Welcome, everyone, to Alimak Group's investor update. My name is Johnny Nylund. I'm Head of Communication and Investor Relations. We are very happy to have you here today, both of you that are in the audience and also you that have joined our webcast. Before we look at the agenda for this afternoon, I'd like to make a quick safety briefing since, yeah, safety is very important in our company. Emergency exits, very easy to find. It's over there, the same place where you entered the premises. There are two fire extinguishers in here, at the entrance and in the kitchen. All right, let's look at the agenda. It's a very full agenda this afternoon.
We will start with an update on the New Heights program by our CEO, Ole Kristian Jødahl, before we get an overview of the group financials by CFO Sylvain Grange, and a session on digitalization by Charlotte Brogren. After these three presentations, we will host our first Q&A session. For those that are joining our webcast, please submit your questions through the chat function. And for those of you that are in the audience, raise your hand and you'll get a microphone. After the Q&A, we will have a short break before we have an update on the transformation program in Facade Access, presented by Philippe Gastineau. And we will explore the growth opportunities that we see in the I ndustrial division, presented by Jens Holmberg.
Our final presentation of the day will be made by our CEO, which he will do a concluding remark before we end with a final Q&A. On stage will be our CEO, but also all the EVPs from our divisions. So with that, let's start it. Please welcome Ole.
Yeah, also from my side, a warm welcome to you all that you're coming here and listening in a little bit to the story of Alimak Group, what we are doing. I also warm welcome to everyone online. I know it's many following us there. We set up this investor day. It's a little bit shorter event, but I feel it's an important piece that we can keep communication with you all and also give you the opportunity to meet management because this is about people. You know, that's what we are driving. This team is not about some few. It's the whole group. So it's nice for you to meet and talk to more people than what we normally meet. So we will focus today a little bit history.
You know, many of you know that before, what we have done, the changes we have been through, but also where we stand and what we are currently focusing on and a little bit how we view the future. So that's the intention of why we meet up today. You all know that we started something that we called the New Heights program that we kicked off in 2020. I came to the group that summer, and the ambition really was to build a sustainable, resilient, highly profitable, growing industrial company, and that's really what has been the key focus in what we have been driving, and that meant we realized relatively quickly that we needed to reset the group somewhat. So we made this three-step plan that many of you have seen before.
First, establishing the base, and I will go a little bit into that soon, now on what that meant. We worked then on securing margin improvements, really to ensure that we were driving the right things in the group. Some we stopped and others we have been investing in. Then from 2022 and onwards up to 2025, we said we should be in some sort of profitable growth phase. I will actually come back to a little bit how we view also now the period after 2025 later. One fundamental thing in what we did was to create a new mission. I strongly felt I came to a company that was very centralized and also product-focused. So to broaden the mission, you know, to get really a strong market perspective was one of the fundamental changes that we did.
This is also, you know, to really ensure that we have a broad view of the entire market. I will give you some examples of that today, but that has opened up tremendous opportunities for the group to grow and excel for as long as we can see, basically, versus the situation that we were in where we were said to have very, very high market shares. Another fundamental piece that we created was the strategic direction. We wanted to set up a decentralized organization, and a decentralized organization also needs some sort of guidance, you know, so that because decentralized means that you make decisions out there and everyone is allowed and expected to take decisions and drive decisions, then they need some guidance on how to drive it, you know. We set up four strategic parameters.
We should be customer and market-driven, you know, customer-obsessed. We should be the technology leader in our industry. We should drive operational excellence, ensuring that we utilize all our assets in the most efficient way, and recognizing that people was the most important asset of the group. So driving a strong culture and focusing on people development. And that's the center of this house. You know, you see these are the core values that we drive towards every day. And I think this is really one of the fundamental keys, you know, the culture that we have built, where people take ownership out there locally. They are allowed to make decisions. They are expected to take decisions, and they do take decisions. They move fast, and we have focus on delivery. So it's not a question of having a lot of things to do.
It's a question of actually being able to deliver on the things that you do. You challenge the limits because often we face, you know, borders, which is difficult to move past, but then we just need to recognize we just need to find a way around, you know. We are not stopping. We are moving. And then lastly, you're not alone. We work as a team, and that's a strong also, I think, impact. You have friends to call. You know, we help each other, and we are a group driving this forward. And that should take us to a place, you know, where we have built a sustainable business. We deliver sustainable results over time. The last and the third piece of this very important, you know, building the base was the organizational structure.
And this I call, you know, the value creating engine, you know, of the group. This is how we drive results. This is how we drive the organization every day. So it was initially built up on four divisions: Construction, Industry, Avanti, and Facade Access. But with the acquisition of Tractel, we got the new vertical, HSPS, and we also got some additions into Facade Access and into Construction with that acquisition. So today, these five divisions, they are fully responsible for their own business. So they have their own customers. They have their own market. They understand their needs. They develop the product and the solution portfolio, and they take to market, make or buy, you know, these products and solutions. And they also are full aftermarket. They drive the whole thing. And this also means they have full P&L responsibility.
They have full balance sheet responsibility and also cash responsibility, so it's no doubt, you know, what they are responsible for. We have a lean central structure on top where we are supporting each division, and the digitalization is one piece that Charlotte will talk more about today, how that is, you know, helping and enabling growth in the divisions, and it's a very important piece that we support with, but all these costs are allocated out, so the sum of these five divisions is also the full group result, so this is a truly, I would say, decentralized structure, which also needs that type of culture and direction with the strategic house, as I talked about, so what have we more done then? You know, that was the base and what have we done ever since? Yes, basically, you know, short list, we have fixed Wind.
Wind was a problem. We have fixed that, you know. We put it back together. We put a lot of focus and really we have excelled in profit and in growth, and that's a resilient, very nice and fine business today. Facade Access, it's on its way to be fixed. We have made huge steps also there, and Philippe will talk more about the steps that we are making and also giving you comfort that we are not at the end station. We have much more to do and we will do it. We have integrated Tractel, you know, and that's part of Facade Access, of course, with the thing there, but also the HSPS division, so if you look into 2023, the results of the group altogether, you know, we excelled results at 12%. We grew organic five% on top of actually that acquisition we did last year.
So we did that well, plus, you know, more. We have created focus and speed in Industrial by separating that into a separate division. And Jens will talk more about that today. And we have made Construction division also much more resilient. And if you look into Construction division, since David is not presenting due to, you know, we tried to make a shorter agenda, these are some of the fundamental pieces that we have done to Construction, which is making this much more resilient and a completely, they are in a completely different position today versus what they would have been in this difficult market situation, I'm sure, if it wouldn't be for these activities. So it's a truly global operation. It's a fundamental thing now, you know, in how the market operates. We run our own rental in certain markets, and that's a good learning thing for us.
It gives also us leverage. We can move some machines and, you know, it gives us much more playing room that we actually do that in some markets. We have developed a used sales model. So we buy back, you know, all used machines. We refurbish them or scrap what should not be in the market, and we sell them again, you know. So we sell them twice, but we can also put them into markets where else we would have not bought Alimak machines, you know. So we are painting the world more orange by doing this also. We have the service and the full aftermarket spare parts that we are driving strongly.
We have also fundamentally widened the scope, and this is maybe where the biggest trick is sitting, you know, because as I was alluding to in the beginning, it was very product-focused on the hoist coming out of Skellefteå, but it's also two other major fundamental product areas, transport platforms and mast climbing work platforms, which we are really driving, and if you see the picture here on the building, here you see mast climbing work platforms, and you see what they are replacing, what would have been there if it wouldn't be for them, scaffolding, and I will come back to that, so this is a technology that can actually and do replace scaffolding, so, you know, we have widened the product range, but we have also widened the market focus, you know. We are not niching ourselves just looking at hoists.
We are looking at the full construction market, you know, where lifting and moving people and material at height is essential. We have continued investments even though with tough times. So I feel we are very well prepared for the rebound that will come. Difficult to say exactly when, but the rebound will come. So during this time, you know, since we launched the New Heights four years ago, we have delivered profitable growth. We have lifted the group turnover from around SEK 4 billion to SEK 7 billion . It's, yes, acquisition, but it's also fundamental organic growth in this. And we have lifted profitability and margins, you know, margins from around 13% up to 17%. And this is also a combination of good M&A management and organic profit development that we are doing. So the group is at a completely different level today than what we saw four years ago.
It doesn't stop here. You know, we set up financial targets last summer because the ones that we made when we made the plan four years ago, those we met already last year. Then we made new targets last summer where we said within two to three years, we should be north of 18% with adjusted EBITDA. I think it's two things to it. First, it's a thing. Yes, we are, you know, continuing to lift the profit, but also I think important to me, it's a culture that we are driving, you know. We are not setting that target to be five years out where someone else needs to worry about it or it's so far out. You don't need to worry today, you know. We set it within two to three years.
So it means we have to work on it from day one and we are doing. And you see the effects already also. Last quarter, we did 17.8. I'm not saying it will be a linear curve, you know, but we are moving in that direction and we feel comfortable we will deliver upon this. And we have also made last summer a good set of sustainability targets, which we are also heavily focusing on and driving. And these are challenging, but we will deliver upon them as well. So looking a little bit more forward, what we have been focusing on lately, you know, this year we have focused more on market understanding, basic market analysis, because when I came to the group again, you know, it was very high market shares and very product focused. So we said, forget that, let's fix the business.
But now we want to understand more, you know, what we have at hand, so that's some time and effort we are spending on this year, and that will lead into updated division strategies next year, so our ambition is actually to meet again in a year's time. That's the plan where we will then give you an updated division deep dive into each division with the updated division strategies in a capital market day, and what that should basically focus on is how we can accelerate profitable growth up to 2030, but the baseline will be the same, so a little bit into the market then, you know, we have some strong mega trends supporting our business, and these are fundamental, you know, drivers, of course, and urbanization is one of them, and we know that it's more and more happening in this area.
