Good afternoon, everyone. We need to talk about dress codes. I was instructed to go and change, and I just see dark suits here. You've taken your ties off, and I've heard that's very Swedish. All right. We're going to talk about an update on our financial targets. Let's recap what we said last year in Orlando. We talked about the base case and a more negative case that we called ugly fish scenario. The base case was based on global growth of roughly 4.5% GDP. We also talked about this ugly fish scenario where we would have a recession about now, and if you read the news, that might even happen. Still, we presented a financial plan that said EUR 3.5 billion in sales by 2015, an increase to EBIT margin to 25%.
When we concluded that, we basically talked about the synergy projects and how we're going to enhance margins by bringing more profit-rich projects through the P&L statement. What happened in 2011 since we left Orlando? Well, we saw the debt crisis getting worse in Europe. For Hexagon specifically, we were hurt and hit by not the high-speed train, but the high-speed train segment collapse. We had roughly an annualized sale of EUR 50 million in China at the peak, and it almost disappeared overnight. Another thing affecting the Hexagon group is the Swiss franc. Now, we don't have much sales in Swiss franc, but we have a manufacturing base and, even more importantly, an R&D base in Switzerland. As the Swiss franc appreciates, of course, it becomes more expensive, putting pressure on our EBIT margins. We also have positive news. There is a boom.
Currently, there is a boom in the global automotive industry. The energy sector is growing very fast, and we do see a recovery here in America. All in all, we had organic growth of 12%, recorded growth of 46%, consolidating Intergraph. Our operating cash flow increased by 35%, and MT, our core business, recorded an EBIT margin of 21%. What does it look like right now, standing here early June? Well, Q1, we reported organic growth of 6%. Another record quarter in metrology, fueled by what Norbert talked about this morning, the expanding automotive industry and also a surge in aerospace investments. Geosystems, we talked about high-speed rail, which had a negative impact on Geosystems growth in Q1. PP&M, strong double-digit growth, basically on fire.
SG&I reports negative growth for the third consecutive quarter, and this has to do with delays in projects, plus our restructuring program. Still, we reported a 21% EBIT margin in our core business in the first quarter. This is a quite interesting slide, actually. Here we've compared Q1 2008 as a reference to Q1 2012, and it's done in an organic growth structure. In 2008, sales that we recorded in 2008 per region is 100%. If you can see from this picture, Asia has continued to grow for Hexagon throughout the financial crisis, and it's actually at peak level. We see Americas recovering from a very low trough in the first quarter of 2009, and we see how difficult it is to get a recovery in EMEA. EMEA is really now leveling out at 85% of the 2008 levels.
We look at the business by application area, we have a similar situation. You see the big negative development in the first quarter of 2009, we see the very strong recovery thereafter. If we look at metrology, no one anticipated that. I remember when we discussed automotive in 2009, everybody said it's a dead industry. Now it's live and kicking and expanding and investing again. You see technology is really consolidated as of the fourth quarter because that's the first quarter when we have comparable numbers for the previous year. Let's talk a bit about currencies. It's true that Hexagon has a benefit on the top line as the US dollar strengthens against the euro or the Chinese renminbi strengthens against the euro.
We have these EUR 300 million of cost, fixed cost and variable cost, in Switzerland that are affected by the Swiss franc/euro relationship. It's important to remember that as we forecast the quarterly statement, that we still have a negative impact even though the year-on-year effect might disappear as of the second quarter. If you look at this graph, it was roughly around summertime. I think this big dip, that's August, from there on it sort of stabilized around 120. We can record a positive impact on the top line and still have a negative impact on the bottom line given the structure and the weight of the various currencies. That's just a piece of information good to remember. The EBIT margin has continued to improve.
We see the financial crisis in 2009 where we dropped down to 15%, we fairly quickly recovered and reached our target of a 20% EBIT margin last year. This is a constant improvement, it stems from mix and moving the company towards solutions and software content. I think that came across fairly clear in the keynote presentation that you've seen from the presidents earlier today. Some other housekeeping that is good to know, this is the situation when it comes to our balance sheet. You see the percentages of our gross debt to the left in this table. 40% is the term loan with the majority in 2015 and so forth. You see the interest rate that we're paying on that loan. The blended interest rate right now is 2.7%.
The reason why we're being able to bring down our financing cost by one percentage point compared to this period last year is this commercial paper program, which been very successful for us indeed. On average, the maturity for our debt is 2015, our borrowings currently are 70% in euro, 15% in Swiss francs, which are pegged to the euro. To simplify things, you could say 85% euro-denominated borrowings, another 15% in US dollars. 73% of our debt is bank loans 27% is this commercial paper program. Already now, even though it's fairly recently we launched it's 25% of our borrowing. Cash conversion. Our average cash conversion since 2007 is 82%. That's a fairly good ratio given that on average we've grown by 12, 13% organic growth over this period.
I think as we are expanding, 89% cash conversion is a reasonable target. What you need to deduct from that is obviously working capital expansion and the situation where we expand investments quicker than depreciation. Cash flow seasonality is important to remember. First half, weak. We pay out the dividend this quarter and so forth. Second half, very strong. Working capital to sales. Here you can see the net sales, which are the light blue bars, and the dark blue bars are the working capital. You have the green line, which is the ratio, working capital to sales, rolling basis. We had a peak, a hump in 2009, and that had all to do with the recession. In the third quarter of 2008, our organic growth was 17%. In the fourth quarter, it was minus 7%, and in the first quarter, it was minus 22%.
