarily restructuring cost booked in 2020 and 2021.
Hence, our return on capital, excluding primarily the restructuring costs, have stayed above 20% since mid-2018. One item impacting returns is of course our working capital, which has increased this year as growth have returned, but also due to the global supply chain challenges. I expect working capital measured as a % of sales to gradually go down as the overall supply situation stabilizes. Finally, please note that return on capital employed, excluding goodwill and step-up values, is well above 50%. The graph to the right shows the development of our net debt, excluding lease liabilities. The net debt has been reduced from about 14 billion SEK after the Framo acquisition to just about 1 billion SEK at the end of 2020.
After the acquisition, which was done in mid-2021, the net debt to EBITDA ratio increased and now stands at 0.75x, excluding lease liabilities. Including lease liabilities, the net debt to EBITDA ratio stands at 1.07x. Hence, we have a healthy return on capital employed and a strong balance sheet, which is a good starting point into discuss how to allocate our capital going forward. Our number one priority from a capital allocation prioritization is to invest in our organic growth. The graph to the left is the same picture that I showed you earlier, hence the development of our non-cyclical product business, which has shown a healthy growth during the last five years. Many of these businesses now face capacity constraints and will require investment to meet the expected market demand.
On top of capacity investment, we will also continue to invest in our manufacturing footprint to further optimize the production cost of those products. In my view, investing in our existing technology platform with a high profitability in a growing market is a formula with fairly low risk and high returns. Our second priority is to invest in long-term growth initiatives driven by the transformation that we see in our markets, and that Thomas and Samir will give you a better picture of in their presentations. Our third priority is to continue to pursue M&A opportunities as we find targets with a strong strategic fit. We will continue to look at both larger targets as well as smaller technology investments or partnerships, as you have seen many example of from this year.
Finally, we don't see any change in our dividend payout policy and our earlier expressed intention to buy back shares of total SEK 4 billion over a two-year period. That leads me then to give you some more details on the investment program. As commented in our Q3 report, we have initiated a forward-looking CapEx program which adds up to SEK 7-8 billion over the next 3+ years. The largest part of this program is capacity and productivity investment, as well as maintenance investment to support the expected growth of our core technology platforms. An example of this is the new brazed heat exchanger factory that was recently inaugurated in Italy to serve the booming heat pump market. Second part of the program is related to specific project to optimize the manufacturing footprint and hence reduce the cost of those products.
Third part of the program is related to the more long-term growth opportunities to address the carbon reduction target of our customers, including, for example, the concept manufacturing of a new heat exchanger technology for applications within, for example, energy storage, hydrogen or fuel cells. Another example is the investment into our new joint venture, Oceanbird, that will industrialize wind propulsion for the marine industry. The program also includes investment into our service business. An example of this is our new service center in Frechen, Germany. This service center is one of the largest and most sophisticated service centers of its kind, and will serve our customers in Central Europe. Finally, we have also included the required investment to take care of our own sustainability targets, such as energy efficiency investment in buildings, recycling of wastewater, et cetera.
Hence, an overall and ambition investment program to ensure we can cater for both the current and future growth of our core technology platforms. That leads to my last slide here, covering the normal guidance points that I do. The first point covers the forward-looking CapEx program that I just addressed. The second point is regarding R&D, where we also plan to step up our investment further, both in our existing product portfolio, but also support the new growth initiatives. R&D, as a percent of sales, will increase from currently today around 2.5% to 2.5%-3% of sales.
The amortization of our step-up values in 2022 will be on the same level, about the same level as this year, as we added step-up values from the acquisition of StormGeo in mid-2021, but also that the amortization of previous acquisitions was partly completed in 2021, the largest of this being the Aalborg acquisition from 2011. The guidance regarding the FX impact on EBITDA has been slightly updated, and now indicates a smaller negative impact in 2021 of -SEK 25 million, and a negative FX transaction impact of -SEK 110 million for 2022. Finally, our guidance regarding the tax rate and also our dividend payout ratio is unchanged. That concludes my presentation of today.
The next part of the program is a deep dive into the Energy Division with Thomas Møller, our new Division President for the Energy Division, which will be followed by Sameer Kalra covering the Marine Division.
We are having a massive transformation in the energy sector at the moment, and it's truly super exciting time for us. I can say I've been in the company now for 19 years, and I've never seen a change happening like this. Before we jump into that, let me just give a few words on the financial side. We have an LTM now that is on an all-time high level, and this is actually based on a completely different application mix than when comparing with the previous all-time high. It's even more impressive when looking at it from that perspective.
We do see the oil and gas, which we were very much dependent on in the old all-time high, somewhat coming back. There are some more activities on the service side. We also start to see it on the capital sales side. Where we see the growth happening going forward, that is actually on the sustainability side, and that's what I wanna focus on now. That is where we come in and talk about energy efficiency, we talk about clean technology, clean energy. If we just look at what IEA is coming out with, we have a carbon emission level that is already high today, but by 2050, it will actually be 50% higher with the energy demand we see coming. We need to get this down, and that reduction is twofold.
It's the energy efficiency, and that can take it as much as 40% down, and this is where we have a lot of current portfolio, and that is driving our current volumes. We are really harvesting a lot of good growth from those areas. We have the clean energy side, and here we talk about hydrogen, we talk about carbon capture, we talk about long-duration energy storage, biofuels, Power-to-X, et cetera.
All that is happening in parallel, but the real expansion of those will take more time. We want to be a thought leader. This is where we want to develop partnerships and really accelerate those areas together with other companies. This is what will drive our business growth long term. If we start to look at the last five years, this is the period where the energy market and the division already has undergone quite some big changes. There has been such an increased interest in the energy efficiency applications, and that means for us that we have run a lot of R&D activities to have a very sharp portfolio for those new markets and opportunities coming up.
It also meant that we had to get our capacities right for those areas, investment plans were made, and also new factories, like we announced recently, the San Bonifacio plant in Italy has been put online exactly for the energy efficiency opportunities. If you look at the last two years, the COVID-19 has had a big impact on the business side, of course, but also at the same time, we have had very reduced oil and gas prices. So that means the investment level in the oil and gas sector has been heavily reduced. The mix we have now is actually that the oil and gas business is as low as 10% of the energy division volumes. So our dependency of the oil and gas business is not there anymore. We have transformed during the last five years.
We are now really on the energy efficiency side, poised well for future growth. This period was about getting ready for future growth in new areas like energy efficiency side, but also getting our cost structure in place, and we are now set for the phase two, you can say, of the clean tech development. Let's look at the next five years. This is where we have two main focus areas. It's the energy efficiency side, and it's the clean energy side. Let's zoom in on the energy efficiency side first. This is actually where we have around 75% of our volumes today, and it has been rapidly growing, and this will be the growth driver for us the next three, four years. Here we have some key areas behind the energy efficiency.
We have the waste heat recovery. We have refrigerants that go into natural refrigerants, which means a lot of investments and redesigns of systems. We have the whole heat pump side of it. We have also data centers. If we just take heat pumps, up to 150 million houses has to replace old gas boilers, oil boilers with new heat pump systems. The good thing is, with that amazing 150 million, that there are actually two heat exchangers in each of these systems. It's a massive opportunity for us. Even if only half of it happens, it's still going to be fantastic. Another area is the data centers. By 2025, there will be 6 billion people online.
If you make a Google search, you will activate six-eight servers and a lot of artificial intelligence streaming services and so on. In 2025, the predictions are that 20% of the world's energy consumption will be through data centers. Whether this is data centers based on air cooling, water cooling or liquid cooling, we have, through the R&D programs we have been running in the last five years, very sharp portfolio for all three areas. This has been rolled out and will be continued to be rolling out new platforms in these areas. When we talk about energy efficiency side, it's also very important to remember the service side, because a lot of the heat exchangers that has been sold are working under different conditions than they are designed for, and that is not giving an optimal efficiency.
