Okay, hi everyone and welcome to ABG's Investor Days. Our upcoming presentation will now shift to outdoor and services, especially those two in combination. With us now we have, first of all, myself, who is responsible for covering Green Landscaping, and I will mainly just be focusing on moderating the presentation hosted by Head of Investor Relations, Magnus Larsson. So the majority of the presentation will be held by Magnus, and then towards the end I'll hopefully be able to ask some questions too. So thank you, Magnus, for being here, and please take it away.
Thanks for having me as well. Just a few words on myself. I have been Head of Investor Relations at Green Landscaping Group for the past two years. I have the majority of my background in the general engineering industry, with finance, communication, and supply chain being sort of majors, both in Sweden and abroad. That's what I bring. For those of you who don't know Green Landscaping Group, let's start at the bottom. We're active in the areas of grounds maintenance, green space management, and landscaping. It's urban areas, outdoor areas in cities. That's where we are active. And we are a home for entrepreneurs, meaning that we consist of 50-plus subsidiaries that work independently of each other. A quick glance on our financial performance. We are a relatively young company.
Our first, or our oldest subsidiary, was founded in 1952, but Green Landscaping Group, as a group, was founded in 2009, 2010, something like that. You look at the financial performance over the years, and you can, you don't get the answers, but you get two clear questions. One is that we did something wrong in the first half of our history, and we did something right thereafter. I'm going to tell you what in just a second, and that is going to be divided into our investment case. These three pillars rest on is the bed of our investment case, and the reason for the turnaround in the financial performance some seven, eight, nine years back. We are active on a very attractive market, contrary to what you might believe in urban areas, urban outdoor areas.
We have a fit-for-purpose business model that we have acquired the hard way, and we are good at M&A. We're very good at that. And these three combined make us what we are today and why we're good. So let's have a look at the market. We have a good and steady growth with low cyclical characteristics. That's sort of what the market is. It's large and highly fragmented, and it's exposed to favorable mega trends. And contrary also to what you believe, we have some notable entry barriers. It's not your usual suspects, but they are there as well. So let me spend a couple of minutes on this. Now this statistics comes from the Swedish municipalities' operating costs, and on our addressable market.
If you look at the, at the left-hand side, you can see that for the past 10, 12, 13 years or so, the growth has been an annual growth of 4% plus, which is surprisingly strong, and it is surprisingly steady as well, because the world has not really been very stable during these past 15 years or so, but the market seems to be quite unaffected by it. It just grows by those 4%. To the right-hand part is one reason for it as well. It's when you look at the municipality's total operating costs, those are the pillars, and you look at the line, and that's sort of our, how much they spend on our markets, which is a very, very small share of it.
Meaning that if they move around in their cost base, if they need to save on something, the money is not on our part. It's just there. So there it is. So how come it can grow these 4%? Well, I'll get to that in a minute. As you might expect, the annual addressable market is really high. In our markets where we are active, it's SEK 350 billion. And as we add markets, meaning add countries, in our case, that's just growing. And how come it's so big? Well, as soon as you have a city, that's when we have a potential market. Now how come the 4% then? Well, we've got a couple of reasons for it. One is the population growth, and the other is the urbanization.
Together they are about 1.5%, which may not sound like much, but it's remarkably steady. It's just that, okay, we get, the population grows and it moves into the cities as well. Year by year, yeah, that is, it's just there. Whatever else happens in the world, it just seems to be sort of a bedrock of 1.5% that our market grows. Now, adding to that, there has been over the past decades a very clear trend of increased safety, security, and attractiveness of outdoor areas. Pretty well described in this picture as well. To your left, you see a playground in the 1990s, and to your right, you see it this year. Of course, worlds apart, you do the same thing, but the attractiveness, the safety, yeah, it's a very big difference.
Obviously, erecting a new park, playground, that is more costly as well. It requires a lot more effort, but also to maintain it, as well. So this is a trend. Yes, it is a mega trend that we have seen. Also in our parks, for instance, both the demands for it to be attractive to walk in, but also safe and secure to be in as well, in terms of lighting, in terms of whatever it is, that too adds to it. Now, the third mega trend is coping with effects of climate change. Yes, this is a trend that mostly is still ahead of us. We are already affected by it. I think we all know that as citizens, but we see it also in our numbers in two different ways. It's an increasing demand for ad hoc occurrences.