And you know, all the data also substantiate. This is data from the World Bank, you know. Land is scarce. More is happening into urban areas. And that means also more at height. So business for us. Another very important mega trend, it's about safety. This is data from OSHA, which is a department of a part of the Department of Labor in the U.S., giving out statistics, you know. And they say that violations for worker safety is related to height, most of it, basically, you know.
So it's a serious area where we see more and more regulations around the world, which is also, of course, good for our business, but also in general, the focus on making sure that the people that are working at construction sites or industrial sites or in wind towers or wherever, you know, where something is moving or lifting at height need to be safe. And also the fact that they should be there from a healthy perspective, you know. That's also an important part that you have the means to be moved up and down and not having the strain of climbing yourself because that, you know, you get tired, more likely to make accidents, and after a long work life, you know, you are done. So it's an important thing that also, you know, you get means to help you.
We have looked into Wind, for example, you know. So these are examples. This is for the lift development. It's a lot of data in the wind market, but not something which really fits back exactly to what's the exposure to our market. So, but if we look into the number of towers being erected, the plan, you know, the data for that in the next coming years, and we know the existing penetration of lift, and we know the trend somewhat, you know, we estimate that this will be the growth ratio for lift installations, you know, into wind towers in the next coming years. And then you also have ladder solutions we work on. You also have height safety, you know, harnesses and rescue devices and stuff. So it's more to it, but this is one of the pieces of the puzzle for Wind.
But this is maybe, you know, where the biggest secret sits, you know, the market perspective, how we really define and how we view the market. Because coming back to the group I entered, you know, which had the focus on the hoist coming out of Skellefteå, that's actually, and everyone was talking about, you know, we have 50%-60% market share. You will all recognize it, those that have followed the group for a long time. Then you have niched yourself into this upper one here, you know, that's the construction hoist market. But if you really think of it, you know, at a construction site, it's a lot of moving of people and material up and down every time, and it means to work and move. So then construction cranes, it's of course one of the means that you use to transport people and material.
That's part of your competition, you know, because they might overtake you or you might be able to take pieces of their market. And the same with scaffolding, you know. Scaffolding is there to make people work from, but when we get the focus back on mast climbing work platform, as we have done, you know, that's a machine that you work from and you see on the pictures here. So these are big wide machines, as I also had in the previous picture, that you actually work from and they replace scaffolding. So when you look upon the market from this perspective, then our market shares are, you know, below one. We estimate that, you know, this scaffolding market might be around $50 billion.
If we would replace 1% of that market, you would still have a very significant figure for our construction business, as you can understand. So this is a completely different way of thinking, which we are driving in all our divisions. Another important area is safety. And this is also, you know, something that we have a different view on today because the view has been that we need to provide safe machines out of our factory. We have done that and it's been, you know, a fundamental safety feature, you know, when we are in the business that we are. But there is one more thing here, you know, is that especially on the construction side, the machines are not installed by us and they are not operated by us. So if others do wrong in installation or in operation, you have a big issue.
We have seen examples of that. What we are doing, we are building in digital means in the machine. If the construction companies or, you know, the unions or the governments are saying that these means need to be used, that would mean that you cannot start one of our machines without that they are, you know, okayed and installed or maintained by someone that is trained and certified by us. That is already now built into. We have built that into our machine. That's available. Next week, actually, we have called for a meeting with all these players here in the Nordics.
So, we are driving that also, you know, so to make some sort of attitude change, you know, in this market so that we get stronger drives toward those safety means, you know, that it needs to be managed also by people that are trained and certified to do it. So, what does this mean altogether? Yeah, you know, I think we have fundamentally changed the group throughout these four years. We have become a sustainable, resilient, highly profitable, growing company. But it doesn't end here. And that's the beauty of this thing, you know. I also just feel that we have started. We are supported by these mega trends that we have talked about.
We have a leading market position, you know, in our niches, which gives us power, gives us a name, gives us a reputation, you know, so it's easy for us to continue to build on that. We have this large footprint already historic, which is a fundamental piece, of course, in our aftermarket business that, you know, gives us the base for selling spare parts and selling services, and we install new machines every day so that market is growing day by day. We have a fantastic fragmented market, which means it's a lot of acquisition opportunities. I think also now we can clearly say we have a proven business model, and we have strong financial metrics and a sound, you know, financial position, which means that we are now in a position to move forward.
The great thing, you know, that we think and what we see, you know, with this strategy and with the team is it's in our hands, you know. We have done it. We have done the change in difficult market conditions and we will continue to drive it. With that, I say thank you for now and Johnny.
Perfect. Thank you very much, Ole, for giving us this update on the New Heights program and how to elevate the group to a new level. Now let's move on to the next presenter that will give us more details about the group financials, our CFO, Sylvain Grange. Welcome.
Thank you very much, Johnny. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm very happy to take you through some key financial data today and to show how our strategy has translated and translates into numbers.
This is an overview of our business split by division and by geography. Starting with the geographies, Europe, Middle East, and Africa make roughly 48% of our total business, and then we refer to rolling 12 months order intake by the end of Q3 2024. So Europe, Middle East, a little bit less than half of our business, and in that region, the three main countries are France, the U.K., and Germany. The Americas make a little bit a third, roughly a third, and in that region, obviously, the U.S. is the heavyweight, the U.S. being the biggest country for the group. APAC is 20%, and the number one country in that region is Australia. If we look at the split by division, overall, it's well balanced, each division contributing significantly to the group.
As indicated by Ole, we have customer-centric divisions focused on their customer segments, on their customer end applications, and it's interesting to see what's the end application exposure of each division. Wind is exposed to Wind. Industrial is exposed to industry, yes, but has a wider range of end applications, so again, industrial segments, but some other segments like energy, telecom, ports, maritime. Safety Productivity Solutions is the most diversified division we have. It serves a very wide range of end applications via the distribution network, which is primarily its direct customers. Construction is mostly exposed to construction, as Facade Access is, although Facade Access has a growing exposure to infrastructure. We have a business which is fairly diversified for a group of our size. We are diversified in terms of products, again, geographies, customer segments, and applications, and that obviously brings resilience to our activity.
Let's now move to profitability, and we are showing here the rolling 12 months adjusted EBITDA performance three years ago and today. We have been on an uplift journey in the last three years, and I think we can say we have improved all parts of our business. Three years ago, Facade Access was a clear underperformer, and the division has embarked into a comprehensive transformation program, which is paying, and that is really what is behind the margin uplift, and we see potential for further improvement. Construction has conducted many changes as well in those three years, has widened its product offering, has developed a market approach which is much more solution-based, but the impact of all those actions and changes have been overcompensated by the very soft market, so in effect, the EBITDA margin has slightly degraded over that period, so we are not happy with that.
But we trust we are in a good position to take the full benefit of the market rebound which we expect in the course of next year. Height Safety and Productivity Solutions were not existing within the Alimak Group three years ago. It was brought to our group via the Tractel acquisition. But it has a history of, I would say, recurring high level of profit and cash flow generation, and we see it continuing in the future. Industrial is a relatively young division. It was created roughly four years ago at the start of the New Heights program. Before that time, it was together with construction in some sort of rack and pinion product division. And that autonomy has enabled the division to focus on its products, its customers, and we see the impact on the volumes and the margin uplift.
As far as Wind is concerned, Wind has been evolving in a relatively difficult market, selling primarily to loss-making OEMs. But it has done the right thing. It has made the right decisions. It has terminated a low-margin business, which was the tower internals. It has developed a very lean and dedicated structure to that industry. And it's basically a turnaround. We are moving from a level of margin which was not satisfactory to something we like today. So a good journey, but a journey which is not over. And we see again potential for further improvement in the future. I'm presenting here the profitability evolution over the same three-year period, but from a different angle, looking at the gross margin and the SG&A as a percentage of revenue. Over that time, gross margin has increased from below 34% to today above 40%.
It's a result on the one hand of the work we do on cost of sales, which means we permanently work on the cost of the products, the solutions to make sure it is at the right level. More generally, we work on the cost base, general cost base on the footprint. When there are some painful decisions to be made, such as the closure of the German facility in the Facade Access division, we take those decisions to make sure that we have the right level of costs. On the other hand, we have been working on making sure we value our products and our services to the market, and we get the proper pricing for that value. It's very basic to some extent. We work on the cost of sales, we work on the pricing, and we uplift the gross margin.
At the same time, if you look at SG&A, we have had a fairly stable SG&A as a percentage of revenue, between 22%-24%. Again, we have been working on the cost base. We do some cost optimization, some cost cutting, but it's not only that. We invest as well in the things which we feel are important to build the future of this company. So we take on expenses in R&D, in product development. We had some additional sales forces in those geographies where we want to grow. We invest in digital. So we try to eliminate the waste, and we try to take on the costs which are important for our future. So it's more cost effectiveness than just cost controlling and cost cutting. And basically, with that, we have moved our EBITDA below 13% to today close to 17%.
And as Ole said, taking Q3 alone, we were at 17.8%. I'd like to focus a moment on service, which is a very important part of our business. We have grown service to roughly SEK 2.6 billion of revenue by the end of Q3 this year, rolling 12 months again. This is 37% of our business. It is important because service is not exposed to any business cycle. Service is driven by the install base of equipment, which is mechanically increasing over time, and is driven by the way or the coverage and the way we serve that install base. And that is clearly another resilience engine for the group, not exposed to business cycles. But beyond that, we see more and more service as a competitive advantage for new equipment sale as well. Our customers look at the total cost of operations.
They look at the life cycle of the assets they own. They want to have sustainable solutions, and that means they are more and more sensitive to providers like us who are able to focus on availability and quality of service, and if you look at the group in general, we see, looking ahead, potential for growth in service. It's a bit different for HSPS because HSPS is selling OpEx products. So there is a bit less potential for forgoing service, but in general, we see good potential for the future. I'm now coming to a topic which is close to my heart, cash generation. This is the history of the last three years. It looks a little bit of a bumpy ride, but in the end, it's fairly simple. In 2022, we increased working capital and partly to address the supply chain issues.