It can also be that over time you have scaling or fouling of the plates, and then you will also have less efficient heat exchanger in place. Coming out and doing the service at the right time, doing energy audits and so on, will also drive a lot of energy efficiency improvements for our customers. Service is as an important side as the other ones. In all these three areas, I mentioned now as examples, we need to invest a lot in the coming years in capacity increases, in our service capabilities and so on, and that is in the plan, and a big chunk of the SEK 3 billion-SEK 4 billion investments we are going to do in the Energy Division side. Let's look at the second area, which is the clean energy side of the coin.
This is as important for us as the energy efficiency side, even though it's not driving the volumes the next three-four years. We are now setting the scene for our role in those applications on a longer term perspective. There is a lot of transformation going. You can see the big oil companies, they are moving into becoming the energy companies, having fossil-free solutions and so on. There are the governments coming in with stimulation packages to speed up the decarbonization and the electrification going up. All this also means that it's a lot of new applications, it's completely new demands, and this is where we can see that our solutions or our technologies are becoming crucial parts in the heart of those new processes.
This is where we need to come in and are doing a lot of radical innovation. We can see our technologies will in some areas even be make it or break it for those applications areas. In clean energy, this is the hydrogen, the carbon capture, the Power-to-X, long duration energy storage, and so on. I cannot go through all those areas today, even though all of them are super exciting for us. Let's zoom in on the smallest molecule in the world, which is the hydrogen. It can be used in so many areas. It can be for heavy transportations, it can be the key to the Power-to-X on the e-methanol, ammonia side of things.
It's also the most visible tool now for the hard to abate sectors like cement or steel to really use hydrogen in the process instead of coal and coke. It is a fundamental area to get going, and it's part of a lot of the governmental plans in the different countries to make the fossil-free area to happen. What is the Alfa Laval opportunities in this value chain? If we look at green hydrogen, there will be onshore activities, but more and more will maybe also move offshore, with the windmill parks, energy islands and so on. This is where our freshwater generators plays a vital role to be able to supply the water without salt. When the renewable energy is created, how do you then turn that into hydrogen? That is through the electrolysis step.
We have, with our new heat exchanger range, our T-range, a fantastic portfolio for the entire electrolyzer market. If you look at that outlook on the electrolyzer business, that area alone in the hydrogen area can be a fantastic growth opportunities for us in the longer term. After you have produced the hydrogen, there's compression stages where we have technologies, high temperature, high pressures, et cetera. We have also, for example, using the hydrogen for the refueling of heavy vehicles. We have special heat exchangers for the refueling gas stations, and here the outlook is that from the few hundred start today, that this can be 15, 20,000 refueling gas stations, where there are at least two heat exchangers in each of these areas.
Then you come also into areas when you then have to burn the hydrogen, and that's in the fuel cell area, where we talk about very high temperatures, very high pressures, many stops and startups. Here we have a lot of heat exchanger opportunities around each fuel cell area. This is also where we can play a vital role in the scale-up of this business. The whole green hydrogen area is a fantastic area for us, where we have a lot of current portfolio that we have developed over the last years, but also heavy R&D activities going on to capture the entire value chain.
What happens after 2025 until 2030? This is where we have a double opportunity, because this is where the energy efficiency will continue, because that is really long-term opportunities as well.
This is also where the clean energy expansions will come, at least in some of the areas. That will be a double growth opportunity for us. By playing the last five years correctly, we will be so ready for that growth in 2025. These applications in the clean energy side, they are very different. I would say they have only one thing in common as I see it, and that is that they are accelerating faster than which we thought a year ago. We are quite certain that in this period, we will start to see heavy volumes and significant volumes from the clean energy application sites. It's also an area where the partnerships are important. To give you a few examples, we have the minority investments in the Liquid Wind Corporation.
It's about taking green hydrogen together with carbon capture and storage and then produce e-methanol. If we look at the methanol side, the demand is much higher than the supply side. We can see in the shipping industry, ships being ordered for future demands on the methanol side, but the supply is not there yet. Being part of these consortiums and making this acceleration of those e-fuels available, we will through our technologies, making that happen at the right time. Another partnership example we have is our investment we have made in Malta, and this is related to the long duration energy storage. A focus area we have just launched at COP26 together with 25 other companies, and that is to bring the long duration energy storage on the agenda.
Because today, when we just say energy storage, people think lithium batteries, but that is just storage for a few hours. If we want to make a power grid that is completely fossil-free, we need long duration energy storage, because we need to make the renewable energy available also when there is no sun or when there is no wind. 10%-15% of the future renewable energy has to be stored from a long duration energy storage in order to have a fossil-free power grid system. 100% fossil-free system versus a 60% renewable load, that is equal to 2 gigatons of CO2 emissions. It has an enormous impact to reach the 1.5 degrees Celsius Paris Agreement.
We talk about terawatt-hours installations, and just a 100-megawatt plant for us means double-digit million EUR orders in heat exchanger technologies that are in the core of these technologies. This is another super exciting area for us, but we need to bring that up together with a lot of other companies to make it one voice, to make it fact-based and get all the attention it needs. Partnership is a fundamental way of accelerating these things. Summing all this up, if we look at the 3 phases, I think it's best to sum it up by showing the portfolio transformation we have been through.
You have the first phase, where you see the dependency on the fossil fuel was heavily reduced and energy efficiency was playing a significant role. In the second phase, you start to see that the clean energy, even though we say they are long-term, they are coming in, and we are getting the first vital commercial plans, the first references and so on. It's really the energy efficiency side of our business that is driving the growth during the coming years. We see a further reduction of the fossil fuel volumes. In the last period, as you see, the energy efficiency continues to grow, but that's where the big clean energy opportunities are kicking in when the expansion comes.
We are looking at a very bright future, and we are so happy to be part of this, and we have a big responsibility in making it happen, and that's what we will do.
The ongoing energy transformation impacts the shipping industry as it does all others. IMO would like to reduce CO2 by 50% in 2050 compared to 2008 levels. EU would like to be carbon neutral in 2050. If you ask the consumers facing the brands today, they would like to be carbon neutral today. We believe the reality will lie somewhere in between these boundary conditions. Today, over the next few minutes, I'll try to give you a sense of how this ongoing fuel transition impacts our business in the short, medium, and long term, and how we are transforming our portfolio to be even more relevant in a carbon neutral future. Shipbuilding has been in a low cycle since 2016, but it now seems to have bottomed out.
The expectation is that the shipbuilding market will grow between 7%-8% CAGR over the next decade, and so will our own sweet spot, which is tankers, gas carriers, and cruise in the same period. The big drivers behind this are, of course, the fact that shipping is in a better supply-demand balance than it was in the past, and the upcoming IMO 2023 regulation. Here, I would like to flag something in the short term, and that is that we still see ship owners a little bit reluctant to order new ships, and this is very much related to the uncertainty they see around the fuel transition. A little bit of question marks to the very short term, but much better conditions in the medium and long term.
The Marine Division, as you know, 30% of our volume comes from service LTM September 2021 basis. Service volumes are a function of installed base, which are a function of the number of ships in the world fleet. It is expected that 98% of the world fleet will still be running on fossil fuels at the end of this decade, with gas having a slightly higher share just above 10% in 2030, and a more gradual transition to alternative fuels thereafter. Our capital sales business is a function of the new contracting market. Here the picture is very different. By 2050, both LNG and alternative fuels will occupy a much larger share of the fuel mix than what they do today. Things are happening here already.
