Great. Hello, everyone, and most welcome to our capital markets update, where we will update on our new financial targets, updated financial targets, and you will also hear a run-through of the segments. Let me just go through for you what, how the agenda look today. Let's see, here we have. Yes, our agenda for today is that we start with an introduction, of course, from myself and Johan Karlsson, who's beside me here, and also the incoming CEO.
Thank you. Good to see you all.
That's great. Yeah. We run through the updated financial targets. We will go hear from Rebecca Tallmark on an update on the SMB segment, small and medium-sized business segment. We will also have Michael Haagen here and Angelo Bul talking about the large corporate and public segment. We obviously will go through the synergies we have, leverage, CO2 emission, which is our uplifted new target, and then obviously have a summary and Q&A. It will be a very good afternoon, one and a half hour intense, and obviously we'll have a Q&A in the session afterwards. You can post your question in the chat. Just write your name and your question, and we will respond to the questions afterwards. Great, let's start off.
Let me just start by introducing somewhat to Dustin, for those of you who are new to the company, even though most of you know us very well. We are, you can say our history is like a textbook example of how a company has evolved in different ownerships and under different management. Started in 1984 by a couple, Bosse and Ulla Lundevall, who started to sell colorful disks at the time in the mid-'1980s. Evolved, launching an e-commerce site in 1995, actually the first one in Sweden. Then start to understand the beauty of a very cost-efficient sales models to the B2B sector. Then was sold to a Swedish private equity, Altor, in 2006, and where we started to invest a lot.
We moved to other countries, Denmark, Norway, Finland, invested in IT systems, warehouses, and so on. Company was listed in 2015, where the anchor investor was Axel Johnson, who then have moved upwards in their ownership and is now the largest shareholder. During this time, obviously, we have professionalized ourself, moved to new countries, like Netherlands and Belgium, and one and a half year ago, we took a step to the European mainland by acquiring the company Centralpoint, which has given us a very strong position in the Benelux. That is a very short history. Today we look a company where we have about 280,000 products, hardware and software products in our assortment. 60% of our business is done online or through a digital interface. 40% is offline, which is typically more relation sales.
We are now in six countries, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Netherlands and Belgium. Since the acquisition of Centralpoint in the Benelux, we have also seen that our main market when it comes to sales is Netherlands nowadays. Netherlands at 35% and Sweden at 25%, Norway, Sweden, Denmark between 10%-15%, Belgium, our smallest market so far, but growing rapidly at 3%. We also have, we are fully towards B2B. We have, of course, a consumer offering as well, but given what we will announce today, this will be the last time you see the segment as this. We will have an SMB and LCP segment. We have many orders flowing through our warehouses and our logistic centers every day in throughout the year.
That's very brief, also the business model we have had from the very beginning has been obvious that we see ourselves as an aggregator. There is a large number of suppliers on the left-hand side who needs an aggregator with a strong position, a strong brand, to interact with a large number of customers. The interesting thing with being an aggregator is that the more complex the world or the more complex the IT world becomes, the more need there is for an aggregator, someone who can help both small customers, but also large companies and the public sector, with the right offer to the right time at the right price. That is what we do. Our position is strengthening by the day in the value chain.
Let's get down to the highlights of today and look at our updated financial targets and what we have seen today. Most of you have probably seen the press release today. The rationale, just quickly on that, is that we have developed, as you have seen, as a company over the years. We have a different segment mix today, or different segment split today, and the market presence is also different compared to when we did the IPO. When was actually the time when we set the previous targets. The purpose of this is obviously to create increased transparency, accountability, and obviously shareholder value, to also mirror sort of what company we are today versus what we were before. Therefore, we have updated our financial targets.
We have also at the same time now created more clarity by reallocate the, what we call the central cost to the segment system, given that the segments has grown and are more self-driving, sort of self-sufficient, we see that we put the cost where the cost arise. You can see how we have developed in the segment splits, and obviously this has come from both organic growth, but of course also acquired growth. Now we have the split that we have as of today. What we will do is that we will merge SMB with B2C as a segment will disappear. It will be incorporated in SMB.
We will update our financial targets. We will also present how we reallocate the central cost to what we now call corporate functions, which will be more transparent, more clarity, and create more value for us. Great, Johan, would you like to take—o r sorry, I will take these, sorry. Here they are.
Here they are.
I almost lost them. We are on EPS growth. EPS is our new target for where we, where we have growth, and you all know EPS as a target. We will grow more than 10% on a three-year average annual growth rate. We stick with our leverage target, which is to be between 2x and 3x on net debt towards EBITDA. We lift up our CO2 emission target. As you know, we have had commitments since before when we, when we committed to be climate neutral by 2030. Now we also put a target on ourselves to reduce this with 25% or reduce CO2, which will be measured in CO2 equivalents versus million SEK in sales. And that we will reduce by 25% in the coming three-year period.
We think it's very good to lift this target up, first of all, that we want to do, but also because we can do it, and we want to drive this, development in the right direction. That we'll do. Then we stick with our dividend policy, where we will distribute more than 70% of our net profit to the shareholders, given of course, that the financial position at the time allows that. We think it's good to have a dividend target that keeps us as, and the company on our toes. Good. Let's take a little deep dive into the different parts here. Johan?