We had to increase inventory. That increase was reversed in 2023, which led to very high cash flows. And this year, we are back to more normal levels. But beyond those lows and highs, we have a CapEx-like model. We do design all of our products. We manufacture most of our products, but we don't do heavy manufacturing. This is light manufacturing. This is final assembly. And so we have a CapEx-like model. We trust we can be around 2% of revenue, maybe a bit more, but that's the order of magnitude. To generate cash, we focus a lot as well on working capital management. And for us, that focus is really on cash collection, invoicing schedules for project businesses, inventory optimization. We don't play with suppliers. We have a policy of paying our suppliers on time. So it's really all about accounts receivable and inventories.
We are at 24% of revenue today. Again, that's something which we are comfortable with. We will try to be better in the future, but it will be stable or slightly improving. Looking ahead, it will continue to be a key priority for us. Strong cash flows mean fast deleveraging. We are today at 2.1 of leverage, and this is on target. We want to be below 2.5. We are below 2.5, and looking at capital allocation, we invest. We will continue investing in product portfolio and operational efficiency. M&A is a priority for us. As mentioned by Ole, we live in a fragmented world. We see opportunities in all divisions. We have a dedicated team, and we have a growing following, so it's an important piece for us, M&A, for sure, and we plan to deliver according to dividend policy, which is 40%-60% of our net earnings.
Ultimately, it's a board proposal to the AGM, but we want to be in a position to be able to deliver on that policy. ROCE is a very important metric for us. It's typically a metric we use when we assess the value of any potential acquisition, and with the work we do on profitability, the expectation we have to further improve profitability, we foresee that ROCE is going to go upwards in the future, so in that short session, I've tried to present some of the key levers we pull to create shareholder value, working on cost effectiveness, making the right CapEx decisions, focusing on working capital management, making us confident that we will achieve the financial targets, and I'm referring in particular to the EBITDA margin. We will be above 18%. I'm referring to fast deleveraging and, again, our commitment to deliver on the dividend policy.
Our financial discipline has created the dry powder to make targeted acquisitions. And we trust this is a good way as well to create additional share value, as we have done with the Tractel Acquisition. On that, I say thank you very much.
Okay, thank you, Sylvain. And now to our next speaker that will address an important part of our growth strategy, which is the digitalization journey. Here to present it is our CTO, Charlotte Brogren.
Thank you very much, Johnny. And you heard Sylvain said it's very close to his heart to collect money. And now I will talk about something that is very close to my heart: investing the money into something that will make us even further competitive going forward.
As many other machine builders, Alimak has spent, or used to spend most of the money in R&D in mechanical development and electrical development to drive innovation and deliver value to our customers. With the New Heights program, we took a strategic decision to complement the competencies we have in mechanical and electrical engineering with also digital competencies. I'm now very proud for you to present some of the examples that this global team has been able to accomplish. Before giving these examples, I would like you to listen to some of the voices from our customers about the value we create.
With over 4,000 connected machines worldwide, Alimak leads the way toward a safer, smarter future. Our digital solutions enhance safety, streamline timelines, and provide valuable insights. For Ramirent in Norway, it's all about safety.
The most important thing for us is that everyone working on site returns safely to their loved ones each day. Alimak's QR codes make daily inspections easy, shares Daniel Scherer. In the U.K., BIM collaboration means precision and efficiency. Quick BIM meetings with Alimak kept tight deadlines on track, enabling real-time adjustments and consistent updates for all stakeholders, building trust and preventing delays. For Cramo in Sweden, the My Alimak platform delivers key insights. Data helps us improve, from managing deliveries to understanding load on elevators. Statistics and data on material transport are truly underestimated, says Harald Sundin. With Skanska, Alimak's AliCalc technology is driving smarter project planning. AliCalc is essential for quoting and planning with clients, allowing us to quickly generate new calculations and manage frequent changes with ease, says Thomas at Skanska Rental.
From connected platforms and insightful data to advanced planning tools, Alimak's digital solutions are built to meet our customers' unique needs and challenges.
So the main objective of this initiative is to increase the customer value over the whole life cycle, from finding the right product, installing the product in the right way, using the product, and of course, maintaining the product over the whole life cycle, as well as taking care of it when it's end of life. While providing more value to our customers, we also use digital technologies to further make ourselves more effective, automating processes, having access to data, and becoming more data-driven in our daily decision-making.
If we start with finding the right product, BIM, Building Information Modeling, is a technology that is being used more and more to handle the life cycle of information for larger, complex projects in the Infrastructure Sector, Industrial Sector, and in Construction. And with BIM, the project owner can, in one model, have control of everything that happens and simulate the whole project, both in terms of geometry, space, how things happen, as well as over time, as well as having knowledge about how much material the project is using, energy consumption, and so forth. And in order for us to be part of this very important trend, we, of course, also have to provide our 3D models, our BIM models of our equipment.
By that, we will allow our customers to easily and fast design our solutions into their design, as well as simulate the combination of different models into finding the most optimal solution for their application. That can be optimal from a productivity perspective, logistics, as well as from sustainability. For us, as a group, it's not just that we offer the models to our customers, but this is a very important tool for us to move upstream when it comes to customer contacts, for actually seeing that when potential customers are downloading the models, we will get notification about projects that might not even be known on the open market. As part of our sustainability agenda, as you heard from Ole, we are increasing our efforts for refurb and offer used machines again to the market.
By adding new technologies by our experts, we can extend the lifetime and create further customer values, and we have therefore also launched our own new online marketplace to offer these machines for new and existing customers all around the globe, and with this, it's also a key benefit for us because this enables us as a group to take one step closer to circularity in our business models. Designing a machine, you need to have knowledge about mechanics, electrical, and control, and control, you can say, is the brain of a machine that tells when the machine is going to start and when it's going to stop, and more and more, the brain, the software, will become increasingly of importance in order to add more functions in terms of usability, safety, and operational flexibility. Just a few years ago, we didn't have this knowledge in-house.
What was also done here a few years back was that we acquired one of our suppliers of control systems. That supplier has been the supplier of control systems to all products produced out of the Skellefteå factory for the last 20 years. This means that we now own this IP of a large installed base, which is very important for our after-sales business, but we also get access to a technology platform that we can leverage across the group. One example of leveraging just that technology into other sectors is in the area of Wind. Of course, you get a lot of better functionality of the wind service lifts by having software-based controls, but you also get benefits on a system level. The owner of the wind parks can then access the Wind lifts remotely.
They can have control of the usage and thereby also optimize when and how to do maintenance of the service lifts. That is very important to enable that, to make sure to take strategic decisions when to shut down the wind parks in order to do the maintenance, and this will have, by doing this in a more optimal way, significant impact both on the operational cost as well as on the environment by avoiding or being able to produce more clean energy from the parks. Safety is another super important part of our DNA, and of course, all our products are designed for safety, and they are also certified to all relevant standards, but no matter how well you design a product, if it's not used in the right way, there can always be a likelihood of something happening that shouldn't be happening.
We have therefore complemented our safe products with different types of applications that will help to handle it. It should be easy to handle the product in the right way. Even before installation, during installation, we have interactive installation guides easily accessible. We have availability of digital logs so that you can ensure that the very important daily inspections have been made. Of course, if the machine also is connected, the customers can have remote control and see the usage and identify if something is happening that shouldn't be happening. Then service. You know, service is a very important part of our business, and it's also a key action in order for us to further improve our Scope 3 carbon footprint. Our service organization is instrumental to maintain the value across the whole lifetime of our products.
Traditionally, in our sector, the service is done on a planned scheme in terms of every quarter, every second year, or whatever. As you can understand, as we operate very widely, the wear and tear of critical parts depends very much on the usage of the machines, on the loads, and also on the surrounding environment in terms of heat, cold, ice, snow, windy, and whatever. That's why we have a clear ambition to move from a planned maintenance scheme to more of a condition-based maintenance scheme to do service when it's really needed. The key technology to take that step is machine learning. For machine learning, you need to have access to data.
And that's why, again, it's super important that we own the IP of our controls, that we have digital logs of the service being made, that we can check the usage of the machines, and all of that, we are then applying algorithms to make us become more proactive in the service that we provide. Making this happen, of course, we have invested in people, new competencies, but digitalization is very much about the change. You can't do that alone. So we have acquired companies. We have also made a partnership with a smaller startup company which is providing a digital tool for field service management. And of course, we need to collaborate with the whole ecosystem. Ole gave a very good example of what we're doing in the area of construction because this is really a collaboration across the whole supply chain that will enable us to move forward.
And last but not least, the investment here is in a broad technology platform that all the divisions can utilize. We provide the digital tools, the divisions provide the data, the knowledge about the applications, and together it delivers a lot of value. So to sum up, we are and we intend to be the technology leaders also going forward. And with this investment now in a new digital platform, we'll enable us to stay competitive. We should further improve the customer value across the whole value chain. We will continue to work on safety, increase productivity, and lower the carbon footprint of our customers as well as of our own operations. So stay tuned. The journey has just started. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Charlotte. You will stay on stage now since we will host our first Q&A session.
And also on stage, I would like to invite the previous speakers, Ole and Sylvain. Just as a reminder, for those of you that are on the webcast, please submit your questions through the chat function. And in the audience, raise your hand and you will be handed a microphone. Please, Ole and Sylvain. One question from Timo. Yeah.
Timo, from Handelsbanken. I mean, the obvious question is about the U.S. tariffs. What kind of risk do you see there? I mean, can you talk about your U.S. exposure by business lines and about the competition landscape and where you have a local competition, but you are not producing locally? So where do you see the biggest risks?
Yeah, of course, very up-to-date question these days. If we take Wind first, Wind, we produce everything we sell in the U.S. So for Wind, there is no risk.