If I was to compare the share of LNG in 2018 compared to what it is today, then at this point in time, it is almost 12-13 percentage points higher compared to what it was three years ago. It's expected that almost 5,000+ LNG-capable ships will be built in the coming decade. Most LNG ships ordered today are actually multi-fuel vessels, with compliant fossil fuel being the alternative fuel on board. A multi-fuel vessel, what does it mean? It means that it requires multi-fuel boilers, multi-fuel flue gas systems from Alfa Laval as two examples. That is more complex systems and more value addition on our side. A wider part of our portfolio is relevant on these kind of vessels. As examples, our methane slip reduction PureCool module, our cryogenic heat exchangers.
Our calculated value of the additional opportunity is about $1.5 million per ship set on an LNG-capable vessel. Now, coming to the most interesting part, the portfolio transformation we are making around the long-term fuel transition. We have taken a number of important steps in this direction in the last 12 months. Nobody can be certain which will be the winner in the alternative fuel race. Will it be ammonia? Will it be methanol? Will it be hydrogen? We don't know. But one thing that we are sure of is any future fuel will be more expensive than the fuels we see in the market today, else they would already be present as a fuel choice at this point in time. What we know is there is a need to develop solutions that will make these kind of fuels both technologically and economically viable.
We have been working with a number of external players to deliver new technology platforms built around new fuels, more efficient power sources, and those that increase the overall operational energy efficiency of systems on board ships. We have been developing with a number of external industrial players, fuel cell systems. Let me be clear, here I'm not talking about fuel cell stacks. What I'm talking about is we are developing modules that deliver power with a fuel cell at its heart. Why Alfa Laval is so important in this game is because a number of critical positions on such a module are based on core Alfa Laval heat exchanger technology. Which means we believe we have a very large role to play in designing and optimizing such modules.
Efficiency of such a power module based on fuel cells, based on an alternative fuel like methanol or ammonia, is double-digit % higher than that of the current existing alternative internal combustion engine-based auxiliary engine. Another exciting opportunity that we are pursuing is wind propulsion, wind assistance, and we do this together in a joint venture with Wallenius, who is also a customer for Alfa Laval. Here, our scope would be to supply the wings and the associated control systems. The ambition here is to offer carbon neutral propulsion, which makes shipping truly sustainable. What a fascinating opportunity. We have, since the beginning of this year, been working with the technology partner Orcan Energy to develop a system that takes low-grade waste heat recovery and converts into power. We call this the E-PowerPack module.
Such a system is able to capture 200-400 kW of power on a large container vessel, which translates into fuel savings up to $200,000 per year for a customer using such a system based on current fuel prices. We know prices for fuel in the future will be significantly higher than this. Earlier this year, just before the summer, we took a position in a company, Marine Performance Systems, which deliver unique proprietary and patented technology in the area of air lubrication systems. Air lubrication systems as a technology platform creates a layer of microbubbles below a vessel's hull, reducing the frictional drag between the ship and the water. The net benefit for a ship owner using such a system is that he reduces her fuel consumption by almost 8-12 percentage points at normal service speeds.
We have, earlier this year, acquired the business StormGeo. This is a digital SaaS business around decision-making for weather sensitive operations. There is no better testimonial of a business than that given by a customer. Odfjell has publicly announced that using StormGeo's advanced weather routing software, they have saved $18 million over a 10-year period between 2010 and 2019. What a fantastic opportunity when the fuel prices go even higher in the future. How does our long-term portfolio transformation impact our volumes? Looking at our business today, more than a third of our portfolio is completely fossil fuel dependent. As an example, our SOx scrubbers. A third of our business is partially fossil fuel dependent. As an example, our Framo cargo pumping system. Less than a third of our portfolio is fuel independent.
As an example, our ballast water systems. Assuming that we are moderately successful in what we are trying to do around the portfolio transformation, we know not all our bets will work as we expect them to. Some will do better, some will do worse. We believe come 2030, not only will we have a bigger business in 2030, but also one that is more resilient and more fuel agnostic. In conclusion, we believe that we, the marine division of Alfa Laval, are very well positioned, both to gain from the structural tailwind we have in shipbuilding and also from the portfolio transformation we are making around the long-term fuel transition.
All right. That was a review on some of the important changes that we have ahead of us when it comes to the portfolio transformation and taking the opportunity and doing the enabling work to make the energy transition possible and viable. Now, as you noticed, we haven't talked about the Food and Water Division today. Let me then just reiterate that, we're very pleased and happy with the development, obviously, in the division over the last five years as it was created. In 2016, we were at a running rate of about 14% margin. We are now at 18+. The division has been growing constantly and annually with about a rate of 7% per year and managed through the pandemic year of 2020 without a dent in the curve.
For obvious reasons, we are pleased with both the past and the projected trajectory we're on in the Food and Water division. It was just that in the Capital Markets Day when we focused on transition, maybe the two divisions you heard were the central points. We will come back to Food and Water, and in fact, Nish is here as part of the team should there be questions related to that division in the Q&A session. Now, finally, let me then just put a few words in framing the status and the years to come in terms of what we try to communicate to you. First of all, we believe our core is very strong.
We are in a good place, we are in a good momentum, we are in a good profitability level, and we are investing significant capital to continue to grow and scale that business in the years to come. Secondly, as we look through end markets, as we look through the geographical markets, as you saw from Jan's presentation, essentially the arrows are pointing upwards. Now, it isn't an instant picture, it may change in both directions, but for the moment, we look at the positive industry outlook essentially across the board in our different businesses. The new business that we are developing will take time. We are not sure about the exact areas and timing on those businesses and how will they take off, but I hope you see that we are fairly broad in our thinking.
We try to capture the areas in a good and constructive way. It's gonna be a tough call in many areas, not to be three years behind, but on the other hand, not to be three years ahead of curve either. We have a lot of work on that, and we will obviously brief you in the years to come in terms of our journey and our path in how we develop those businesses. We look at a lot of excitement on those. We think there's a lot of potential for us on those, and it's also very aligned with the purpose for us as a company.
I think we all as a team getting out of bed earlier and a little bit more energized in terms of being able to contribute to the change we know is needed in the industrial system and in the energy systems in the years to come. With that, what's the concern? Well, if the concerns are not so much within the context of our current and future business, certainly the current misalignment between interest rate, cost of money, and the inflationary trends that we are seeing, across the board in our businesses, in supply chain, in labor, transportation, I struggle a bit to see how we have a soft landing on that part.
From a macroeconomic point of view, some concerns and the geopolitical tensions that is growing, the risk of trade retaliations between Asia, Europe, U.S., is also a lingering problem and challenge for us. We do have some concerns when it comes to the outlook. They are not Alfa Laval specific. You will follow them from others than us. I guess my comment is more to let you know that we are diligent and cautious in our planning. We are aware that the current positive tailwinds may shift in the years to come, and we will, as always, be ready to handle that as well should those days arrive. With that, I think we are ready for the Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you, Tom. My name is Johan Lundin, head of IR, and we're now moving into the second leg of this event. It will be a live Q&A session where you will have the opportunity to ask questions to all of today's participants, our CEO and CFO, but also our three divisional presidents, Sameer Kalra from Marine, Thomas Møller from Energy, and Nish Patel from Food and Water. For those of you joining through Teams, please raise your hand to ask your questions, and remember to unmute when your name is being called up. For those of you dialing in, please send your questions by mail as stated in the invitation. I can see a couple of eager hands in the air already, so I think we get started. The first question comes from the line of Johan Eliason at Kepler Cheuvreux. Welcome, Johan.