We arrived here responding to incidents, meaning that if we have a heat wave or flooding or a snowstorm or something, yeah, the snow needs to be removed. The water you need to correct whatever it has damaged, et cetera, but also we see the preventive initiatives and the maintenance that come with it, and this we believe is largely ahead of us, but combined, the coping with the effects of climate change, the population growth, and the safe and secure outdoor areas, yeah, that's why the market grows by those 4%. It's these trends are not moving anywhere. If anything, yeah, this last one is going to be of increasing importance. Now about the entry barriers as well. The work that we conduct is not, it's not rocket science. It's not immensely difficult in any sort of traditional way.
We don't have patents on any inventions or anything like that that sort of protect us in this way. We don't have economies of scale really either. But we do have something else. The market is exceptionally fragmented and local. Now, the customers are the ones that own the outdoor environments, obviously. Mostly public customers, municipalities mostly, and some real estate owners as well. Now by default, the municipality is local. It's sort of. It's just where it is. And through this picture, you can imagine scaling the highest building in a city, church tower or something, and you look out and there's your market. Anything outside of it is out of your reach. Anything inside of it, that's your market. And if that grows by 4%, yeah, there you are. You are the local hero.
You have, as a local company, a great local reputation and knowledge, brand knowledge as well. You're called something, well, it could be anything, really, and you're unknown outside of it, meaning that your possibilities to grow outside of your market is small, but the likelihood of someone coming in and taking your market is equally small, which is why the market is so big, but it consists of only small companies almost. Now, the fit-for-purpose business model could look like this. These are our companies, and you see that, yeah, there are a lot of different companies. They have their own brands. They have their own cultures, if you wish. They have their own ways of making business as well. What they have in common is that they are good companies. They go, they're good at what they do.
They serve the local customers in their way. They have found a way to act on that market. Usually have been there for a long time as well. Now, in the beginning of our history, we tried to consolidate the market and sort of consolidate the companies that we acquired under the umbrella Green Landscaping Group. That did not work very well at all. You saw that from the financial performance picture. After a couple of years, we found out that, okay, this market, it's not the way to go to the market. You need to be local. You need to have that local entrepreneurship, to be able to move around and to know your customer, as well. Which is why we sort of made a really bold and heavy lifting move from a centralized model to a decentralized model.
And the financial performance picture as well, that's sort of the divider. And that's when it all clicked, sort of when we started to perform really well. And this picture, you can see to your right-hand side, we have plotted all our companies. And you see from the vertical side that, yeah, it differs in profitability. You see on the horizontal side that almost all of them are small. Yeah, they're representative of the market as well. You see a green line. Hopefully, if you're in the audience, it might be difficult, but it's there as well. That's the industry average of just shy of 5%, some 4%-5% EBIT margin. Now, as you might remember from the picture, we've gone from very low single digit up till 8.5% where we are now.
On an upwards trend as well. Yes, we have a lot of companies that we can learn from, but it's also so that we can, that we know that, it's good to buy a good company instead of a bad one. The proven M&A strategy could be summarized like this. We will buy the same companies or try to invest in the same companies and tie the same companies to our group tomorrow as we have done today and in our recent past as well. Meaning someone that is already top tier that has found their thing, their niche on the local market. It needs to be a cultural fit. They need to be decent people making decent returns in a decent way.
That's sort of, it's a catchphrase that we've sort of borrowed from somewhere that we really like. So we have a lot of people that meet the potential candidates, to try to get to know them culturally, personally, and understand if they would like it at being part of us as well. It needs to be a strategic fit, meaning that, yeah, we are what we are. We are a niche compounder in this way. Meaning that, the outdoor areas, the green space management, the landscaping, yeah, that's where you need to be active really. What will change is the geographies. We will widen our net. We will continue to be aggressive in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. That's the DACH areas with our Munich as a node that we have since last year.
We're active in the Baltics, and we're opportunistic in the Nordics, which is our home market, so we will seize on the opportunities that will come there, although we are focusing most of our efforts into the DACH area then. We're looking at closing some eight to 10 transactions, meaning that eight to 10 companies join us on a yearly basis, considering both the leverage that we have and our ability to both attract them, the companies and to welcome them in an orderly way into our group as well, so this is it, and by that, I leave it to Carl and you to ask questions.
Thank you, Magnus. The first one is just on the focus on regions of where you acquire the companies.
So can you explain the rationale and why you made this decision a couple of years ago to start actually looking into the DACH region, why you are doing it at the moment? So why pursue this new region compared to doing eight to 10 acquisitions in Sweden, for example?
Yes. We've found the recipe for this market, we believe. We don't have much of an industrial competitor, meaning someone doing the same thing as we do. We have a few of them, but we'd like to see ourselves as the European champion in a couple of years. We are well on our way, we think. And in going with that aspiration, yeah, the DACH region is really a centerpiece of what you need to do when you're a Nordic company and we've already been there. That is one reason.