If you look at the other divisions, we are not really producing heavily in the U.S., but we can't say either that we have a significant competition inside the U.S. So that means in practice that we will all be in the same boat. So really, we don't see a fundamental big risk with the tariffs for us, you know, versus competition. If it happens, you know, we will have to adapt, but it will be some sort of thing that happens also to our competitors. With the exception of Wind, as I say, you know, where we actually do produce inside the U.S., what we sell in the U.S. today.
Okay, thanks. And then about the Tractel integration, do you still have some benefits? What do you expect coming in, or is it basically fully done and we see all benefits at the moment in your results?
No, but we still do have benefits to collect. You know, if you come back a little bit to what we said when we did the Tractel acquisition, it was a highly profitable, well-run company. And then you need to also make sure that you drive the integration activities accordingly. You know, and that's first and foremost to take care of what you have bought. So that was the core thing, you know, of the first time together. And then there are always synergies to it. We said we will collect by 2024 half of the cost sales synergies and by 2026 the rest of it. We see that we have done absolutely what we should have done by now 2024, but there is also more to come. So we have more to do on the cost and we have also some more to do on the sales side.
But I think this is the, let's say, the careful planning. So we are absolutely, I would say, if anything, we are ahead of plan with these activities. And what I'm most happy with is that we have kept the people. You know, that's really what makes the business.
Thank you.
Should I continue?
Maybe. Feel free.
Yeah, yeah. About the cost base by different business lines and especially about in the construction, I mean, is there something you can do to make it more flexible? We have seen quite volatile quarters in order intake and then sales. I mean, I know that you have talked about that, well, actions to make it more flexible, but where you are, can it be more flexible than today?
You want to?
Yes. So we did take some actions, Timo, in particular in our Polish factory.
We reduced the cost base there because we didn't have enough activity. I would say we permanently monitor our cost base to ensure that it's not too heavy compared to the volumes. But obviously, it's a fine line because we still want to keep certain costs typically in product development, in sales to prepare for the future. So on the one hand, you know, we control the cost base, we review it on a permanent basis, and when we can and should make some adjustments, we make them as we did in the beginning of the year. On the other hand, we don't want to cut everything and then to be without resources when the market comes back. So that's really what we are trying to monitor, and it's not easy. It's a challenge, to be clear.
Thanks. I have one question for you, Charlotte.
You talked about influencing the entire ecosystem when it comes to installation of our products. Could you elaborate a little bit more on what are the possibilities when it comes to increasing safety through digitalization?
Yeah, it should be easy to handle machines and use the machines in the right way, and thereby we need to make sure that the right information is available to the right person at the right time. We also can supervise much more about also, so that is one step. The other step is actually supervising, just like you have in your car. I often get a message, you are tired, you need to stop and take a coffee. And I keep telling my car, I don't drink coffee. But that kind of supervision is very easy as you are installing software-based controls in our machines.
Perfect.
I know that we are doing also work together with the unions, construction companies, etc. Could you tell us a little bit more about that, Ole?
Yeah, this was what I alluded to also in my presentation, and it's on the same topic. It's to ensure, you know, that we want to take a bigger scope. You know, and if you refer to it maybe from a sustainability perspective, we talk about Scope 3, you know, then you cover the whole thing. And we think the same way now on safety. So it's not enough just for us to provide a safe machine. We would like to ensure that actually the machine is installed safely and operated safely. And that, as I said, we can do with digital means. So you build in a functionality.
So it's not possible to start the machine after, you know, installing it without having people there that are trained and certified installers with a QR code, no, not a, you know, with a passcard, you know, or a code or something that needs to type in and do specific measures, you know, on the machine to start the machine. That functionality is there now, and that functionality we also do have on the same side, on the operational side, you know, because you should do daily inspections, you should do weekly, monthly, and things like this, so also that, you know, that these things are done. If it's not done, the machine doesn't start, and that needs to be done again by people that are trained and certified by us.
We cannot dictate that to happen in the market, you know, because it's not our decision whether it's Skanska or NCC or, you know, Byggnads or, you know, if they put this as a requirement. But we work towards them now because we think they should put that as a requirement. That only certified, you know, people are managing these machines. Because we know if you are not, you know, today, actually, anyone can go and install the machine. It's no regulation for that today. So this is an important step to make, you know, this thing, this whole ecosystem more safe. And it's, of course, also something that we take responsibility and want to change. So we, as I said, next week, we have called for a meeting with all these stakeholders and we'll drive this.
You know, we will make them aware and we will push for them to make this type of calls. Because if they don't want to, you know, of course, they can take a competitive machine. So we, you know, we can't just say it's a must, but we have at least the functionality there.
Thank you. Any other question we have over there? Jenna?
Hello. This is Jenna from Berenberg Bank. Thank you for the presentation and thank you for taking my question. My question is around the construction division, and maybe this would be better answered by the EVP, but
David will be here on stage this afternoon if you feel that you want to address it to David in the next break, but it's up to you.
But maybe it goes back to what you said earlier about the sort of market size for the tower cranes and the scaffolding. Maybe you could just give us an idea of what percentage of current tower crane applications can be replaced by the products that Alimak has and likewise for scaffolding.
Yeah, I can't give you clear examples, you know, or explain in detail in which applications. I think the important thing is that we look upon that market as our market and that, you know, we all are basically, you know, in that market moving people or material safely at height or making sure that, you know, you can work at height safely.
We do have a lot of examples in many, many places, especially for mast climbing work platforms, you know, where these machines are more safe, they are more productive, you know, they cost less, you know, the total cost of the whole project, etc. So we have all of that statistics. I can't give you concrete examples now off the top of my head, but we have that. We have even built a calculator for our salespeople, you know, so they can actually do more of this because it's a change we are about to install in the organization. So this is not something that really has happened yet, you know, but it's something that we are now really wanting to change in, let's say, the years to come.
Okay, thank you. That's very helpful.
Thank you.
We have actually a couple of more questions on Wind and construction, but we'll save it for later because we have both EVPs here with us today. So we'll address that in the final Q&A session. So a question on M&A. Is there any specific markets or segments that you are looking at? Could you explain the pipeline?
You know, as we have said before, it's a very fragmented market and basically it is like that for all divisions. So we look for opportunities in all segments today. In all divisions, we have opportunities. The funnel is there and it's related to products, you know, but it varies from division to division a little bit, of course. You know, it's related to services. It can be technology and also maybe geography. So we look for all these things.
To Timo's question, you know, we are not really looking for more big manufacturing facilities. You know, we feel that we don't want to become more heavy. So we are also, you know, yeah, careful about, you know, what we bring in. We want to stay true to our financial metrics. You know, so looking at what Sylvain showed you today is fundamental to us when we evaluate acquisition opportunities. So it needs to be something that are, you know, meaningful and give you comfort that we are true to the story we are saying, you know. So it's profitable, good companies or something that will obviously provide good value and, you know, help us meet our targets.
Perfect. And Sylvain, are you happy with the leverage we have today or could it be increased if we find an interesting target?
I think first it could be decreased and we would decrease it because we deleverage, we generate cash flows. But yes, you know, so our target is to be below 2.5. So we try to stay within that 2.5. You know, if we make acquisitions, we could, you know, temporarily overshoot the 2.5 if we find a very good acquisition. But that would mean we would come back to 2.5 very fast. That's more or less the framework in which we work.
Very good.
Can I ask about the acquisitions? I mean, looking at your share, what kind of multiple it is trading. So do you feel that you have a strong currency to do the acquisitions? I mean, can you find companies to buy which are kind of, you have to pay lower than your own share is trading?
Yes.
Yes.
No, yeah, I mean, it's so I think it's, you know, what we see. So maybe the thing to be said is that today we focus more on small and mid-size type of targets. You know, we are not planning to make another Tractel tomorrow morning. And in that space, we see opportunities with reasonable multiples to address your question a bit differently. Yes, we do.
Thanks.
Yeah. And also, you know, talking about financial metrics, as I said, you know, if it doesn't, we don't do it.
Good.
We actually have another question on M&A as well. Partially, it has already been answered, but what qualities are Alimak looking for in acquisitions when it comes to profitability, service share, etc.? And the multiples, what's reasonable to pay? We already addressed that, but yeah.
I think it's basically what we already talked about, you know.
It needs to be quality companies. We are looking for quality. It's better to buy something which is well-managed and a good solid business model and everything, you know, and take that in, take care of it and continue to grow it. That really do turn around cases. And as I said, you know, we have tried to build this type of, you know, resilient, sustainable business, you know, and we don't want to destroy that with making a bad acquisition. So it's important to us that we are careful in what we do in that respect. So we also have control over that.
Very good. No further questions. So with that, we'll have a short break and we will be back again at 3:35 P.M. And for those of you in the room, there will be some refreshments. So please help yourselves. Restrooms are one floor down. Thank you.
Welcome back, everyone, to the second half of our program today, this afternoon. Our next speaker will give us an update on the Facade Access Transformation program, and just a quick reminder, there will be a short Q&A with Philippe after his presentation, so prepare your questions already now. Please welcome on stage, Philippe.
Good afternoon, everybody. Very happy to be here. Last time I was on stage was June 23, more or less six months after the Tractel acquisition, and I was presenting at the time the start of the transformation program that we were going to deliver as part of the Facade Access division. I'm very happy to give you an update today of where we stand on the transformation and, even more importantly, where we're going in future years, so having said that, let's go immediately to some reminders of what is Facade Access today.
We have an interesting set of slides here. First thing is we offer a very wide range of products and solutions to the construction and the infrastructure market. Very wide range because it goes from very simple anchor type solutions to medium complexity, mobile gantries or davits to very high complexity, very bespoke, highly engineered products such as the Sydney Harbour Bridge project we are about to deliver. That's the first thing. Very wide range of products and solutions we can offer. The second thing is we are diversified geographically. Americas and Europe more or less 40% each of our business, APAC 20%. The last interesting point here is that we are running at about 40% of our business as reported in Q3 in services.