Yes, hello. I hope you can hear me.
Yes.
Okay, excellent. I was impressed by the presentations by the energy side and the marine side, giving a convincing message on your position in the future transitions. I was just a bit curious about the Food and Water Division you didn't mention. I looked through your presentations here, and you seem to be indicating that you have lost some competitiveness in food systems. In the same way, you know, we talk about these alternative proteins, et cetera, going forward. Is that not a transition that should be important for the Food and Water Division?
No, absolutely. You're totally right. Nish, I will have you on stage here. Again, maybe a bit unusual to have a capital markets day where the best performing division is not present on stage. The transformation is a little bit smaller in Food and Water than it is elsewhere. Nish, maybe you wanna give some comments on the biofuel side and the engineering side as such.
Yeah, let's start with. I mean, the transformation is there. Maybe it's not the same extent as what you heard with marine and with the energy. We have got new proteins, which we talked about at previous capital market days as well, and that business has started to come through. Biofuels, particularly HVO, the pre-treated HVO business, I think we've mentioned that in a couple of meetings now, that that's starting to also come through. There are changes happening in a number of different areas in terms of transformation as well. When it comes to food systems being a sort of engineering part of our business, the profitability is and will always remain low. I don't feel that it's an area that we have any concern regarding that.
I think over the years we've been quite selective in what we do, and the selectivity has also progressed, and predictability has improved quite a lot when it comes to our engineered solutions and when it comes to our food systems business. We have seen good improvements over the last five years in this area.
Nish, you're a cautious man. I might add to that comment that in fact at this moment is the first time that we reached our financial objectives with the engineering business in food systems. They are where we wanted them to be. They have a target below the Alfa Laval target of 15, but they're actually on an all-time high, and we see the final contribution from the engineering business being in line with our expectations after five years of hard work. I think that engineering team deserves a lot of cred for what they've done and is part of their success journey, Nish, that you've been on.
They deserve the credit for sure. Thank you, Tom.
Okay. Thank you very much.
Thank you, everyone. I can see that our next question comes from Mattias Holmberg. Welcome, Mattias. Can you hear us?
Thank you. Can you hear me?
Absolutely.
Perfect. How should we think about your financial target of at least 5% annual sales growth over a business cycle in the context of what you've talked about today? What I mean is that your track record is higher than the target, and you've highlighted several high-potential business opportunities, as well as sort of a traditional marine contracting market, which should grow 7%-8% per year long term. Is your financial target of at least 5% sales growth conservative, or am I missing something here?
Well, I mean, it's a fair statement to say that we tend to reach our financial targets on all dimensions. Whether that is a conservative approach or not, I'm not sure. What I've said regarding the organic growth target, I think a couple of times, is that it felt in 2016 when we adjusted our financial targets as somewhat of a challenging target. It didn't resonate exactly with what we had achieved in the years prior. As years have gone by, I expressed increasing confidence in the fact that we should be able to hold on the 5% over the cycle, and that with relatively minor, if any, impact of M&A.
In that sense, we have, I think, implicitly adjusted a little bit the organic growth target to reflect a reality. Now, I'm not quite ready to bank on the new business opportunities in terms of integrating in a financial plan as such. I think within the core that we have been describing and the underlying trends that we have, we think the 5% organic growth target remains appropriate over the cycle. I would still give some room to say that, you know, should we see that some of the new business development will come, I think they may be considered a bit of a turbo, but it's too early to say whether they will definitely not have a major impact in the next three years.
You know, we are looking to 2023, 2025 in terms of starting to see the effect. Should that come, I think we will have a similar situation as we had, you know, with the retrofit businesses in marine. We showed we were able to scale quickly, adapt quickly and work in a very entrepreneurial way to take, you know, quick advantage of a market that came quickly. We may have similar situations in some of the business we are looking at. But at this point in time, as I said, we are not ready to integrate them into a business plan. There's too much uncertainty, but I think obviously there's something out there, and that's why we put money, effort and partnerships and R&D money into those areas.
They are not fully integrated in the financial planning as of yet.
That's clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Mattias. Our next question comes from Max Yates at Credit Suisse. Hello, Max.
Hi. Morning. Can you hear me?
Loud and clear.
Excellent. I just had a quick question about the data centers business. I wanted to understand a little bit more kind of how this works. Do you expect your business to grow proportionally with the number of data centers that are being added? Or actually, is there a kind of whole generation of data centers where perhaps your cooling solutions or optimal technology around energy efficiency wasn't installed at the time and therefore there's a retrofit opportunity as well? I'm just trying to understand kind of what we think about the real growth driver. Is it new additions or is there actually a retrofit element here as well?
Thank you. I think we hear your question. Thomas, this is right in your alley.
Data centers is a booming area for us in several ways. You can say that there are different technologies. There's air-to-air, there's air-to-liquid, there's also data centers where the servers are being immersed and so on, which is more early days still. But a lot of the energy, I mean, 40% of the energy in data centers are going for the cooling of the servers, and 60% for really running the servers. Where the opportunities comes from us is definitely on the greenfield side, but you have also a lot of data centers.
Most data centers today is not using the heat created, and that heat recovery in, for example, district heating or to industrial purposes do represent a significant potential for us as well. You say it's two-fold that our growth opportunities there.
Okay. Johan, could I ask a very quick follow-up just to Jan? Just that, Jan, there was a sorry to sort of pick up on something that was less positive. I just... When you talked a little bit about the backlog margins, and you talked about sort of some contracts where raw materials had gone up, and you had sort of signed them at fixed prices, I wonder if you could be kind of a little bit more specific. Is there any way you can size for us kinda how big those contracts are and maybe sort of put some kind of magnitude around sort of maybe what the cost impact might be? Just a little bit more color on that point would be really helpful. Thank you.
No, for sure. Well, as you know, part of a business is have longer lead times, particularly in marine, also part in the energy division. As I said, part of that backlog related to those business have been priced kind of before or during these material cost increases. On the other hand, you know, we have a strategy to hedge some of the key metals, so we can sort of mitigate some of that impact. I think the net impact, though, is fairly small. I would estimate to be maybe an impact of 0.5%, and probably that impact would come rather in kind of Q2, Q3 over next year. Overall, I think it's something we can manage.
Understood. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Max. I think we will take one question sent in to us by email. It's from Klas Bergelind at Citi. On the aftermarket opportunity in the new growth verticals, is it the same? Is it smaller? Is it bigger? The product portfolio is largely the same, but the new growth should be similar, or should it be different to, you know, previous?
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure we have a super answer, but Sameer, if I can ask you to come on stage. We have the experience and start to get the experience now from the retrofit business in areas like exhaust gas cleanings and ballast water. What's your reflection on the service business on new areas versus traditional ones?
I think it's a bit of a question mark in terms of how do we define a new area. If I was to give an example, the multi-fuel boilers is one example of a new area where we are scaling up. We do know that once these vessels hit the water, there is going to be a need for solutions around multi-fuels on the service side. This could be one area where I would say there is a relatively short scale-up in terms of time from the time it goes into the water till you start doing service on it. There are other places where for example we have been looking at new opportunities, for example, around our E-PowerPack, around our air lubrication system business.
I think there is going to be a lead time from when these solutions become available till the time service business comes behind it at this point in time. I think there is a mixed bag.
Do you think they will have approximately the same service intensity and as the old product program? Do you see a shift there, smaller, bigger?