Yes. Let's start with the EPS growth then, the more than 10% on a three-year average on an annual growth rate. To support that, we have defined two supporting targets, and that's really to a better way for you all to understand what we are thinking about the development of the segment that in the end should of course generate the EPS growth. We have set two of these supporting targets for each of the segments. It's organic net sales growth, and it is segment margin. If we then look at SMB where we keep 8% organic growth as a target, while on LCP, we are moving to 5% as a growth target, and we will come back to that a little bit later, why and how.
On segment margin, you can see that we are aiming for a margin above 6.5% on SMB and above 4.5% on LCP. Some of you will then understand that that is the new way of explaining the segment margin, as the old one was much higher. Let's have a look at what we have actually changed on the redefinition of cost and the merge of the segments. First, on the top of this slide, you will see the merge of the SMB and B2C that basically forms a segment with SEK 7.6 billion of sales and 11.1% margin in the old way of expressing segment margin. On the bottom of this slide, you will see the redefinition or the reallocation of central cost.
As Thomas said before, we had central cost from the start because that was cost that we shared between the segments and that was really an efficient way of using the resources of Dustin. Now we see more and more that the cost base is more and more allocated to one of the segments and therefore we believe that the cost calibration are better done close to the business. What we have done, we have moved SEK 383 million of cost to SMB and SEK 475 million of cost to LCP. The consequence you see below, basically segment margin in SMB goes from 11.1%- 6%, and in LCP from 6.7% - 4%. Remember the target is 6.5% on SMB and 4.5% on LCP.
Left, in then what we now call the corporate functions are basically group management and some HQ functions such as HR, legal, and finance, and that in the end will represent something like 0.5% of sales. First we merge the SMB and B2C, and then we are changing the allocation of cost. These are the two changes that we're doing to the P&L. If we then use the financial target and look at what, where would we end up, in a more number-driven forecast, these are the projections of taking all the financial targets and looking at where we end up. EPS, the main target, where we will go from 4.2% - 6.5% earnings per share.
That of course, how will then the business look like, if we are at 6.5%? Well, we will have a turnover of about SEK 30 billion from today's SEK 24 billion, and we will have an EBITDA of SEK 1.4 billion compared to today SEK 978 million, and that represents more, a margin of 4.7%. This is important to understand this is that the target for each of the segment basically remains the same, but we are changing the segment split, that is basically the reason why we are now below the 5%-6% that we had before and end up at 4.7%. This is if you project a little bit of the numbers from the financial target towards the business.
We then split that in the segments, we move to the next slide, we can see we start with SMB, where the focus will be on, still on growth, but also improving profitability. We are today at SEK 7.6 billion, with the 8% growth, we will end up around SEK 10 billion of sales. Profit-wise, SEK 454 million to somewhere slightly below SEK 700 million, and that will take us above the 6.5% segment margin. That is our target.
On LCP, where I would say more, focus is on profitability, we move from SEK 16 billion of sales to SEK 20 billion, and on segment margin and segment result, we move from SEK 637 million to approximately SEK 900 million, and that will take us to the 4.5% or above 4.5% of segment margin, as is the target for LCP. With that said, I think we will move on.
Exactly. Let's welcome Rebecca Tallmark, head of SMB, to the stage, and take us through what SMB and how that will look.
Well, thank you.
Welcome, Rebecca.
Thank you.
Thank you.
If we start by looking at the current demand of SMB, we know that demand peaked during COVID. The work from home boosted demand, and the shortages was favorable for us because we could procure to our own stock and use our pricing excellence. During the fall, we did see decreased demand for basic hardware, and I would say, as usual, it started with the smaller SMBs and then moved up to the larger and larger ones. We are most impacted in Sweden by this, but it is a general trend across all markets. Historically, demand has come back after two to four quarters, and I would say that we are now at a stable, however lower demand than we are used to.
At the same time as this happened with the demand in the market, there was higher availability of almost all products, which has led to an intensified campaign focus, especially comparing against last year, where campaigns were few since it was such a shortage. We also see that our competitors really compete for the demand that is available and cost for paid traffic, the cost per click, has increased during the fall. On a positive note in this short-term perspective, there is a continued good demand for managed services. It is a more strategic decision. The sales cycles are longer. Currently, the market conditions are a little bit challenging, but the long-term trends for SMB, they are positive, and it's primarily driven by the fact that IT is becoming more complex and the SMBs need advice.
There is growth of mobility, digitalization, and quite a big move from on-prem to the cloud. With these trends comes a request to have focus on both security and integrity, two questions that have not really been on the SMB agenda. Many of our SMBs, they do not have a big IT department. The questions that are on the table are many at the moment, and they come for us for a much more strategic dialogue than we saw a few years back, which is positive. This complexity in IT is also driving requests for a more predictable IT. Customers want a fixed monthly cost and an uptime that is secured by a partner. We can also see that standardized managed services are accepted. A few years back, customers wanted services to be customized.
That is not at all the same trend anymore. It's because standardized managed services are a signal of quality and efficiency, 80% of our installed base in the Nordics is now on standard. Customers want a hassle-free experience. The expectations on what that means are increasing all the time. With that comes general growth of online sales also self-service. The customers find that efficient for them. It's also efficient for us. From the consumer market, we get trends like personalization and guidance that is also coming into the SMB space. Our SMB customers do not rank sustainability that high when choosing a reseller. They still expect us to take full responsibility for that. Of course, we want to do that. All of these trends are what will drive our long-term growth.