So the service element is growing as part of our total sales, which is, as far as I'm concerned, very good news. And we'll come back to the service element of our business because it is one of the key points of the strategy going forward with our RR R strategy. So we followed in Facade Access the New Heights program that Ole reminded us of since four years ago. We actually are going through the same steps. The first step was establishing the base in 2023. And what did we do in 2023? We looked at everything. We looked at the way we sell. We looked at our channels to market. We looked at the way we tender for projects. We certainly examined in detail how we project manage these projects, make or buy decisions, services delivery. So we looked at everything.
The transformation program we embarked upon was really focused on those four key elements that are on the board. The first one was about reorganization of our teams. We did two things here. We regionalized. We have three regions, again, Europe, North America, and APAC. That gave us close proximity with our markets, proximity with our teams, also proximity with our competitors. A lot of our competitors are local. It gave us proximity on the service side. We reinforced management and we regionalized it. The second thing we did on reorganization was to specialize our units. We have specialized units in delivery of new equipment, and we have specialized units in delivery of services. The markets there are not the same. On the new equipment, we essentially sell to EPC contractors involved in the construction business, involved in the infrastructure business.
In the services, we deal with building owners, infrastructure owners, facility managers, so not the same end customers and not the same competencies we need to have in those teams, so these are the two reorganization elements we did in 2023, and then it was all about discipline. Discipline is the word I like to use a lot with my teams. It's discipline on the tendering side, so make sure we take on the jobs we want, and those jobs need to have a certain level of margins. They need to have a certain level of contingencies. They need to have certain terms and conditions, and if they don't have that, we will leave those jobs to competition, and we will wish our competition good luck, so it's discipline on the tendering.
And really, in our line of business, which is really contracting, the moment you sign a contract, it's 50% of the story is there. So we spend a lot of time on tendering and making sure we get the jobs we want. Of course, the second part of the story is the project management execution. So the second 50 other percent, whether we get the margin we want, sometimes higher, is all about project management, project management, contract management, including in services. So we spent a lot of time in 2023 and also some time in 2024 making sure all the teams had those skills on the tendering side and on the project management side. The last element of establishing the base in 2023 and beginning of 2024 was about the manufacturing footprint. And I'll come back to that next slide. Manufacturing footprint was a hard decision for us.
I actually come from a business Tractel which didn't have any manufacturing inside. We were sourcing our machines outside and integrating them, so we took a hard look at make versus buy. We took a hard look at our cost base. We had two manufacturing units, and we decided and we announced in December 2023 that we would be closing our German assembly site. Here were the expected savings and one-off costs that we announced to the market again in December 2023. We have closed the Mammendorf site. We have retained, of course, the brand, so Manntech brand exists in the market and will continue to exist. We have retained the engineering, which is the core of what we were selling, the design of these machines, but the assembly has been transferred to Madrid. Today, there are no more machines that are being manufactured out of Germany.
All of them have been transferred to Madrid, and I'm very proud to say, and I wish in all my career I could have had such projects every time, but we're looking at, if you take the capital gain expectation that we expect from selling of the land and the building, we're looking at less than a year payback on an industrial project. Again, I wish all my projects along my rather long career could have been as good as this one, so I'm very pleased with the outcome of this project, and I'm very pleased with how the European team, in particular, delivered this, so where do we stand today? Having set the base, well, two things here. First of all, we've stabilized the order intake. This is 12 months rolling, so we've stabilized the order intake at around SEK 1.8 billion.
Of course, the quality of these orders we are taking in today are much better than the orders that we inherited back end of 2022. So the order backlog is of a much better quality. Therefore, we'll deliver much better results in the future. The second thing, of course, is the EBITDA, which, and again, this is on a 12-month rolling basis, which is now 9.2% as of Q3. When we published Q3 for that quarter, it's 11.5%. So for sure, we had to run through our P&L some of the legacy projects that were in the backlog back end of 2022, and we've run them through 2023. We're running them through 2024. They are nearly all gone. There's a little tail of those in 2025. And I'm sure that would have been one of the questions you probably wanted to ask me later on.
But so most of these projects are gone. There is a little tail in 2025 of these legacy jobs. And the legacy jobs had lower margins and lower contingencies. But we're basically running the vast majority of these jobs in this year. So where does that leave us for the future? We've established the base. We've restructured our manufacturing footprint. We are starting to see the margin improvement. We're starting to see the EBITDA improvement. So the next phase will all be about profitable growth. Again, very much along the same lines as the group program. Five key elements. I'll go through every one of them. First one is we need to sell all our product portfolio and not just BMUs, all our product portfolios in all the geographies in which we're present with our sales force. And it does sound like a mundane statement. Actually, it isn't.
Some of our teams were used to selling just BMUs. We need them to sell the low complexity products, the davits and the pedestals and those sorts of lower risk, high margin products. We need them to sell that. So we're going to continue pushing in every single one of those markets in which we are, and we're basically present 40% North America, 40% Europe, 20% APAC. We're going to continue pushing selling of those low complexity products because we know these bring lower risks and higher margins. The next four, I'll go into a little bit more detail. We have a clear strategy around what we call RR R. I'll come back to that around service. We are pushing out some innovation on design as well. We clearly are a player in the infrastructure market, growing infrastructure market, and we'll talk a little bit about innovation.
Let me go through each one of those. Pillar number one. This is an introduction to what we really mean by our services strategy. If you look at how much our clients are spending initially versus the total cost of ownership of these assets, it's that sort of ratio. For the BMUs, the large complex machine, you're talking a one-to-one ratio. They'll spend about as much initially as they'll spend throughout the course of the life of that asset. If you're talking simpler products like the davits, the monorails, the tie-backs, the ratio is more like four to one. Hence, our focus on that segment of the market as well. Smaller projects, less risky, high margin. On top of that, we do a lot more value throughout the life of those assets.
Really, to keep it very simple, and we had a little discussion during one of the breaks about strategy being simple. This is very simple. We just want to be throughout the life of these assets that are on the ground. We want to be present everywhere. We want to be present throughout the life of these assets. We want to do the services. We want to do the refurbishments. When those assets come to the end of their life, we want to be there for the replacement. That's the basis of the RR R strategy. What does R R stand for? It's about Refurbishment, Retrofit, and Replacement. Refurbishment is regular maintenance, inspection and maintenance on a regular basis. Retrofit is deeper maintenance. You will be exchanging modules. You'll change the drives, the control systems.
You do quite a lot more work on the machine to enhance its operations, to possibly enhance its safety. Replacement is what it is. You actually, it's come to the end of its life and you're replacing it. We have substantially more than 10,000 assets on the ground in those different geographies. And we have service teams in all of these geographies. So that's the lowest hanging fruit for us by a long distance. So we need to be present throughout the life of these assets, including up to replacement. And of course, that's a sustainable business. We're pushing and extending the life of these assets and replacing them at the end. A couple of examples, recent examples that we published as part of Q3. One was the iconic The Shard building in London where we replaced hydraulic cylinders on the 87th floor.
I was there a few months back. You have a very nice view over London on the 87th floor. That's really a retrofit operation. The second one is closer to home, Radio France, where there were 45-year-old Manntech machines on the rooftop of that building. We actually took them down, brought them back to Spain, had them completely retrofitted. We kept only the metal frame. Everything else was changed and put them back into place. Now, that's sustainability at work. These machines are going to be operating for at least 10, maybe 20 more years than the 45 years I was born at that time, but then the 45 years that they've already been operating. We are there until the end, and then we extend for another 20 years these assets. Second area, and this is innovation in services.
I need to be a little bit technical here for a minute. How do our clients source these products, this equipment? The first thing they'll do is they'll ask an engineering firm or a Facade Access consultant to do a design for them. Those designs can be fairly basic. They can be conceptual, or they can be quite detailed. Then after that work has been done, they'll tender it out as part of the package, and we'll respond to that tender and we'll hopefully win the job. What do we do with the design that the consultants have created? Nothing. We will redo entirely the design. Because the consultants will never rubber stamp his design and say, "This is the design.
You need to do this as per." They will say, "It's a design, but it's your option to offer something else." So we will redo the design entirely. What that means is that the client is paying twice the design. So what we're offering to the market is we will do the design, dear client, as a self-standing package. And by the way, we've structured this as a P&L. We have a general manager in America that deals with this. So we will do the design work, and it'll be SEK 2 million. And at the end, you will decide whether you give us the job for execution and we will build and install this machine, or whether you want to tender it out. And you'll have multiple offers, and maybe we'll get the machine, or maybe we won't.
Now, of course, the benefit to the client is double. He wins on the design phase, so the planning is reduced by three to six months, and he doesn't have to pay twice the design. He just pays it once with us if he chooses us for the machine. Now, we've introduced this back end of 2023. It's picking up like wildfire. We have a lot of clients that like this. Again, for those two key benefits, it reduces the time to source and reduces the cost because, again, no doubling of the engineering. I'm not going to say exactly what our conversion rate, so how many of these jobs we offer, how many do we get, but it's substantially higher than our hit rate for normal business. So it's a win-win. The client wins, we win.
The idea is, of course, to roll this out outside of North America, starting with the U.K. and then pushing it out to the rest of Europe and APAC. Very happy with this development. Another pillar, of course, is infrastructure. I mean, you've all read as I have the investment that needs to be carried out in infrastructure. We like things that are tall or deep. So we're talking bridges, we're talking nuclear power plants, we're talking energy assets, we're talking shafts in tunnels. That's what we like. And here's a couple of examples. Gordie Howe Bridge, a big stay-cable bridge between the U.S. and Canada, huge asset for which we're doing a number of work, including the underbridge maintenance gantry and Houston Ship Channel Bridge as well, which are two ongoing projects. So these are two very good projects. I'll give you an example of an energy.
This is the ITER. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it correctly. Maybe it's ITER, International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Cadarache in France, where we are providing a bespoke works platform for the welding of the inner core, so very technical, but again, we have all the tools necessary to provide solutions to our clients in that field. Infrastructure work is extremely interesting. It's a booming market. It is also a highly specialized market, which means we have specialist teams within Facade Access division taking care of these projects. These are not projects that you could give any sort of engineering group and tell them to run with it. The end client is usually a public client, so it needs special care, and we have the teams to do that.