It's a little bit early to actually make that call, Tom. I think that's my honest answer. I think we need to get these out in the water, see how they perform. Of course, the ambition is that they are super reliable, they don't need any service, or they need limited service. Time will tell once they're out in the water. I think, the jury's out on this one. Let's wait a bit, have some of these out, sailing on ships, then we are able to give you a much better answer on this question.
Okay, thanks. Okay, Klas, since you're not online, I'm asking, drilling on the issue a little bit because I know you would have. But let me give some color, too, on this. I think in some of these or several of the areas we go in, we're actually using existing product platforms. I think we will bring volumes of our existing products like biofuels, take some separators and other equipment that we will use. It doesn't change the nature or let's say the mix between service and capital sales. I think what might change, you know, 2023 onwards is if we see an accelerated growth from new applications, the service mix will obviously, for the reasons that Sameer referred to, be smaller over a build-up period. It doesn't mean that it won't grow.
It just mean that it might grow a little bit slower than the capital sales side. I think it depends either way it will be, I think, good news. Margins will be good if we grow capital sales slower, and if capital sales grows quicker, then sales grow and profit grow and, but the share will be somewhat smaller.
All right. Thank you. On the line, I can now see that we have Sebastian Kuenne from RBC. Sebastian, are you with us? You need to unmute perhaps.
Can you hear me?
Now we can hear you.
Oh, perfect. Now, I have a couple of questions. First on hydrogen. You showed us that there's great opportunity in hydrogen. You even showed us charts for new energy, so some content for [audio distortion] for new energy, for the new energy business. You must have done the calculations on, you know, a ton of hydrogen per day, how much heat exchange technology is needed there for the electrolyzer, for the conversion to methanol, for the compression, and for the cooling. Could you maybe give us an idea, if I had a system, a test system of one ton per day of hydrogen, how much equipment content is needed to produce that? That gives us a starting point to look into 2025, 2030 when this part of the industry really takes off.
You must have done and maybe you can give us an idea of the equipment required there. Thank you.
Yeah. Our whole capital markets day has been a word of caution as to bringing in forecasting on specific products into the equation at this point in time. It's not just a matter of, you know, generically. It's a question of where do we wanna go? Where do we find, you know, a profit pool that is attractive? Where do we find a business proposition that is relevant for us? With that said, Thomas, do you wanna give some light as to how we see the opportunity?
Yeah, I think we are excited about the hydrogen opportunities for sure. It's also very early days, and it's a complex matter where there's a lot of scaling up challenges. You have also hydrogen coming in so many different colors. I mean, I just went through green hydrogen here today, but you have it yellow, pink, blue and whatnot. How that exactly plays out is difficult to say. We have opportunities in all the areas because it is both on the production side, but also the usage side of hydrogen. We have opportunities. Exactly how this will play out, it's too early to say, to be honest.
There is also the hydrogen price level today. It probably have to come down 50-60% to maybe $2 per kilogram before it really starts to happen. Is that possible? There are a lot of challenges to overcome there. I think we can play an important role in making that happen. You have what is it? 39 governments around the world today with a clear hydrogen strategy plan and so on. A lot of focus on it. We feel we have an important role in that area.
I mean, okay. I agree there's lots of governments and lots of, you know, different colored hydrogens, but physics and chemistry is what it is. If you have a megawatt hour of electricity, there's only so much hydrogen you can produce. There's so much waste heat that you have, and you need a certain system to recoup that waste heat. I think there is. Maybe you can establish a number for a later date and provide that to us. I have a few more other questions. Sorry to be a bit jumpy here. On the heat pumps business, you mentioned the 150 million households. Can you tell us how much content there is per household? You mentioned the two heat exchangers per household.
What's the value of those heat exchangers per household if I bought one today?
Also here, the systems are different. There's air to air, there's air to liquid, you have the geothermal side and so on. This is of course an area where we are selling millions of heat exchangers. It's not selling one heat pump system. It's not an announcement in Alfa Laval. It's really standardized business and millions of units. You are in the hundreds and thousands, of course, here. Also playing if it's for industrial purpose or if it's more from residential. That also plays into it. It is a very standardized mass production setup for us.
Thereby it's of course not mega volumes per heat exchangers, but.
I mean, if we look at the range plus minus for, you know, a mid-size, brazed heat exchangers, approximately, where are you pricing those?
I mean, you are in the smallest 100s of EUR, up to some thousands of EUR. Then you have an evaporator and a condenser in some of these systems, if it's liquid to liquid. That's
Right. I think there we have sort of the guidance you need. You can follow the share of brazed as it develops in the Energy Division. It gives you a little bit of a reference to where it's going.
I have one last question, then I go back in the line. You mentioned the fuel cell opportunities, the plug-and-play module that you briefly showed in the presentation. What partnerships do you currently have with fuel cell developers? Again, a content question, how much content is there in a fuel cell? How much Alfa Laval content, how much heat exchanger content is there? Thank you.
At this point in time, we are working with the HT-PEM fuel cell as the first one, and we have publicly announced we have a partnership with Blue World Technologies in Denmark. It's a company that actually manufactures the fuel cell stacks and are an expert in that area. On this one, we also have a customer involved. We have Maersk Drilling, we have Tom, all of them are involved in a partnership to make sure that when we develop it's for a certain application that a customer is willing to install and test immediately as soon as we are satisfied with what it can perform inside the test and training center. In addition to that, we are also working with a number of external partners at universities, DTU as one example.
We are working with a broad ecosystem of partners to get this through. I think it's a bit early to say what is our share of content on this one. The first unit is not yet in our test center. It's going to come in quarter one, 2022. At that point in time, when we start to engineer it and get to a S-stage where we know exactly what it should deliver, what it should do, I think we are at a better place to be able to inform you what is our share of content on a system like this.
Thank you very much. Much appreciated.
Okay, thank you, Sebastian. Our next question comes from Andy Wilson at JP Morgan. Hi, Andy.
Hi, good morning. Hopefully you can hear me okay.
Absolutely.
Perfect. I actually have a couple of questions which are slightly different. I'll take them one by one. Just on the partnerships, you mentioned in a number of areas how you've been developing partnerships, building through partnerships, and I think clearly that makes sense in some of these, particularly the new areas. I guess I'm interested in terms of how typically these partnerships come about, whether it's Alfa Laval led, whether it's led by the third party, and also where, if anywhere, you've had partnerships which you've, you know, which either haven't developed as expected or you've decided to move on. I'm just interested in the kind of dynamics on how this comes about.
No, it's a good question. I think it's all shapes and forms. We have partnerships with customers where we go into joint ventures. We have consortia where we are part co-investors. I would say if you want one leading thought on some of these partnerships that includes multiple parties, it is that we are either participating or inviting into those consortia based on the fact that our technology is needed. Our value in participating in the consortia does not necessarily consist of a minority stake in a legal entity. It is providing a solution where, as it becomes successful, it becomes a channel for our product technology into those applications. I think that's an important comment to you, that you don't perceive this as some sort of venture capital activity.
We are not in the process of creating sort of a ven cap type of activity in the company. It is part of our organic growth strategy, and we primarily put our resources into areas where we find channel for our products. There are obviously some exceptions to that. The Oceanbird project is obviously different. But on the other hand, there we're looking at complementary technology for reducing the carbon emission from the global merchant fleet. As one tool out of many, it forms an integral part of our offering, although that setup is perhaps a little bit different.
It's different just for the case that we need a lead customer who actually had the prototype, the technology to begin with, so credit to that, but also an acceptance and a willingness to go as pilot ship, if I can use that word, in terms of trying out full scale technology solution maybe about five years from now.