Historically, we have been growing at around 6.5%, including B2C, we intend to grow at around 8%. We will continue to grow at 7%-7.5% in the core markets, B2B hardware Nordics, but have a target of growing 20% by scaling our SMB model in the Benelux market, where we see lots of opportunity to combine e-com and our sales force. Maybe stating the obvious, how we intend to deliver this is to grow our customer base and to sell more to each customer. Starting with the growth of customer base, it is very much about the new customer intake, where strong focus would be on Netherlands and Belgium but also the Nordic countries, increasing the overall attractiveness of what we offer, our brand, and the experience and working with that online excellence where we can optimize our site for traffic.
Growing the customer base by new customer intake, we will of course also focus on loyalization because we want a stable customer base. This target has increased a little bit, including now, Netherlands and Belgium. It is a higher ambition than we have had in the Nordics, and that is the Netherlands and Belgium standing for majority of that. Selling more to each customer, we intend to grow by 5%-6%, and here we have been successful in the past, very much supported by the trends and the complexity of IT that is increasing. Here, we work with increasing share of wallet and the order value, moving well beyond client sales and product and price to adding more value. We do this both online in the customer journey and with our sales force.
This is what the task of our sales force in SMB is. Entire customer intake is driven online, but selling more to each customer, that's really the role of the sales force. While we grow, we will also scale and have synergies to support our margin increase. The normalized segment margin for us is 6%, and we intend to grow that with a target of above 6.5% in the year 2025, 2026. We have three levers that increases the margin and one that has a negative impact on the margin journey. If I start with the first one, it's general scalability and efficiency. We can really scale from growth, we are working across all countries at the moment, and we can leverage automation and self-service, promoting that to the customers.
We also increase efficiency in our managed services operations when we are moving more and more to standardized services that are scalable and remotely managed. The second lever is strengthening the sales mix, and here we leverage the share of wallet potential that I talked about in growing the sales. It's also good for the margin. We will continue the expansion of private label and take-back in other product near services. The third lever is pricing and procurement. As a reseller, obviously at our core, and our proprietary pricing has good opportunities to develop the margin further.
Last but not least, I said we had a slight negative impact, and it's investment in growth because it does require some investment to get traction in both Netherlands and Belgium, and that will decrease the margin slightly, reaching the target segment margin of 6.5%.
Great. Thank you very much, Rebecca.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for that. Let's now continue and welcome up LCP players Michael Haagen , responsible for the Nordics, and Angelo Bul, responsible for the Benelux.
Thank you, sir.
Welcome. Please take the stage. Here it is.
Thank you. Thank you, sir. Let's start the LCP section with a little short-term and demand trends. Currently, we have been seeing that our supply chain is going to normalize to pre-pandemic levels. That means that we will have shorter time to deliver on our customer-specific builds, usually with a higher margin, very good for us. Also, that we have less buffer stock necessary to meet our customer and contract SLAs, which also will influence our net working capital positive. Secondly, we see a stable demand right now. Demand during COVID was really driven by the implementation of a lot of home offices. Currently we're seeing a financial turmoil that are creating hesitation in the market versus investment. We see a stable demand, primarily for our public sector.
That is 70% of all LCP business, while corporate is starting to slow down. We are mitigating that with the corporate actually taking market share at the moment. Thirdly, we would like to put attention on the fact that the customer wants a tailored purchase experience. Like in SMB, we are using standardized blocks to tailor those digital experience. You can say that we are taking their standardized blocks and putting them in customer-specific stacks in order to give more and more self service for the customer and more control. Fourth is sustainability. Here, the customer ranking of sustainability is very important when selecting a reseller.
All of our customers, or most of our customers, really have 20 to 30 commitments towards sustainability, and we are even seeing that up to 30% of all tenders right now is evaluating bidders based on our ability to perform sustainability. That was on short-term, Angelo, let's also hear some long-term.
On the long term. On the long term, we expect some, yeah, tailwind from the following four long-term trends. Demand for hybrid workspace is still growing. We had on the COVID, we had a lot of growth there, but we see that it's actually here to stay because people work remotely, different places. The journey towards security and cloud is still here, and we're actually growing for the coming years. The higher use of data, not only by the workforce, but also by all kinds of IoT devices will drive data center as computing as well.
As-a-service model, when IT will become more and more common in the coming years, and not only on the sort of workspace but also on the data center and the data storage.
Thank you. Let's take us to the growth for LCP. Historically, we have been growing 8.8% since 2017, 2018 to 2021, 2022. We're gonna then do our future organic growth. We're gonna change that to an ambition on 5% to focus on margin. How are we gonna do that? You know, first of all, we're gonna then build and enhance our current contracts with a lot of lifecycle services, which would give us around 5% CAGR. That could be preparation, on-site installations, swap, take-back, further when growing our cross-sell and up-sell with increased private label focus. Secondly, we're gonna then increase and drive our share of wallet, driving 3% CAGR, meaning that we would like to power the hybrid workplace.