Very specialized engineering work, but also a very specialized way of dealing with the project execution and the contract management with such clients. So very happy with the development here. We have high order intake in Q3, as you have probably seen, thanks in particular to the infrastructure work we're doing. Last but not least, driving innovation. Our engineers are occupied at two things at the moment. First one sounds a little bit mundane as well, but we absolutely need to do it. We have three brands, Tractel, Manntech, CoxGomyl, three different types of machines. We need to make sure all the subcomponents, subassemblies of those three brands are optimized, are harmonized. We don't want three different drives. We don't want three different control systems.
We want to make sure we get the full benefit of having these three machines sitting on similar components on which we can drive cost competitiveness and therefore drive cost competitiveness on the overall machines, so they're occupied doing that, but we're still introducing innovation in the marketplace as well. That's one example, which is our multi-axis control BMU. Basically, it's the difference between a fishing rod, so a telescopic arm just going straight or an arm with knuckles, so you can imagine that sort of system is much more versatile in terms of how it can get the swing stage into the proper position, particularly if space is constrained. We tend to use this system. This system is IP protected. It has a lot of other benefits, such as less weight, therefore less carbon footprint, and it's very easy to operate.
So we're very proud with this innovation, which we've introduced to the market a few months ago, and hopefully it'll have the success it needs. Concluding remark, again, looking back at where we were in June 2023, I'm pleased with what the team has accomplished. This is a teamwork. This is all about people having the right managers and the right teams in the right place, knowing what they need to do. So leadership in practice. We're well on our way. It's not over yet at all. I think the regional management structure, being closer to the markets, closer to our teams, closer to our competitive situation, closer to the clients, as well as separating out the services business versus the new equipment projects business, was a very good idea, and we implemented it correctly. We have the enablers.
We've just launched the new marketing Facade Access solution site, representing the three brands. I've just talked to you about the innovation. So it's all about three things: execution, execution, and execution. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Philippe. And you can stay on stage because we will have some questions for you as well.
You're absolutely right.
So don't leave. Yeah, please, Jenna.
Hello. Jenna from Berenberg again with another question. Thank you very much for your presentation and congratulations on the very impressive set of initiatives and results that you've achieved in the Facade Access division.
Thank you.
So on the financial side, we've seen order intake kind of stabilize at around 1.8 billion SEK, as you mentioned in your presentation. But this is bearing in mind the kind of difficult construction market environment that we're in right now. If, say, a construction recovery were to happen in 2025, how do you foresee growth in the order intake under more normal market conditions?
I mean, I see it great. I hope and wish it comes as early as possible. What we have done is really, first of all, increase the services proportion. So our business in services has reached 40%, and that's never been done in the Facade Access business. And I'm very pleased with that for all the reasons that I think Sylvain mentioned earlier and Ole as well. Growing our services business is important for Facade Access. Second thing is, of course, we are developing these other offerings, in particular in infrastructure, and the infrastructure business is a growing business for us. Again, we're careful about this business. We don't want to go too fast. We don't want to overstretch our capabilities, but we know this is a growth factor for us as long as we are able to deliver good projects and good profitability.
So we are positive and bullish on the infrastructure segment. And then the rest, of course, is, as you rightly mentioned, had some headwinds. Similar to David in the construction division, we're poised at the minute this market picks up, it's going to be we're opening up the champagne bottle.
Very good. And maybe a bit on the infrastructure push. Will you be happy to disclose, maybe give us an idea of what is the share of revenues that come from infrastructure right now?
I personally would be happy, but I don't believe Ole and Sylvain would, so I think I will not disclose anything.
Okay, that's fair enough. And maybe just one last question from me on sort of any risks going into 2025, because I believe there is still a tail end of lower margin projects in the order book. Do you foresee any risks of that being delayed into 2026, or should we see most of that?
No, I don't. I think most of that, and again, it's a tail end. Our projects usually last 18 months to two years, sometimes a bit longer. So yes, those projects that were in the backlog at the beginning of the project, back end of 2022 and 2022, where we pushed through the P&L 2023, 2024, there's a small proportion that will remain in 2025, and my guess is nothing in 2026. So yes, we have a little bit, but again, it's a small minority.
Okay, thank you very much.
About those legacy projects in your backlog, I mean, is there a risk that you won't push them out to clean the backlog for 2025 and we see higher cost in the fourth quarter? And you try to complete the projects by the year end?
No, that's not.
Sometimes we see that.
Yeah, no, that's not how we operate at all. No, no, the projects, it's on a percentage of completion accounting. We're in the contracting business. Contracting is all about managing risks, having provisions, and delivering good projects for our clients. Yeah, no, this would not happen.
Thanks.
If I understand your question correctly.
Hi, Henrik. And the order backlog then and the order intake, is it generally fewer and larger projects going from here and forward, or smaller and more?
I would separate the answer into two segments, which are quite different. One is the regular construction market segment, where we deploy all these solutions that I've just mentioned, and the second one is the infrastructure market. On the first one, the push is really to have as much as possible of the lower complexity, so it's smaller projects, less risky, simpler solutions, and to push that percentage, to push those projects, so to try and answer your question, on the construction side, I would say it's more of smaller, higher margin, less risk. On the infrastructure side, that is not the case. The infrastructure side tends to be somewhat larger types of jobs, which is why we have specific teams that are dedicated to delivering these projects, and when I mean delivering, these are self-standing units.
The only thing they do in the Houston Ship Channel Bridge project is the Houston Ship Channel Bridge project. That's the only thing they do. Project managers, engineers, manufacturing units, installation supervisors, the only thing they do is they take care of one project because they are important, they are sufficiently big. So that's how we manage the risk of these projects. I don't know if I answered your question.
Yeah, very good. Thanks. And in general then, are there a larger portion of fixed price projects or a smaller portion going forward?
Again, sorry, I didn't mention the services side. Services is different from everything we've just mentioned. If you look at new equipment projects, most of our projects are fixed price. Part of our work is making sure we extract the maximum value, while delivering great value to our customers, but we extract the maximum value out of these projects. Hence, the project management and the contract management skills that we need to have to make sure we get variation orders for additional work, we get variation orders for extension of times, we get variation orders because things have happened, and we're in a great position to negotiate and get more value out of our services from our clients.
Even though most of our projects are lump sum fixed price projects, we get a proportion of our sales from those negotiations and contract management type discussions with our client, and therefore are able to increase the size of these projects profitably. Again, nothing I'm saying is for those of you who know about the contracting world. This is very traditional, nothing special, but we have to do it, and we have to do it professionally.
Thanks.
We have another question here at the front.
Thank you. So you're obviously doing a lot of good things, and the margins are coming, picking up in Facade Access, which is.
They are not where I want them to be, but we're in the right direction.
Exactly. I think when you joined, you were fairly confident that you should be able to, there was no reason Alimak, the legacy part of Facade Access, shouldn't be able to make the margins that Tractel was making in this area. Is that still your conviction, and maybe you can elaborate a little bit.
It's my conviction. It was my conviction at the time. It's still my conviction. We joined two teams that had been competitors to each other for a long time. So that took a little bit of time. I found great things in the legacy Alimak team as well. So it's not as if one party was bringing everything to the table and the other, nothing. Absolutely, that's absolutely not the case in terms of geographical scope. In terms of services, the Alimak legacy team was much better than the Tractel legacy team. So we're joining forces. We are a much stronger team today than any of the two teams were initially in terms of competencies, scope, everything that I've described, spectrum of solutions that we can deliver. So now it's about, again, it's about execution and making sure we rise up to the levels that I found particularly achievable.
We're very competitive. I don't like, and nobody in the Facade Access team likes being bottom of the class in terms of profitability when I saw Sylvain's table earlier. We're competitive. We work in the construction industry. Our clients are general contractors. We are competitive. I don't think this. I maintain my view on that.
Good. Thank you.
Perfect. No further questions, so thank you very much, Philippe.
Thank you.
We are moving on to our next presenter, which is Jens Holmberg, that will present and explore the growth opportunities that we see in the industrial division. Please welcome on stage, Jens.
Thank you very much, Johnny. Good to see all of you. Great to be here. We're happy to present an update of the Industrial division. I guess I'm the newest kid on the block. I've been with the group for about one year. I have an industrial background. Prior to joining Alimak, I spent nine years with Sandvik, primarily working in the mining infrastructure and construction segment. Enough about me. Let's focus on the industrial division. I think first, looking back over the last three and a half years, I would say that we have been on a fairly strong growth trajectory. We've been able to reach a CAGR of 17% since 2021. All of that has been organic.
So if you add to that potential future M&A, as well as our ambition to grow our small traction business globally outside of Europe and particularly Norway, we will continue to grow double-digit in the future as well. Looking at our earnings performance, it's also been strong. We're now 24% on a rolling 12-month basis, touching the 25% mark. And even if that is strong compared to other industrial peers, there is more potential to further improve that. I think one of the good things that I've learned about the EBITDA performance of the industrial division and business is that it does not only come from a strong aftermarket, which is important and profitable for us, but it also comes from selling new equipment.
I do expect in the short to mid-term that we will grow new equipment sales a bit faster than aftermarket, but we do not need to expect a substantial negative mix effect as a result. And what is supporting our growth ambitions is, first of all, that we are a very diversified business when it comes to customer segment exposure. And what you see here on the screen is not by all means an exhaustive list of the segments that we are exposed to. We're exposed to many more customer segments, such as infrastructure, such as steelmaking, pulp and paper, chemical processes, and various other heavy industries as well. But what I do think is representative about this picture is the numbers. And I'm happy to see that mid to long term, there is solid underlying growth in most of our customer segments.