Maybe if I can just sort of, I guess throw a quick follow-up to that. I think it's interesting to think about how these things come to be in place. I guess, are you seeing your competitors doing similar things, or do you think it sounds to me as if there's a sort of more proactivity, albeit that it's built around the product suite, that Alfa Laval's maybe displaying which perhaps your competitors aren't.
Well, I think maybe. You know, I don't wanna rate or grade too much of what's going on with our competitors, but I would say in general, there are not so many of our competitors with a global reach and with a sizable balance sheet and capitalized the way we are. I think in that sense, we may be being a, you know, in a reasonable way, the technology leaders in. We are the reference point in many of our applications, and it's quite natural that as these leading consortia are being created, it is with a company of our nature. There are not so many of our competitors that have that characteristics. We tend to meet more often than not niched, quite often family-owned, type of companies, with some exceptions. Consequently, perhaps we are.
The base for us to form this partnership is a little bit more stable long-term than perhaps I would with some of the alternatives.
No, that makes perfect sense. Appreciate the detail around that. My second question, completely different area, but just interested in terms of as you sort of look at this sort of you know, 3-5-year planning and then the longer term planning, how much of the planning as well kind of looks at how you think about the cost base and the resources that you're putting into those areas which you do expect to be shrinking, almost the areas that are sort of sacrificed as we see this energy transition? Kind of interested as to how you think about, you know, actions you may or may not need to take on the cost base in some of those other areas.
Yeah. I think the transition in terms of downside, the way we looked at it, we see that as a relatively small problem. We expect to phase out certain fossil-dependent activities over the next 10 years. You know, in a way, I hope that happens. I think maybe the optimism to getting rid of fossil fuels is a bit not fully anchored in realities at this point in time. Maybe it would linger with us a little bit longer, not because we want to, but because that's what the world will require.
I said before that maybe we are dropping, you know, that business in the order of magnitude of 1%-2% per year over the next 10 years, and that's a relatively small number compared to even if you look at the current product platform and the tailwinds we are getting from hydrogen, biofuels, and other areas. I think the transition is not gonna be a problem. I think the challenge we will have is that some of these ventures and some of these businesses will be new. We need to build, you know, a global organization and a supply chain and the P&L and, you know, all of that. We are starting those businesses from scratch in a similar way that we did with scrubbers and ballast water.
Now we have, I think, good experience from it. We have a track record from it, so we feel comfortable about that. It is somewhat difficult at this point in time when we don't even have a fully engineered system to think about margins and resource buildup. I think what I've been trying to say today is a little bit that. The platform that we have will provide the basis and stability for the long-term planning of the new. I know there's been a written question about our financial target and operating margin of 15% and whether we should increase that. Well, I think we are comfortable with the 15%. We wanna build the new, and we don't know exactly where the profitability on that will be.
We just know that we're gonna have to invest to build the future Alfa Laval. I think we have balanced risks and opportunity with what we are good at and what we have invested for the next 5 years in our existing platforms, and it will allow us to, in a way that is not sacrificing financial performance short-term, prepare us for the next step from 2025 and beyond. That's a little bit how it looks from our cockpit at the moment.
Thank you very much for the detail. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Andy. I think it's time for a question that comes in through email. It's from Claus at Citi. On service growth in general, you said that you have invested here and that you're basically done with the platform. At the CMD last year, you revealed the share of field service plus value-added services having expanded from a low single digit share last 10 years to 50% of service sales. What is the target here? Where can the performance-based services go to?
Yeah. Johan, I don't know whether we have a target in terms of percentages of sales. It's all moving parts. I think what we experience now is that the service growth looks relatively stable across the board, including for spare parts. Our assumption over time has been that we will see a gradual shift in the portfolio towards value-added services, towards service agreements, towards other aspects than the revenue from spare parts sales. I think that's what we've seen up until last Capital Markets Day and including also over the last year. I think we will see a slow and gradual transitions over the year, and you could say that the big.
Probably the biggest factor in that is how we will potentially deal with the digital part of the service revenue in the future. The acquisition of StormGeo was obviously making a shift and a dent in terms of how that structure looks like compared to the traditional spare parts sale. I think there is a big question in the market as to how far the service model will gravitate towards digital business models, including software as a service. Now, we took the first step with StormGeo. So far so good. We have good experience from it. We see the opportunities we hoped for when we did it, and the development is well in line.
It may not be the last step from our side in terms of moving a little bit further away from the spare parts traditional sales to find other type of service components that either are directly or touches on the software as a service type of revenue. You may expect that that will shift this mix a little bit further and a little bit faster than otherwise.
Maybe just one comment. What I did say, Claus, in my presentation is that the field service and value-added service is now at 20% as we have added the software as a service through the StormGeo acquisition. It is, that part is now 20% here, if you look at it today.
Good. Thank you, Tom and Jan. Our next question comes from Sven Weier at UBS. Hi, Sven. Can you hear us?
Yeah, I can. Thanks for taking my question, Jan Allde. I have three questions, if I may. The first one is on the marine business, and I was first wondering regarding the green fuels, green ammonia, green hydrogen, and so forth. I guess one of the challenges is, of course, the lower energy density and the storage required. As far as I know, Wärtsilä is working on a solution that, you know, you store LNG on board, and then you transform it into the green fuels with carbon capture. I was just wondering, given that you are fuel handling experts, are you working on a similar solution to make it easier on the storage of these fuels?
So far, our effort has been very much around giving solutions, assuming that a ship owner chooses to go for either methanol or ammonia as a fuel. In our test and training center, we are running, for example, a fuel supply system with methanol, a boiler running on methanol instead of a fossil fuel. We expect ammonia to come into our test and training center early next year, after which we will begin testing around this as well. We are doing that as one step to make sure that if a ship owner chooses to go for either a fossil fuel-free or a low carbon fuel, we have solutions around our existing portfolio. We are also testing carbon capture independently, but we are trying to do it on land to see how good a system can be.
I'll give you a real example. Recently, this was in the news, I think Stena has made a feasibility study, and the cost of capturing 90% of the CO2 was about a $30 million investment plus a $2 million OpEx on an annual basis on a Suezmax vessel. It's not small, you know. The question is, would this fly or not? We don't know. At this point in time, we just want to see, is there an efficient way to capture CO2 on board a vessel? If it is there, we believe we will have solutions around it. At this point in time, are we making solutions on storing such things on board? No.
Okay, thank you for that. I also have a follow-up question for you regarding the technologies on air lubrication and wind. I mean, I was just wondering, given that some of these technologies are now going to be taken up in the next few years already, quite sharply in some instances. I was just wondering on your wind solution, it's I think it's coming in 2025. Don't you think that's a little bit too late? Also on the air lubrication, I think you're partnering with MPS. I think it's not one of the market leaders there, which I think is Silverstream Technologies. So are you looking for further collaborations in wind and air lubrication to benefit more from the near-term uptick there, or is this going to be exclusive with those two parties?
It's a valid and very fair question. Let me start with the air lubrication. It's not that we... Before we decided to take a M&A position with MPS, we have actually looked at the entire market, and we believe that the solution from MPS is unique, it's patented. We believe that the bubble layer that they create relative to what others do is much better for the friction below the vessel.
Using this system, if it does what it claims to be and what it has tested on a small coastal vessel, if we can prove the same on a large seagoing vessel, we believe this will be best in class, which is the reason why we went for MPS and not to make a cooperation with someone like Silverstream Technologies, as you mentioned, as an example, who, you're right, are the forerunners in this area at this point in time. If I look at the wind propulsion, we looked at the whole market. You know, we looked at sails, we looked at rotors, all the companies that you can think of from Norsepower, Anemoi, across the board.