We would like to secure the enterprise, transfer the network and cloud, and enable when sustainable IT. Thirdly, and importantly, we would like to do contract optimization and - 3% CapEx where we focus on selective contracts. Contracts that suits Dustin LCP, that suits our ambition for higher margin. On top of that, growing our corporate business and continuously focus on an assortment that will then give us a COGS level that is better for existing contracts. All of that in the Dustin way, where we invest and scale in new customer offerings as API connection to enhance value and secure customer stickiness, but also utilizing a clear data-driven approach to enhance our win rate and cherry-picking the contracts that gives us the best opportunity.
While we are giving a greater customer experience with a lot of self-service and security, so a good digital experience, pragmatic, easy to access, giving the customer a lot of transparency and control and of course giving us opportunity to be trustworthy and give a lot of high IT competence. Then we have the opportunity to leverage on our European capabilities to drive scale and win rates by sharing our digital offerings between our two regions, but also implementing the best practices. For instance, what we are doing on our tender desk work in both our regions and also unifying our experience to serve customers that operates in both our regions. Let's hear a little about margin, Angelo.
The LCP margin, the LCP margin development. As you see, we're going from 4% - 4.5%. Why are we confident that we will reach that target? Basically we have four main buckets of growth. The first one is general scalability, efficiency, where, as Michael said before, implement best practices across the region to have a big impact and also for our service offering we will use standard building blocks for our customers. The second part, prioritized contracts.
Um, as a volume, uh, the current volume that we have gives us the, uh, opportunity to be a bit more, uh, to be a bit more, bit more picky and, uh, and, and pick the contracts with a higher margin and contracts where we can a ctually add, add, add, uh, add the value. Um, the third one, mix of, uh, mix of sales. We want to, uh, increase cross and, uh, cross and, uh, upsell mainly on a private label or on a private label product. We kinda grow in take back and all the life cycle management services, and we're going to increase our software share of, uh, share of wallet. And the last main bucket is the global, the global, the global procurement part.
The fact now that we can put our procurement in one basket over six countries will give us more leverage to negotiate better terms and conditions towards our vendors. That will end up 2025, 2026, a bit over 4%-5% margin.
Thank you very much —
Thank you very much.
— Angelo and Michael. Really important part o f the LCP journey is margin, of course. Talking about margin, a very important part of the margin journey is actually to capture the synergies and we will now run through the synergies in a summarized form. To help me there, I will ask Alexandra Fürst to support.
Welcome, Alexandra.
Thank you.
Let's look at the synergies as we have presented them before and just check a little bit how we are doing. As you remember, we divide the synergies in two groups. There are revenue synergies and cost synergies. The revenue synergies are actually two and first one being the SMB Benelux. That is really the introduction of our online business or in the Benelux region and that we have started that job.
As you see in this slide, you will see in the pie charts a little bit how we are doing in progress, first in activities and then financially and then where we expect to be at the end of 2023, 2024. That's how the slide works. As you can see then from the introduction of the online business in the Benelux, we have done part of it. Obviously launching our model in the new country doesn't financially yield so much in the beginning, so we don't see any financial impact yet from that initiative. It's of course a long-term initiative, this. We expect at the end of 2023, 2024 that we have reached maybe 25% of full potential in this initiative. But it's well on the way. Organization is in place and we are ramping up.
As we speak, we are gaining customers every day. If we look at LCP tenders, that's really an exchange of knowledge between the two regions and here we are in full speed doing that and we have actually started with one country in the Nordics to start a tender desk which is a copy of the Benelux one and here we see good progress. We will continue now with the other countries in the Nordics and here we expect full effect at the end of 2023, 2024. We then move to the cost synergies. There are four of them and I would say two of them are in more business-driven and one is more OpEx-driven or two of them are more OpEx-driven. The first one is private label
As you know, we have a great success with private label in the Nordics and we have now extended the assortment also to the Benelux. It's doing fantastic and we are already on a run rate basis on the levels close to our target, and we for sure believe that we can do the targets on, in this area. In procurement, we have done a lot of activities in the last six months after changing the organization. There activity-wise, we are doing good, and we are starting to see effect, and our belief is that we will see full effect of that, and Alexandra will show us a bit later on the procurement side.
When we look at the cost synergies, these are divided in two. I would say the first one more related to the integration of the units in the Benelux, where we have now started to integrate the old Vincere Groep companies into Dustin. We see good result from that. That work will continue now for the next year. Still we will get, as it looks at the moment, good synergies coming from that. The last one is really the, let's say, using that integration to form global or regional organization, and also using the effects from the one IT platform. I think that's where, yeah, I would ask Alexandra to continue a little bit on the one IT platform and on the procurement side.
Thank you. I'll start with the one IT platform. one IT platform as we talked about before, I mean, it's really an enabler for capturing these cost synergies that we just heard about, and also a key component in building the European IT powerhouse that is our strategy. What is then one IT platform? Well, it's a lot of things, of course. The major blocks is here on the slide. It's four major initiatives you could say that is really forming the one IT platform. The first one is the one ERP, what we call the One Dynamics, and one ERP is of course, for the group. That's the whole thing. We have one web experience for our customers.