The second is also we had a really deep look at the market before we decided to enter it, to see if it sort of met the same characteristics in that region as in other regions as well. So, and yeah, all the boxes were ticked as well, meaning that yeah, the market was fragmented there as well. It was not consolidated, but we believe that with our model, yeah, we could really make a difference. And yeah, that's why we did it the way we did.
If I may ask you to go back to the slide where you had the long-term financial performance, it might. I apologize for making things difficult for you here if it.
No, no. I'll try to make more than one thing at a time.
You yeah, you just continue.
So, no.
The question is that, for example, the financial targets you have are to have a margin above 8% and to grow revenues by more than 10%, both of which you are currently above. If we look at actual net profit or earnings per share, the growth rate has been even higher. Yeah. As you say, this is a combination of efforts both by improving your existing businesses, but also by acquiring companies. I think in Germany, for example, you've been able to acquire companies with margins above 10% even. Why do you think that the opportunity to acquire these high-margin companies is so good to start with?
The market is huge. Tens of thousands of companies, and the average profitability was at 4%. That also means that you've got a lot of companies that are really good.
If we can gather them and you sort of gather a winning team and a sort of a Champions League participant, as well, you sort of get a movement inside and you get sort of a pull factor as well where when companies actually call us and say, "Hey, I'd like to join you. How do I do that?" So that's one thing. About the targets, yeah, we're aware of that, of them that we are currently trending above them, particularly the ones that are pictured here on the screen. They came about when we did our IPO and went to the market in 2018. By that time, you see, yeah, those targets were really stretched targets. Now they're stretched in the other way, almost. We acknowledge that.
There is an ongoing discussion internally to perhaps revise the targets as well to better reflect our future potential rather than the past.
If we take a broader perspective when we look at service companies here in the Nordics, for example, we have companies active within installation, facade services, a lot of different applications. Many of these have seen quite a number of challenges in recent years with a weaker market, higher competition. Yet, as you pointed out, you've been able to still grow organically in line with your kind of market assessment of 3%-5%. Why do you think that perhaps your market is a bit more resilient and that perhaps your businesses have been able to manage the situation a bit better than in other niches when we look at?
Yeah. Yeah.
In theory, it actually should be more resilient, going back to the mega trends that I just discussed with the population growth, with the climate part, with the safety, security of outdoor areas, and myself and the CEO are arguably the only ones in the company that sort of looked forward to a downturn or some harsh times, in order for us to be able to prove that theory in practice as well, and yes, the market and the service market that you point at have seen some fairly rough seas for the past year and a half, which is not really visible in our numbers. If you ask our MDs, yeah, things are really tough.
But if you look at the numbers and the top lines, and the bottom lines, yeah, we sort of see that the profitability has sort of flattened out a little bit, but not gone down, or just a tad or something like that. So yeah, so far so good. And we're pretty confident that we can sort of once we get out of this downturn and whatever time it takes and looking back, yeah, we should be able to prove that we've done some good things as well. That's one thing. And the second is that if you gather the best companies in the group as well, that means that they're profitable for a reason. They treat their people really well. They treat their customers well. They are typically the favorites of the customers as well.
And if the customer has got two, three, four different suppliers and times get tough, they cut that perhaps to only two, which of course would be their favorites and the ones that they rely on the most, which is why in theory, yeah, you should see the good companies sort of move along reasonably well, even though times are tough. And that's exactly what we see.
And then, another thing is that in general, your businesses don't need too much capital. You don't need to invest that much in a lot of factories and machinery, et cetera.
So when you look at the current market situation and so on, do you see that you can continue to improve your own cash flow generation, i.e., that you have enough firepower internally to continue to achieve that goal that you have of stepping up the acquisition pace and so on?
Yes, that's the short answer. And this is another beauty of it. You're right. Yeah. We're a service provider in that we don't sell products, meaning that we don't have inventories that go up and down. And we don't have that sort of operational leverage issue that a producing company would have. It's a benefit to us here from a cash flow perspective as well. We've got seasonal variations over the year, as we move along with the seasons, effectively. That impacts the cash flow for us.
But it's reasonably well known beforehand a little bit on how the trend will look. And there is no reason to believe that it will change in any material way going forward either.
With that, I think our time is running out. I would like to thank everyone who has been listening, everyone who has been watching. If you have any more questions, feel free to direct them to Magnus, our head of Investor Relations at Green Landscaping Group.
Of course. Thank you.