We also looked at fixed wings, and we believe that the technology concept that Wallenius have done in feasibility and pre-testing is the best in the market. We decided if we want to be a clear number one, we should partner with a technology that is a number one, and which is why we have taken the call. It's an open question. You know, it's still a concept at this point in time. We need to make it an industrial product, which is why, in fact, Wallenius approached Alfa Laval. We have succeeded in the past. We have done it with ballast water. We have done it with exhaust gas cleaning. We took it from a pure concept into an industrial product with a lot of scale at the end of it. We...
You know, at this point in time, we are in the first part of the S-curve. We still need to make sure that it's a strong, reliable product where we can put the Alfa Laval brand behind it. Once that happens, we are going to scale it.
Okay, thank you for that. My last question is on following up on the heat pump situation, and you mentioned the 150 million homes. I mean, my understanding is that installing heat pumps for new builds is relatively straightforward, right? Most people are doing that. But what about the retrofit, right? I think in the retrofit side, it's also depending, you know, the size of your radiators at home and things like that, so it becomes quite a bit more complicated. Do you think there will be further innovations that make the retrofit of heat pumps then much easier?
Yeah. I think so, and that's what we are engaged in with a lot of our key accounts. There are a lot of focus on making that upgrade, you can say, smoother than today. There will be a lot of activities coming which will gain the heat pump supply and definitely also Alfa Laval with new ranges and so on. Yes. Of course, you can also say heat pumps when they are installed, there is also a certain lifetime. After, say, 7-8 years, you start to have less energy efficient system than when you started to install it.
There will also be a retrofit of heat pumps going forward. That's also exciting.
Okay, good to know as a potential user. Thank you very much for that.
Yes.
I go back in line.
Thank you, Sven. The next caller is Karl Bokvist from ABG. Hi, Karl.
Hello, and thank-
We lost you, Karl.
Yeah, sorry. Sorry about that. Thank you, and hi to the entire Alfa management team. My first question is also on the heat pump side. Just a bit curious about if you have any particular positioning here when it comes to air-to-air, geothermal, exhaust air or anything like that to keep in mind.
Our opportunities are in the air-to-liquid and the geothermal side. That is where our opportunity sits.
Okay, understood. Do you think, you know, from your side that you will be agnostic when it comes to the different refrigerants that we are talking about here, both on the heat pump side and on the refrigeration side? You know, regardless if it's CO2 or R32 or stuff like that.
Yes. We have innovation programs running on all the different natural refrigerants that is out there and also will come over time. We are putting a lot of innovation and R&D activities into these areas. Also things are available today that has been jointly developed with our partners. We see this as a great opportunity for us.
Understood. Just finally on the energy side, do you see any kind of longer-term dynamics in your power business and refinery business if we, you know, exclude the fossil fuel, oil and gas business from it and look at what other things you have in power and refinery?
Yeah, I think the power industry, I mean, you have the combined heat power. You have all the renewables coming and a lot of renewables needed for the green hydrogen side. You can also see nuclear power coming with certain government programs that can also or is coming back to a certain extent. We see a lot of dynamics in the power side of it, definitely. Also the Power-to-X is also driving a lot of opportunities, of course.
All right. Thank you. My final question was just on marine, just so I didn't misunderstand the comment there on the contracting outlook. I believe you mentioned a number there of 7%-8% growth per annum over the next decade. You know, which starting point or were you referring to like the general contracting and number of vessels?
That's correct. I'm referring to general contracting and number of vessels. I also refer to our sweet spot, and, you know, this refers to tankers, gas carriers, cruise vessels. Both of them we expect to grow over a decade, you know, using 2020 as a reference point, which, yeah, we all agree is a low year. Nevertheless, that is what it is. Compared from between 2020 and 2030, we expect 7%-8%, and this is based on Clarksons statistics, actually.
All right. Thank you. If I may, just one final broader question to Tom. All these applications you mentioned now, I can imagine that you may balance between volume and profitability or is it that you keep both in mind with all these exciting growth opportunities ahead?
Yeah, it is a balancing act. That's what we are here to do. I think, you know, I think we've hopefully proved to you that we are relatively diligent when it comes to our margin ambitions. To the degree we would have a dramatically different outlook, or if we should come to that point, I think we will probably communicate it to you. As we see now, we can combine preparing and building and investing for the future with a healthy financial margin. It is, as you say, it's a balancing act.
I mean, what you know, from my point of view, what I will not allow is that five, 10 years from now, we look back at this period and say, "We didn't see it coming." You know, there is a huge transition coming. There are opportunities. It may require scaling up in a way that we haven't seen before, but we have to be prepared, and that's what we're doing. At this stage of the game, it doesn't alter anything of what we're onto, you know. I'm not running a startup company here, so we're not gonna run up losses in order to get money in the future. We are the industrial company that we are, and we are consistent in our performance, in our financial targets.
We align with that. Should that need to be rebalanced somewhat in the future, let's see. That would be obviously both positive and negative news, I think, depending on what outlook you have on our financial performance and why you're a shareholder. I don't see around the corner a dramatic change in terms of how financial metrics look. I hope that's. It's a broad question you're asking. That's the best way I can frame it for you. I hope it gives you some light.
Yeah. Understood. Thank you.
All right. Thank you, Karl. Our next question comes from Robert Davies at Morgan Stanley. Can you hear us, Robert?
Yes. Can you hear me okay?
We can.
Great. My first of my two questions was on the marine side, specifically around the alternative fuels. A couple of people have touched on this 7%-8% growth figure on the marine contracting. I think you mentioned in your earlier remarks the impact of some of the shipowners being uncertain around using these different types of alternative fuels. Does that mean that that growth number is sort of very back-end loaded? Or just as sort of an aside to that, I guess, on the R&D side, the 2.5%-3% of R&D spend, how much of that is kind of tied into programs that are kind of running in parallel? You're sort of placing your bets on multiple different technologies here.
How easy is it to redirect some of that R&D spend and sort of pull back if one of the technologies doesn't work out? I guess the first part was on the alternative fuel opportunities. Does that sort of push the growth figure out a little bit to the back half of the decade being stronger? On the R&D side, how quick is it that you can redirect that spending if one of those turns out not to be the right bet? Thank you.
Thanks. I think if you allow, I take the back-end question and then hand it over to Sameer. I think you know, the question on R&D is well-founded. I think one reason why we are guiding a somewhat higher share of our sales invested/reinvested in or respent in into R&D is that we need to do a couple of things on top of and in addition to what we've done in the past. That means that we have continuity in our existing R&D programs and platforms that we are running. At the same time, what we said when we increased our R&D spend was that we had a couple of product programs that needed to be renewed.
I think part of the R&D spend will naturally decrease, 2022, 2023, as we've completed part of the heavy work on introducing the new product platforms that we needed. I think we will have a gradual shift from the product renewal process we've been in to slightly more, let's say innovative areas or new areas that we haven't engaged in in the past. I think that's a comment that holds true for the group, and I think to a degree for the marine industry, and with that, Sameer, any call on that then on the fuel side for the ship owners.
I think when you look at what will drive contracting, if you look at purely the data, about 23% of the world fleet is more than 20 years old, and 20 years is the economic life of a vessel. If you take 23 × 50,000, you have 10,000 ships which are ready to go basically for renewal, you know. Now, should that happen, the renewal start tomorrow, or should it start a bit later, it's difficult to predict. I would say the slope of this curve is a little bit difficult to predict. I think one of the things that will really drive this will be the fact that the IMO 2023 regulation around EEXI and CII. I think you're all aware about this one.