They should have one experience when meeting Dustin, and for us that's consolidating the portals we have and also the open webs. The third part, it's all about one service management. We heard Rebecca talk about that. One service operations, both internally and externally. Last but not least, the one data platform for us to be able to take data-driven decisions on the group, we're forming the one data platform moving on. This future platform is something that is scalable, that's important for us. It's scaling across geographies. It will align way of working. We are also leveraging from standard processes in the different IT components that we select in each and every box. And of course, it's a digitalization of our customer journey that we also hear.
That's what we want to meet, to continue with the self-service and digitalization of the customer experience. Last but not least, to cater for further efficiency and further automation. The focus from us at Dustin is that we will be able to continue on this efficient path, to really go to efficiency in our core processes to increase the level of automation from where we are, to a higher level. As we heard, Johan describe, to reduce the integration time of acquired companies. We also see the benefit of having one quicker time to market for new functionality, since we will have one development process eventually. Last but not least, to communicate internally, but as well externally with one Dustin.
All in all, this is an enabler for us to realize the synergies within the back office area, as we heard, Johan talked about, and also within the processes, improving quality, and of course the efficiency overall. Between this year, 2022, 2023, until fiscal year 2024, 2025, we expect to invest SEK 300 million in the IT transformation moving on. About procurement, we have formed a global procurement department within operations, and the focus we have and the key activities we drive really keeps delivering to the procurement synergies. As we heard, we expect them to be realized during this year. The global procurement, what does it allow us to do? Well, again, it harmonizes the way you're working across the six different countries we operate in, which is of course more efficient.
It also enable us to use our full size and to achieve the lower costs, which is the benefit for our customer, for Dustin. Also to use the total procurement power to create better results, but also terms and condition. The focus we have in global procurement is to continue on this path, to continue work with the kickbacks and the renegotiation and negotiations when it comes to payment terms. I'll come back to this also when we talk about net working capital and that impact. It's also about harmonizing how we procure and go to just-in-time procurement in smaller batches more often, rather than the opposite, having large procurement more seldom. This, of course, has an impact on the inventory levels that we have.
It's also an opportunity for us now to really align on the one way of working on a group level and to use this combined size to secure better deals. Last but not least, to really have the right competencies in the right place within Dustin.
Thank you very much, Alexandra Fürst. I think this shows, again, the importance of capturing the synergies for us in order to deliver on the financial targets that we have just presented. Actually, we will now continue from the EPS target towards the target regarding leverage. As you know, or as Thomas said before, we have not made any changes to the leverage target. We are still committed to be between 2x and 3x of net debt to EBITDA. There is no change on that. We will go through a little bit here what we believe are the important steps to make sure that we come back to that level in the future. Just look at the history a little bit on leverage.
Here you can see that, as we acquired Centralpoint, in 2021, in Q4, leverage went up to 4.3x. At the time, we had a plan to reduce that along with the dotted curve here, which would take us back to the level of two to three within eight quarters. What has happened in the meantime, obviously, that life is not always going the way you plan it. What has happened now is, of course, because of the tougher market, we have a lower EBITA result. That affects our plan, let's say with 0.2x. We have FX Swedish krona being quite weak.
That also affects our leverage with 0.3x. We have working capital and inventory primarily being quite high at the moment, that has affected our planned leverage with 0.4x. This affects our business with approximately 1 x on leverage side. What are we now doing in order to get the leverage back? We are working with net working capital for sure, Alexandra, can you take us through this?
Yes. The aim is to reduce net working capital to be between SEK -100 and SEK -200. The actions we take will have an impact on the reduced inventory levels, as you can see there, and also getting net WC back to negative levels. What are we then doing? Well, first of all, as you heard me talk about, we're leveraging the new organizational setup, the structure we have to really use the combined size and the power we have in the market. We are also moving the way we procure to just in time procurement, which means in per se that we will also reduce the inventory by having a smarter way of procure.
That is also possible now because we're not in the pandemic anymore, and we heard that the supply chain is normalizing in another way. It's also an opportunity to do this. We are working across the Group to reduce the inventory when it comes to customer specific inventory. By quarter four this year, 2022, 2023, we expect it to be reduced by SEK 400 million. In parallel, we're also working on what we call the core inventory to be reduced by SEK 60 million. This, of course, has a direct impact on where we are on this target. We're also focusing on the payment terms and the payment days towards our major distributors. The estimated impact of this is SEK 250 million on the net working capital.
Again, this will get us back on the negative levels we want, and also this facilitates our asset-light business model.
Thank you, Alexandra. Let's have a look at the total impact of these actions on the projected numbers for leverage. I think it's important to understand that if we take the financial targets and with some assumptions that you see on this slide, we will come back into the range or even below the range of leverage target until 2025, 2026. What have we done? Well, we have used the EBITA or we have calculated the EBITA using the financial targets until 2025, 2026. We have assumed SEK 200 million of CapEx every year, and you heard half of that more or less will be building the One IT platform. We have assumed a negative net working capital of roughly SEK 100 million, where inventory reduction is the main facilitator.
We have calculated with the dividend according to our policy, and we have assumed the current FX rates. What you can see here then is that leverage from now on will reduce to 1.7x in 2025, 2026, of which a large part of this will come from a better business result that's about 70%, and the other part will come from improved net working capital. This is a projection of the future leverage using our financial numbers. I think by that, thank you very much, Alexandra.
Thank you.
We will move on to the third target in the total target.