Speaking of segments, improving our knowledge and being more surgical about the drivers in each of these segments will be key for further growth. This is a focus that we've increased as of late, much more than what we've done historically. Now we do not allow ourselves to simply, in any local sales geography, to focus on customer segments where we've traditionally been strong. Now we're turning every stone to find the growth opportunities. Now we also have the proper market intelligence tool to help us do that. Another important element that many of my colleagues have talked about as well is, of course, driving innovation. We, in the industrial division, of course, invest quite heavily in more forward-looking R&D and product development that improves or extends our current product platform.
But we also invest quite heavy in order engineering, leveraging our existing product platform, which is modular, bringing tailored, bespoke solutions to our customers. What you see here, I think, is four good examples from our rack and pinion product platform that proves that lifts can look very differently from each other. To your left, you see a platform-like very narrow lift installed on a twin mast at an opera and theater scenography workshop. On the right of that, you do see a lift installed at the Svanen c rane ship that some of you might know of, which is designed to withstand quite harsh environments at sea, where material choice is important.
Further to the right, you see a lift installed in a water pumping station in the Middle East with an auto-rise function that allows the lift to automatically go up in case of a flooding, avoiding the lift to be submerged in water, and then to the extreme right, you see a double-decker solution, two cars on top of each other for personnel transport installed in a mine shaft in the U.K., and the cool thing about this, I think, is that all of these solutions, despite looking very different from each other, leverage the same components and the same fundamental base of the product platform. And that ability to fine-tune the modularity of our product platform and cost-effectively deliver these types of projects going forward with good profitability will be key for us.
A good example of a, let's say, product development initiative that has opened up a new market for us, which we've spoken about before in previous quarterly reports, but I think it's worthwhile repeating, is our gangway elevators based on both traction as well as rack and pinion technology. This is a highly complex product that we've developed in close collaborations with customers during a very short period of time, and I think looking at the results of where we are currently, this cannot be categorized as anything else but a success. We have established ourselves as a clear market leader in this niche, but in a way, customer segment that is, if you remember from the previous slide, poised for more than 20% growth going forward.
Further exciting to this is the fact that we have not yet seen the aftermarket potential of this as we're now putting these lifts on these support vessels into operation. Further on innovation. Innovation is exciting, so I'd like to talk about it. This is another example, which is, I think, good because it represents a case where it's a low investment for us. It's low risk from a technology perspective, but it still brings a win-win-win relationship for ourselves, for our customers first and foremost, and for the environment. Just to give some context about this, Scando Mini and Alicoms, that's an old design that's been around for more than 30 years. We have more than 2,000 units installed globally. And as it's been around for that long time, many of these units are now becoming of age, poised to be replaced.
And what we have done in this case, instead of just pushing a refurbishment alternative, we have developed a completely new car based on new technology, but from software, electronics, and hardware, which is good for our customers because they would not only get an old technology, but brand new. Now they get access to new technology. It reduces their cost, the price, as well as the downtime when we make these replacements. It's good for the environment because what we are able to do is that we can reuse the old mast that these lifts are mounted on. It means less material consumed, a lower carbon footprint. And as it reduces the cost of the whole solution, it puts us in a very competitive situation to capture all of these replacement opportunities that are there.
However, even if we would continue, which we will, to develop the best products in sliced bread, they will not sell themselves. They will not fly off the shelf. We need to continue to invest in our sales and our service workforce. We are actively investing in more sales engineers to cover geographical white spots. Canada has been one of those examples from an industrial point of view. Western Australia, with a big mining market, is another. Sub-Saharan Africa is a third. We also need to improve the way we work and improve the performance of our indirect sales partners, both when it comes to finding new ones to cover new geographies, but also uplift the competence of the existing ones, investing especially in the competence of their service techs so they and we can take the full advantage of the aftermarket in the areas where they are working.
On the service technician side, that is a core element for us. Service technicians are owned in the market where we go direct. They're not only important and essential to ensure smooth operations for our customers, but also, of course, to drive parts and service sales, clear correlation. But they're also important to identify new sales opportunities for us with existing customers. Yeah, many of my colleagues have talked about the aftermarket. The aftermarket, as I said, is obviously very important for the industrial division as well. As you might know, it represents currently about 60% of our business. What you see here on the slide in the bar chart is our parts and service sales per installed elevator, meaning if that can increase, we're selling more parts, more service per elevator.
That varies across our different geographies, but on balance, since 2022, we've been able to increase that 14%-15%. There's more potential to share best practices across the group and get that further up. Actions to do that, I've talked about them: service technicians recruitment. Charlotte earlier mentioned our own field service software, service protocol. We're actively rolling out that so we can maximize the utilization of our service techs and make sure that we make their life easy on the field. It's the training of our partners that I mentioned, but it's also about supply chain improvements, making sure that we have the right product of the right quantity at the right time at the right place, improving customer service level. That is something that we have done over the last year. I'd say that we've picked the low-hanging fruits.
We've been able to improve customer service levels while we also have reduced the overall cost and carbon footprint of our supply chain, converting transportation from air to sea. We also have some work to do when it comes to our parts pricing strategy, making that consistent across the globe. When we have sort of fixed the supply chain and worked on our parts pricing strategy, we're ready to improve our exposure online, opening up new sales channels for our parts, making it easier for our customers to find the right parts and then buy it from us. Last but not least, something which many of my colleagues talked about is making sure that our machines are connected. Every new machine that comes out of the factory now, they have the capability to be connected. But we do have many units installed around the world that are not.
That's something that we need to address, and if they get connected, I think we become an even more natural choice for customers for their service of their machines. I've talked about growth, both in the new equipment side as well as the aftermarket. That's obviously exciting, but to ensure that that growth is profitable, we obviously need to work on our internal efficiency as well. In my role as EVP for the industrial division, I have also the responsibility for our factories in Sweden, in Poland, and in China, both for industrial as well as for the construction division. One improvement that we've been able to drive this year is our safety record. We've actually not had a single lost-time injury in any of our factories this year, and we're hard at work to make that continue. Why is that important for cost efficiency and operational excellence?
Because I think, and I don't think, I'm sure that working safely is the number one prerequisite to work productively. That's the case for our customers, and that's the case for us internally as well. We've also put in deliberate efforts to improve our sales and operations planning. Yeah, it's a pretty soft market, especially in construction now, and we need to adapt capacity to the current demand. And we have done improvements in that regard, making sure that we optimize utilization of our factories. We drive several productivity and cost efficiency initiatives. There was one question about the cost base and the flexibility of that, given the current market that we're facing, that Sylvain answered about our Polish factory. I actually think that's a very good example where we've been able to clearly question whether we should do things in-house or we should outsource.
In this case, we have been able to outsource quite a substantial part, converting fixed costs to variable costs, all while we have been able to lower the overall cost of goods sold. I've also mentioned our ambition to grow our traction business. Our traction business, we actually do not have any factory producing these units. As Philippe told about Tractel, it's the same for our traction business. We rely exclusively on sub-suppliers to supply the components that we then assemble and commission on-site. This is a practice that we've been able to fine-tune and that we will continue to leverage as we grow traction in the Americas as well as in APAC, all while we have improvements to do when it comes to sourcing of the component, making sure that we take down the cost and improve the profitability there as well. All right, conclusions.
So I do think that the industrial business is definitely supported by underlying market growth, which is exciting. We will take market share. We'll do so by making sure that we have the right customer segment focus in each market where we operate, but we will also venture into new geographies. We'll continue to drive innovation. The aftermarket is obviously there, but we can grow it. And then finally, we do have now the footprint, the manufacturing footprint that we need to drive growth, I would say, both in the industrial division as well as in the construction division. Thank you, Johnny.
Perfect. Thank you, Jens. And you are staying on stage.
I'm staying on stage.
Perfect.
Sure.
Very good. So it's now time for some questions for Jens as well.
Yeah, thanks. I can start. I mean, so after sales, this is 60% of the revenue.
True.
Yeah, and that includes maintenance and modernization. So how much is this modernization of that 60%?
That's not a number that we disclose. So I unfortunately can't tell you that.
I guess you have a quite old installed base and the modernization opportunities are quite good. So it would be very useful to know how big the potential is?
Sure. I mean, the modernization opportunities are definitely there. It is also the way you define that, whether it is a replacement or it is a refurbishment. It sometimes differs. What we have seen in our growth this year, we have had many replacement opportunities, such as I presented about the Scando Mini and Alicoms.
About modernization profitability then, I mean, I guess it must be higher than for new equipment.
It's high for new equipment, and it's high for refurbishment and modernization as well.
Perfect. We have another question here. Jenna.
Hi. Thanks for the presentation, Jens. The industrial division has been very impressive, and I just wanted to kind of circle back on the growth point because as you stated in the presentation, the majority of the growth, essentially almost all of the growth, has come from organic means, so what sort of M&A opportunities would you be sort of think would be the most interesting in the near term?
I think there are many different M&A opportunities. Obviously, I think growing our penetration in the aftermarket is something that we want to do. So, look at bolt-on service acquisition is interesting. But I also think that there are many other opportunities to grow our product portfolio and technologies to access more customer applications in geographies where we're present now.
Thank you.
Yep, another question.
Yeah, how about sales? The split between internal and external sales. Where is it today and will it change going forward?
The split between internal and external sales?
Yeah, if you use external sales forces, that helps.
Yeah, okay. So between using.
Sales force and others.
We predominantly are direct sales, but we do use dealers, distributors in areas where we do not have strong enough, big enough markets. When we venture into, let's say, trying to grow more in Sub-Saharan Africa, that's initially about getting more dealers to address those markets. But at the same time as we do that, even if you add new dealers, you have to have your own people to manage them, making sure that they perform. But we do have growth opportunities both in areas where we cover with dealers such as Latin America, Africa, parts of Southeast Asia. But there is also growth opportunities even in Europe where we're exclusively direct, as well as in North America where we are direct.
So the mix will be more external?
Going forward, I don't see a dramatic change. The majority would still be direct with our own service workforce.