It's going to put a lot of pressure on ships which are not fuel efficient, and there is a high possibility that 2023, 2024 onwards, we start to see an increased level of scrapping, removals of old ships and new vessels coming in as well. This is supported by the fact that if you look at some of the big segments like tankers and bulk carriers, the order backlog as a percentage of the fleet is less than 10%, which is at almost all-time low. The supply side is really good here. It's just a question of when the demand comes up, and you are spot on, there is this question mark around the alternative fuel availability. That is where the big question mark lies, what will be the slope of the upturn going forward to 2000+ ships in 2030?
I hope that answers your question.
Yes, thank you. That does. Maybe just one quick follow-up, if that's okay. Just on the energy side of the business, I guess within the traditional sort of oil and gas segment, given oil prices and all back up over $80, I'd just be curious, have you seen any change in activity or increased spending, even if it's not on maybe the traditional parts of oil and gas spending, but maybe on some of the energy efficiency or improvements or technology improvements? Is there a bit more money sloshing around in the system now from any of those companies? I know they're obviously making a push internally themselves with green energy, the transition, and the whole kind of 10-year view on the oil price, et cetera, et cetera.
Just in the kind of near term, have you seen any uptick spend on energy efficiency products specifically within the oil and gas segment? Thank you.
Yeah. We have seen activity somewhat picking up. I think if you go some months or a couple of quarters back, it started with the service side, where the oil production when that and the gas production starts up, then the service activities was the first thing. We do also see some brownfield activities like retrofit or, like you say, the energy efficiency gains that our new technologies indeed also can provide for the oil and gas sector. I don't think going forward, we don't believe that we'll ever come back to where it was. I in a way hope it doesn't. I hope so for our planet here.
If you can say the gas peak is long out and the oil peak, and I think that gas activities also in gas distribution and so on, that's probably where there will be more activities going forward.
Understood. Great. Thank you very much.
All right. Thank you, Robert. Our next question comes from Lars Brorson at Barclays. Hi, Lars.
Hi. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for taking my question. I hope you can hear me okay. Tom and Jan, thank you, and the team, thank you for the presentation. Tom, I take your point, there's no change to the overall financial targets, clearly. I wonder, though, whether you can elaborate a little bit beyond Rob's question on R&D around what these new sets of opportunities means overall for your cost profile as you pursue them, as you manage for optionality. It wasn't entirely clear to me whether you see R&D step down again beyond the rate we see over the next couple of years, or whether we are sitting at structurally higher R&D levels going forward, and equally around your CapEx spend.
Again, you're clearly managing to or you're setting yourself up to scale up. Can you talk a little about scaling down again? You've had, again, an experience with scrubbers that saw a very significant growth profile, and then you're managing that, subsequent to that opportunity. How should we think about CapEx levels going forward? Maybe the broader question, Tom, is how you're managing the business from an investment standpoint in this cycle versus the prior cycle. As I said, can you talk a little about the change in cost profile and the structural drivers that mean we might be sitting at R&D and CapEx levels at higher levels for longer? Thank you.
Thank you. That was a broad cascade of topics and questions. I'll see if I can frame some answers on it. I think, you know, in terms of R&D, I don't see a huge structural change in terms of what we're doing. What is clear is that as we embark into a couple of these new areas without any revenue, it's clear that cost comes first and revenue later. I think as those materialize or get aborted or whatever we decide to do with them down the road, I don't think the R&D intensity within our, you know, existing EUR 4.5 billion of sales is particularly changed.
I think on the contrary, we've been taking a, you know, a very strong position in investing and developing solutions, product platforms in a way that was a little bit of a catch up. I would say if anything, you might have seen somewhat of a high spending over a period of time, and that is probably persisting over 2022, but not much beyond that. I think we are in good balance on that. I don't see a reason for why we should be, you know, continuously on a 3% level unless we see fantastic opportunities in new areas where it's a good investment to go for it.
I wouldn't be overemphasizing the change on R&D, but we don't want to miss the opportunities we have ahead of us now, because of a couple of decimals on percentage of spend in R&D, when we look at the fairly sizable business opportunities in hydrogen and other areas. I think that's that. The CapEx program. You know, you've been with us for many years, Lars, so you know sort of where we came from. We guided back a couple of years ago when we went up to a CapEx of around SEK 1.5, that was fairly much driven by footprint projects.
As we reorganized our supply chains, we would come back to a more normal level at around SEK 1 billion or so per year, and unless we decided to do something else. I guess what happened now is we decided to do something else. You've seen from Jan's presentation that the growth in our core has been very, very strong, and we look at a reasonable demand forecast going forward. We felt the right thing to do was to put the capital behind it and make sure that we could follow the growth in heat pumps, we could follow the growth in data centers, we could follow the growth we've seen on high-speed separation in various technologies, including the biotech area.
We are just running flat out at the moment in a number of areas, and we are way higher than the numbers were in 2019. You know, after having captured that, then manage an extra shift and drive productivity to a certain level, we are just at the point now that either we have to start to walk away from business or we have to put the capacity in place. That's what we're doing. We are taking those decisions as we speak. I think Jan alluded to the fact that sometimes we make those decisions and the spend comes a little bit later. We'll see, you know, how quick that ramp will be into 2022.
We may in actual spend lag a little bit behind our guidance, but in terms of our decision-making process and the initiatives that we put in place, I think the underlying activity level is around the level that Jan has been guiding to, and then we'll see how it ramps exactly, 2022, 2023. Once those capacity things are over, I think we should be in relatively normal circumstances when it comes to CapEx and depreciation charge versus the invoicing level in terms of ratio, I think. Jan, do you wanna correct me or add a comment to that?
No, I think you described it well, Tom.
Thank you very much.
Sorry, Tom, we heard the same in 2017 when we saw the new footprint program. I guess my question was more as you manage for that flexibility, you manage to not just scale up, but also managing for scaling down. Are you doing something structurally different today from a footprint supply chain standpoint? Is it more assembly? Like, how should we think about returns in the business in this next cycle, as it relates to fixed tangible asset intensity?
Yeah, I think our asset intensity, I mean, we obviously expect growth to continue, so I don't think asset intensity will be hugely different. We have less footprint and more capacity now. So in terms of return on investment, the investment program that we're looking at now is better in terms of payback than the one we launched in 2017. You know, footprint changes are expensive sometimes, you know. So we were looking at payback times of 7-8 years in terms of moving and shutting down some manufacturing units, cost of redundancies and other things, some bricks and mortars that it wasn't super productive in terms of payback. So when we look at the payback period on the capacity expansions we're looking at, they are typically better than that.
The only part of the CapEx program that we are looking at at a slightly lower time period is related to the sustainability investments, where we are accepting a 7, 8, 9-year payback in terms of solar powers and other things in order to drive our own CO2 footprint down. We think it's still an acceptable return. It's a relatively small part of the CapEx program. Otherwise, I think our, as Jan went on to our return on capital employed on our existing core is around 40%-50% return on capital employed, and that will be fully supported by the capacity expansion projects that we are doing now. We don't see a change in those numbers as a result, I think.
Thank you.
Good. Thank you, everyone. Time flies, and we have approached the end of this capital markets day. Thank you, everyone, for participating today, and I will just hand over to Tom for some very short final remarks. Thank you.
Thank you, Jan, for managing the Q&A. It would have been nice to see you all face to face. I hope you found this format at least time efficient and that you got most out of it as you would expect from a Capital Markets Day. We are, as you can see, relatively excited in a low-key Alfa Laval mode when it comes to the opportunities ahead of us. We hope we could share some of the enthusiasm and energy that we feel around the business in the years to come. If not before, we'll meet most of us in connection with the earnings report after Q4. Look forward to that. Thank you very much for today.