Thank you. Exactly. Let's talk a little bit about the CO2 emission and what we have there, which is the target that I was into in the beginning, that we lift up from our current commitments that we have on being climate neutral in 2030. We think it's also important to start to report in this and lift it up in a higher level because we can, and we can drive that development forward. We look upon it like this, that we have a 25% reduction in CO2 equivalents on per SEK 1 million net sales for the coming period, coming three-year period. I said that leads us towards our 2030 commitment of being climate neutral. This we report.
We already report this in our annual report. We will also now follow it up by in a higher level, you can say, that we will do. Obviously we do this because, I mean, the trends are quite clear. Climate reduction is increasingly important in procurement. Demand for circular products and solutions is also increasing heavily. Obviously the responsibility and transparency in supply chain management is also increasing heavily. With the trends, I mean, sustainability is becoming an integral part of buying IT. We today, we have done a lot of actions, as you heard us talk about before. We have launched our own take-back service.
We have a production facility in south of Sweden, in Växjö, and we also have a production facility in south of Netherlands.
Where we take in products from all our clients and refurbish them or recycle them and resell them. This work that we have done in sustainability has also given a lot of advantage for us in tenders where we see that we can win new business by having the thorough work in sustainability. We've also linked, as we've announced before, we have linked our loans, our financing towards two KPIs, which is CO2 equivalent per shipment, and of course also the number of take-backs that we do. This gives us a discount on the interest rate we pay. We see though also that we have a full value chain approach. We have included Scope 3 in our reporting that you can follow in our annual and sustainability report.
We take the full value chain as an approach to this, obviously, and we are compliant with the TCFD. Of course, for our third year or fourth year actually, we have done the external integrated reporting. Same level of sustainability as the financial accounting. This of course leads us to where there a lot of potential. I mean, we can in the future also sell more of refurbished products online. We obviously do it offline as well, but we can also do it online. We can use the data that we have to help our customers make the sustainable choices and help them out of that. We offer circular options that add clear customer values as well.
LCP, sort of the drive in LCP customers is also, those expectations is also, driving change in SMB. As Rebecca was into the SMBs are more sort of taking it for granted that we fix this and that we work with this and it counts a lot with the, with the corporations we have with the large corporate and public players, especially the public players, which is driving this ahead, which is really good. Obviously, given our position and our size in the market, we can have a positive impact in the entire value chain. For us, it is making sustainable IT, easy for our customers, and by that, also contributing to margin development. Profit is obviously a very good sustainability metric as well.
How it will look, I mean, our path to decrease our CO2 impact. Here you can see a graph, where we're starting point is the end of last year when we ended. We include all the scopes here, Scope 1, 2, and 3. We start at 61, and in full year of 2025, 2026, we will come to 46, and this is 46 CO2 equivalents per million SEK of net sales. That means a 25% reduction until then, taking us further on our journey towards a zero, or a climate neutral company. This we will do with a lot of actions and our main levers, as you can see on the right-hand side there and an estimate of the share of the total improvement there.
I mean, obviously expanding our services such as managed services and take-back, that will bring contribute to this. We will also promote solutions and products with the lower negative environmental impact to actively support our customers' reduction. Cooperate with the committed vendors who also has their own sort of targets and actions towards reducing CO2 equivalents or CO2 emissions. That will of course for us be more steering towards those type of vendors. We'll also partner with stakeholders towards climate action, which could be either institutions or other partnering with other companies and finding partners that also work towards this to find a better in terms of distribution, better in terms of packaging. It can be different measures here. We see this as important task as well.
Of course, be carbon neutral in our own operations, which means that we go for right energy sources, we secure that we have the right cars when we travel, et cetera, everything we do. Of course, also our own private label operations, that they also work towards their carbon neutral environment. There will be a residual that we probably know already, and then all companies will have this. That we will either do a certified offsetting. We'll see how that looks when we come to 2030. There will be residual that we will deal with either in offsetting or have found other innovations on the way towards 2030.
It's an exciting time ahead, and I think that we have a great opportunity and we both can and will work on this and lift it up and show the importance on this and also show the way forward on this target. With that, I think we are through the presentation of this. I hope we have before we go into summary and Q&A. Let's us just summarize this on that. You can say that right now in the middle of this, we are very extreme or exciting market as we have been into during the, as we talked about in Q1, as also the, both Rebecca and Angelo and Michael have mentioned on the markets.
If we look at our own more long-term targets now, Johan, would you like to summarize?
Yes. I think, I mean, really important is of course to raise the sight a little bit with the times we are in now. If we look ahead, again, on this call we have announced that we will change the targets primarily on the business side from growth and margin to EPS growth. I think that's an important move as we are steering the business going forward. We have also changed how we allocate the central cost towards the segments where we believe this will have a good impact on accountability and transparency on the segment's result. If we look at the segments by themselves, SMB really is all about growing the customer base primarily than in the Benelux and expanding the margins primarily in the Nordics.
On the LCP side, we need to scale on the lifecycle management services, and take-back, and we have a priority on the high-margin contracts, and that will affect little bit the growth expectations going forward, where we are now 5% instead of 8%. Obviously improvements of segment margin will come through the synergies. Delivering the synergies is so utmost importance and I hope you have followed us in the presentation on how we will do that. The leverage target we have not changed. We are strongly committed to come back to the level of 2x-3x of leverage. We have clearly identified activities there, and I think our model is really geared for taking us back to that level within the next one and a half to two years.