I guess it's easier to use your own technicians in order to promote more sales, upsales and the.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, if we can do that, that's obviously what we want to do. We want to touch as many machines as we possibly can. But it's also in terms of there's a lot of upfront investment if you want to walk into a new market. And that's why we need to make sure that if we don't have our own service technicians, at least the service technicians that our partners have, they are trained, skilled, and have the ability to identify the service opportunities and the spare part sales. We will not get the service revenue, the labor, but we will get the parts revenue as well.
What is the service penetration of your installed base, especially for the spare parts?
I'd say it's less than 50%.
Okay, which one is a bigger driver for going forward? Is it the growth of the new installed base or to get the penetration up?
I think both. There is opportunity to increase penetration in the existing installed base. And we, as I said, we expect to grow the new equipment sales a bit faster in the short to mid-term. And that will also, in the long term, help our aftermarket.
About the service penetration, I mean, which has been a bigger problem for you, that is spare parts availability that you are not close to customers, or is it that competition that there's a third-party suppliers?
It's a combination, but there is a clear correlation. The more service techs we have, the higher our sales per installed elevator. Getting those service technicians, that's really key to drive sales.
How do you see the competition? I mean, I guess there's a huge number of third-party spare parts suppliers. So do you see that? Is it the kind of end market what makes, or is it the difference between the end markets, or is it the difference between the geographies where you see the biggest competition?
First of all, I wouldn't see that there is a wide range of third-party suppliers for parts. It's important to separate this. We do have, and this is, I'm very grateful to the founder of Alimak and what's been done throughout the years because there's been a deliberate strategy to have our own proprietary spare parts, such as our safety devices. That's really hard to copy, and our customers don't want to use pirate copies. That drives stickiness for us, and that drives sales. Then there is another part which is more OEM, third-party sales. That's more difficult to address, but their pricing strategy, supply chain, and those kinds of things will be key. Service technician availability will be key to grow that. That said, I mean, the performance across different regions. We are better in some regions and not so good in others.
I see that as an improvement potential.
Thanks, very clear.
Very good. So no more questions. And thank you very much, Jens.
Thank you.
Thank you. And we now move on to our final presentation before we have our last Q&A session. So please welcome back on stage Ole.
Yeah, thank you. And I hope that you have seen a little bit and feel you have a good recap again of what we have done with this group over the last four years. A little bit more where we stand today and how we now see also the potential going forward. One key element, which I highlighted in the beginning in my presentation, which I also really hope that you have seen, is this taking ownership. We are taking ownership as a group for where we were. We took that, and we have been developing. And we have worked deliberately on all of these areas that you have gotten insight in today to take this group to a new level, to New Heights.
And it's driven on group level that people at group level take ownership. But I'm also very proud to see, and I hope you agree with me, how these examples of team members, how they show, how they take ownership of their business and driving it forward. And that's the culture we build, actually, which is along when you talk about sustainability and resilience of the business, that this is a fundamental piece, of course, that you instill that type of culture in the organization. It doesn't only sit here in this team. It sits out in the organization with all our 3,000 employees. And this is something we work on every day, and that makes sustainable change. Then, of course, we continue to invest in this business.
We feel, and that again, also I hope that you sit back with that feeling, that we are just in the beginning of what this group can become going forward. It will not be something that just nothing is like that, but you also see the trends here. You see what we are doing, and you see the fundamentals, so this is we are becoming. I think we are already, but we can be so much more, this sustainable, resilient, highly profitable, growing industrial company, and we invest every day to accelerate this. We invest, as you have seen, in front-end resources, in sales, in services, service people. We invest in our product portfolio. We invest in our solutions portfolio, how to grow the aftermarket, and we also heavily invest in digitalization because that's the fundamental enabler.
And then we have this great thing about the business that we are supported by Megatrends. We are in a sphere where we talk about height. We talk about risk, which creates ties between us and the customers. When they feel comfortable and they feel safe with our solutions, the likelihood to change to someone else becomes much lower. And also, of course, we work on means with our service business and how we grow each element and how we work with digitalization. We want people to be trained and certified by us, etc. These will create even stronger ties for us as a group with our market. So these are fundamental, purposeful moves that we are making, again, to make this business more profitable, more resilient, and a great company over time. So with that, I think I will leave it.
We will have a Q&A where you will also meet a couple more of the members, so let's move to that part. Thank you.
Perfect. Very good, and so with me on stage, we have all the EVPs. So we have David Batson from Construction Division. We have Jens, as you know, from Industrial. José María Nevot from the Wind Division. And Philippe Gastineau representing both Facade Access, but also HSPS, Height Safety and Productivity Solutions Division. So we have a question. Since we can start with that one that we parked a little bit from earlier this day, so if we start with you, David, do you expect the margin expectations to improve? Do you expect your margins to improve even further?
Thanks, Johnny. Thanks for the question. So firstly, I suppose I just want to reflect on what Ole had mentioned earlier in the team. Is that if you look at the customer obsession, if you look at the digitalization strategy, if you think about our operational efficiency that Jens mentioned, and that our people are the most important asset, and you think about the resilience we've built up in the last couple of years, and what we can only say has been strong headwinds. And we reflect back on Q3 even, and further back on. There's no reason why we can't move forward positively and blow through some of those numbers as well. So I'm confident that that can occur.
Perfect. José María, there's a question for you as well for the Wind Division. How sustainable are your current margins?
In the last quarter, we have a level of 19%, which is basically 19.4%, which is basically the same as we had in 2023 for quarter three. This is, well, thanks to a smooth, good development of activities and the business development. But I would say that basically that comes because what we did a couple of years back when we made the strategy, and we set our priorities and our focus. Then since then, we have been working very much closer with our customers. We developed the sales. We decreased our cost. We enlarged our portfolio. Then we already lifted the margins, and we are acceptable level and in line with the group expectations going forward.
Very good. Thank you. Any questions in the room? Yeah.
I think you're doing a great job on your increased margins. How about if you were to look at the capital employed and returns on capital employed? Are there any chance we can see that one increase as well? Because you're down, you're somewhere in between 10% and 15%, and you have a large chunk of goodwill when it comes to return on equity. So that one is tough. But on cash flows and return on capital employed, is there a chance we can see the same sort of journey moving up towards 25% or something?
It's absolutely on our agenda. So it's a key measure that we follow, as you saw Sylvain presented. We also present it now in every quarterly update to you. So it's something we follow very closely and something we absolutely have focused to grow. So the answer is yes, it will go up. I will not give you a figure, but it's clearly on our agenda.
That was a very good answer. Thanks.
If I can continue, are these guys incentivized to do that? I mean, is it KPIs to improve the working capital and also the capital employed? Or is it just Sylvain trying to do something?
It's a good question. They are incentivized today based on order intake, result, and cash generation. So not full balance, but that covers a lot of the balance sheet, of course.
I feel incentivized. I feel incentivized on that one.
And it's clearly there. You can't measure everything on the incentive side, but it's top of mind and top of agenda internally on how we drive things.
So we have a question to you, Philippe. Can you give an update on the closure of Mammendorf facility? You already addressed it, but are you still expecting the cost savings previously announced?
Absolutely. Again, back to my earlier comments, I wished all my industrial projects were as successful as this one. We are confirming the cost savings that we had initially announced to the market back in December 2023. And we are hoping the site is actually on the market at the moment. So we are hoping to achieve as well, if not overachieve, the capital gain on the sale of the land and the building. So yes.
Very good. Service. Is it possible to increase the service share across the divisions even more? What should we expect?
Service is an important growth piece of the journey. It's a very important piece of the business model for each division and for the group. But service is not there unless you also sell new machines because that's what you service. So we drive both elements in all divisions. And the good thing is also in this group, as several of you have alluded to, we make good margins both on new sales of equipment and on the aftermarket. So both are important. Both will grow. And then I think exactly the balance between them in each division, it's not the most important for us. The important thing is that we are overall growing, and more new sales will feed more aftermarket sales, etc. The strategies are there for both.
Perfect. Very clear. Construction and scaffolding, question for you, David. Are there markets where you see that there has been a switch from scaffolding to mast climbing work platforms? Are there any places where this has been stronger than other places? Any examples?
I think it's a really good question because if you look back at the group and at Alimak Construction, we weren't performing very well in the mast climbing work platform business four years ago, and I think the acquisition and the additional products that we had brought in with Scanclimber, our investment in R&D, we find that we can really go after this market, and I know there was a question earlier about what percentage or how much can we get, but the market is so big, and I think we've taken our blinkers off and we've said, if you look at a construction site and the logistics of a construction site and moving people and materials safely at heights, that's huge. That's not only cranes and scaffolding. It's mobile lifting equipment as well, EWPs.
So there's a whole gamut of products on a construction site, whether it's residential construction or infrastructure or even industrial that we can participate in. So we think this opportunity is quite significant, and we're putting plans in to go after it.
Very good. Interesting. One question for Wind. Do you see most opportunities in offshore or onshore Wind?
Both markets are relevant for us. It is true that the onshore market is much larger, and therefore, in terms of volumes, it's still very big. The growth rate is lower. But it's interesting in that sense. Offshore has been developing in a greater path with double digits. In the way we work with the main OEMs, we want to be always the preferred partner. We are developing solutions, but in terms of products or services that are fitting their needs in both areas, onshore and offshore. That's the view.
Perfect. Thank you very much. No more questions for today. Perfect. Before we end this afternoon, any final words from you, Ole?
Yeah. I would like to take this opportunity then to thank you all for coming here. And also those of you online, thank you for listening in. Thank you for following and spending time with us. That's important. Big thank you to the team, everyone presenting, Sylvain, Charlotte, also presenting today. Matilda, she has not been on stage. She is highly pregnant. It's a couple of months, a couple of weeks left, I think. But you have been instrumental in planning and organizing all of this day together with Johnny. So both of you, a big thank you. Team here for organizing the technicalities. But most and foremost, all the 3,000 people that are making it possible, generating value, driving the company forward every day. So big thank you to all of them. Thank you.
Excellent. Thank you, Ole, for those last words. And thank you, everyone that have joined our investor update. Thank you.