If we repeat on the financial target side, EPS growth above 10%, leverage stays at 2x-3x on net debt to EBITDA. CO2 emission is now quantified on a three-year basis to a reduction of 25%, and that is still a part of the 2030 commitment, and the dividend policy remains the same of above 70% of net result.
Very good. Great. Let's move into Q&A and hope you have been following through the slides here and the presentation. That will obviously be available also on dustingroup.com for you to look into furthermore. Obviously you can also pose questions to us anytime, to me and Johan, or to Fredrik Zetterström, our Head of IR as well, if any questions arise. If you have any questions now, please post them just in the chat and just post your name and the question, and we will respond to them. I think we have already gotten in some questions during the talk here. Let's see. The first one we have here. Yes. According to market sources, Apple force iPhone volumes to, among other CSPs.
Is Dustin also impacted from this, perhaps explaining some of the inventory issues in Q4? No, this is actually nothing we have experienced that they force volume on us. Obviously iPhone is a very popular phone and Apple is a large vendor, so they have somewhat lower margins you can say —
Mm-hmm
—still, we haven't been forced on taking those volumes. We take them because the customers is in want them and they want them. That's why we have sold. There has been a lot of imbalances during the last year, where we got volumes in different kinds of orders. As you know, we have talked about before the imbalances in the supply chains due to primarily China's behavior on Corona. Now that is smoothing out, so it should be easier going forward in the future. Let's see here. Next question. A recurring question has been your too high gearing following the working capital bill. You have denied the need for new share issue repeatedly on back of an estimated working capital release in H1 2023.
Can you reiterate this statement also today? Would you like to elaborate on that? I think we've talked about some of it—
Yeah.
—in the presentation.
I really think that we showed you before in the presentation that we are really committed to come back on leverage. I think we have the model, we have the way of operating our business is deleveraging. Short term, we will work with the net working capital as you saw. It will come back to the levels where we aim to be primarily through reducing inventory.
Exactly. Exactly. Great. Here is another one. On the net working capital targets, have you abandoned the plan to sell SEK 750 million accounts receivables? Have you abandoned that? No, we have not actually—
No.
We haven't started.
I think we can say like this, what we discussed previously on the net working capital are the operational issues with net working capital. We will continue with having the, let's say, the bridge activity of selling receivables. If we can and want to, we will use that opportunity. That will not take away our focus from actually reducing net working capital operational.
No, exactly. Exactly. Here is another one also on the, more near term net working capital. How do you see the near term net working capital and leverage to develop during 2022, 2023 until year end, until August, end of August, 2023? Is there any risk of this causing a too stretched balance sheet?
Well, I think what, again, maybe repeating ourselves, but we said before that our aim is to reduce inventory down to SEK 1.1 billion from the Q1 SEK 1.6 billion, and I think that will release obviously SEK 500 million, reducing debt levels with that number. I think that will take the pressure off a little bit from the balance sheet.
Mm. It will.
Yes.
Let's see. How have you distributed the central functions cost to each segments? Do you have an allocation key per segment? Good question.
Well, actually, yeah. Quite a technical thing.
Yeah.
Yes, we do have a look at each of the functions and how much of that function's work is really related to one or the other segment. It's a qualitative key for each of the cost centers or each of the function.
Yeah. Here we have a question also on SMB. The 20% growth in Benelux and the investor growth impacting of - 0.3 percentage points to reach the target of 6.5% EBITDA, do these figures include or, and/or need updating warehouse to more efficient automated solutions like Sweden? Well, what we have said so far is that it is not needed to reach those levels. We will, however, obviously look into how we can automate the warehouse as we did in Sweden, in the Swedish warehouse, which is, by the way, also very successful operating now. We obviously can take that model to export to Benelux as well. For now it's not incorporated in the plans. That is not. That will be another benefit.
I think.
It will take some time, yes.
The volume will take some time to grow.—
Yeah.
— in the Netherlands in order to do automation profitable.
As you know, we waited somewhat, many years before we automated the warehouse in outside Stockholm here. You do that when you're sort of optimized your flow, when you have the right customer base, and you have the right customer flow, then it's very good to put in an automated solution. We're not there yet in the Benelux, so it's not incorporated at this time. Let's see here. Here, we have another one. The most important reasons for the negative margin trend the past few quarters and why you have not reached EBITA margin of 5%-6% seem primarily due to temporary issues according to your quarterly presentations. What are the main reasons for the downgraded growth and margin targets today? Are there any fundamental changes to your market and how you operate?
I think I can start to elaborate on that. I think the overall you can see that our company has developed, and we are a different company today than we were on when we set the previous targets. We just touched upon the margin target. We passed about 5% last year. Still, we have grown significance in LCP, both organically and through the acquisition of Centralpoint, and we have also grown significantly in SMB. We have a different split. Also the fact that the segments are much larger today than they were before, we see it much more efficient and more transparent and actually creating more clarity for us to follow us on a group level with DPS and leverage and obvious CO2.
That is for us a better way of mirroring how the company looks today.
We haven't really changed—
Exactly.
— the ambition on each of the segments. That's clear. It's the same as we have had before.
Yeah.
The main change is what Thomas said, is the mix between the segments.
The segments have the same targets as we had before. However, the mix has altered, so we see it more efficient and more better for us and transparent and more value to look at DPS from a group target. We will have the supporting targets which are the same. What has changed is also, of course, that we as Michael and Angelo was into on the LCP studies that we are actually exchanging growth towards the more specific and more prioritizing contracts where we see where we can add more value than just taking in the contracts. That we can do because of the size we have. We see the portfolio of LCP contract is similar to the portfolio of SMB contracts we have.
Therefore we can be a bit more picky or a bit more targeted when it comes to choosing contracts where we can add value and then hence more margin. Let's see here. Is there a risk that software reselling in the future will take place more in the cloud, meaning that you as a reseller may be less relevant to ask companies to buy more software directly from vendors? Well, this is a very interesting question, I think, because it sort of—t hat was also the starting point when internet was actually the ones that customers will go directly to the vendors.
It has not happened, and what is an interesting part, as I also mentioned in the beginning, is that the beauty of being an aggregator like we are in IT, specialized in IT, is that the customer typically wants a lot of different solutions. They want a laptop from someone, they want a printer, they want a software solution. Rather we see that the importance of being on our toes as an aggregator, and depending on how you deliver, because the cloud is just a delivery model, we still sell the product or the software. We believe that there will obviously be companies that buy directly from vendors, but that is already happening today and has happened since 1984, and it will continue to happen.
We as a strong player and strong aggregator in this will help the customers in their full IT portfolio. We believe there's strength in the model. Here we have another one on acquisition. Should we expect bolt-on acquisitions or even mid-size acquisitions in the next four years? Is that put on hold and eventually come on top of the targets and most likely not to be share count diluted when they occur? Yes, it is. You can say that everything we have presented today is without M&A.
Yeah.
There's no acquisition. Everything is organic. We did that because we want to show also how we develop organically. Obviously, as you understand, as we have talked about before as well in the quarterly reports, is that now we are, we have our hands full of integrating the companies we have, Centralpoint, for example. That we will do, before we do that, we will probably not to do maybe some smaller, but not as it look right now. The numbers we have here is organically. Obviously we want to, when you do an acquisition, you should secure that you operationally can deal with it and that you can financially deal with it.
I think in the, I mean, in the near future, we really have to make sure that we can yield on the investments that we have already done.
Yeah.
That is the key priority at the moment.
Yes. Yes. good. here, how patient are your lenders in your process to deleveraging down to a net debt of 2x-3 x adjusted EBITA? What are you saying?
I think they are patient.
Yeah.
We have a good dialogue with our lenders.
Yes.
I think they understand where we are and our model in a really good way, and that comes from a history of relationship with the lenders for many, many years.
Mm-hmm.
I think, yeah, I would say, patient.
Yes, they are. We have a good relationship with the, with the three banks we have today.
Yes.
Let's see here. Next one. There. A question on SMB and LCP, on the plan to drive EBITA margins to 6.5% and 4.5%. You have sales mix as an item behind improving margins. Can you expand on this? Does it simply mean your sales mix swinging back compared to what you have experienced the last several quarters? Do you have an intention to add on new product groups that you can expect will carry better margin contributing compared to the sales mix today? What do you say there?
I think here we have to go back to why we did the acquisition of Centralpoint and why we changed the customer split or the segment split in the first place. I think what we have created now in the Benelux is the foundation to grow organically on the SMB side. That we need to use. That we have also talked about today. It is one of the most important targets that we have as a group. That will of course, as you could see, between 2015 and 2020, we were actually in an increase of the SMB share. Now we need to do that again. We are back to growth in SMB, primarily coming from the Benelux expansion. That should take us, again, a little bit more towards the balanced approach.
It will of course not be 50/50 in the near future, but it will get slightly better year by year.
Yes. Yes. Good. Here another question. What are the incentives for the management teams per segment, and how are they linked to the growth margins and cash flow targets? Well, incentives, we have both the short-term incentives and obviously that is for within the year we go, and there we have targets for all those three. Obviously we have long-term incentives, which we now, which you might have seen, we also have the performance share plan, which is very much linked into the shareholders. Obviously the short-term incentive should also drive to shareholder value over time. I don't know if you wanna comment anymore on that.
No. I think.
No? Yeah.
I mean, we do have individual target for the segments, for the ones working with the segments, but everyone in the leadership team also share a group common target.
Yes. Exactly. Great. Let's see if we have another question here coming up. Yes. Here we go. Just see if we can get—y eah, there. How is the process going to find a new CFO? Well, let's talk—
Good que-
—ask the incoming CEO.
Good question.
How does it work?
It has started, and I think it's going well. We have a process, we have a partner, and we're in full speed ahead.
Many people raising their hands for this job, so that's good.
A lot.
Yeah. That's good. Great. Let's see if we have another. That was the last question. Very good. Great. Thank you very much everyone for tuning into this, and I hope it gave you more flavor also to the press release that we gave this morning and announced that we have these new financial targets, which we will create more clearance, more clarity, transparency, and obviously it will drive shareholder value also going forward. That we want to do. Thank you very much for participating, and just reach out to any one of us if you have any more questions further on. Thank you very much.
Thanks.
See you soon. Thank you.