How do you pull the brakes on a thing like that? That's basically what we see here. I think we managed to mitigate it fairly good. Now we're back to actually a lower situation than pre-crisis levels. I think this is a good target, somewhere 17% working capital to sales. Net debt to EBITDA, that's something people discuss with us quite frequently. This is our history when it comes to net debt to EBITDA. The red line represents the upper threshold, 3.5 times, and the lower green line represents our target that we set for the fourth quarter of this year. You basically see that we have spikes when we do major acquisitions, fairly quickly we amortize our net debt position. That's what we're going to do this time again. Business update, second quarter.
We basically see the similar trends as we saw in the first quarter. We do see there is a general slowdown in the weighting in the global economy, we haven't really seen it in the second quarter, we're actually in mid-June right now. We expect all major geographic regions to grow in the second quarter. We expect PP&M and metrology to continue to show positive growth as they've done historically. Geosystems will recover in this quarter compared to last quarter where we had no growth. The negative sales trend in SD&I is expected to stop, the currency effect is going to be slightly more positive on the top line compared to the first quarter, where it was 3%. We'll have a similar negative impact on the bottom line.
We recorded minus EUR 1.8 million of currency headwind on the EBIT margin last quarter, you should expect a similar situation in the second quarter. If we look at this picture snapshot, this is what it looked like per region and per customer segment in the first quarter. The things that have changed for the better are really standing here in June, North America Public Safety. We have several tenders, we booked large orders for public safety going into the second quarter. It's definitely a much better situation for public safety in North America compared to six months ago. The other area that is improving gradually, it's not big swings, we haven't factored in this, what you've read about high-speed rail, we do see a stabilization for Geosystems surveying in China. It's not shrinking anymore.
Let's update you on the financial plan that we launched about this time last year. Our history and financial plan is described here. This is basically how Hexagon has developed. You see the dark blue bars? That's other businesses outside measurement technologies. The light blue on top, that's the measurement technology business. We started this business in 2001. It grew in 2002 through 2003. We continued to outgrow the other businesses in Hexagon. By 2008, we paid out a company called Hexpol today as an extraordinary dividend to our shareholders. We see the acquisition of Intergraph, where it really takes off. The new target, the old plan was called 20/20/11. That was when we recorded our numbers in Swedish krona.
The new plan is set in euros, where we want to grow from roughly EUR 2.1 billion to EUR 3.5 billion over the next coming four years. We want to improve our EBIT margin from 21% last year to 25% by 2015. That's basically the overview, and that's how we left it. We talked about an ugly fish scenario, we talked about a base case scenario, the big difference is really the organic growth in the ugly fish scenario compared to the base case scenario. Organic growth of 12% last year and 6% in the first quarter points at the base case scenario being still valid, and that's what we believe at this point in time. However, we read the same news as you do, the more people that read negative news, the closer you are to a downside in terms of economic output.
Is Europe in trouble? China slowing down, just taking a breather? U.S. continue with this patchy recovery? That's basically what we've seen over the past few weeks. To summarize, we believe we're still on the base case for this plan, EUR 3.5 billion in sales, 25% EBIT margin. Now let's dissect this plan. Let's look at its components and how they interrelate. If we look at the growth component and the target of EUR 3.5 billion in sales, we obviously want to grow our current core business in its current structure. We have new initiatives, and I think you can appreciate that going to the tech center and seeing our divisional presidents' presentations earlier on today. We're going to continue to do acquisitions. Those are the three growth components I want to discuss with you today.
If we look at the margin target, we want to improve the EBIT margin by 4%. Now, it's going to come from improved mix, it's going to come from increased gross margins, and that's obviously because of the improved mix. A tiny portion, but still maybe a percentage point out of the 4%, is operational leverage. We don't factor in too much operational leverage, because you need to remember when you compare us to other companies you might follow, that we have a fairly small fixed cost base in our manufacturing. We don't really have manufacturing as such. We have 1,000 blue collars out of 13,000 employees. That tells you the story. That means that as volumes go down or go up, we don't get economies of scale or significant economies of scale in our gross margin.
In order to lift our gross margin, we need to constantly do what we've been talking about all day, and that is develop new applications, develop new products, new things to sell that have a richer gross margin. Look at target number 1, organic growth in the core business. We'll start, and we'll dissect it by division. If we start with Geosystems, these are basically sort of a five-minute description of the business. Wide array of measurement and positioning systems, mainly used in the development and protection of infrastructure. We address surveying public sector customers, construction, civil engineering, mining, energy, agriculture, and defense. Key competitors in this segment would be Trimble and Topcon Positioning Systems. Topcon is listed in Japan, Trimble on NASDAQ here in the U.S.
Growth indicators, construction and infrastructure activity is not 100% correlated to it, but I think it's a fairly good estimation to how Geosystems is faring. Historically, if we go back 15 years, Geosystems has enjoyed an organic growth of roughly 8% per annum. EBIT margin is today around group average, but has historically been higher, but we're suffering from the effects of the China high-speed rail and the Swiss franc appreciation. I think look at that bar at the bottom, I think that's a good description on software services, recurring revenues, direct sales, and so forth. Growth profile for Geosystems. 50% of the current portfolio is growing below 8% per annum, 25% significantly above 8% per annum, and roughly 25% of the product portfolio around 8% growth. If we look at the region, this is our most Euro-centric business. Europe represents roughly 50% of the total business.
North and Central Europe, 31%, Southern Europe, 14%, and Eastern Europe, 4%. How we record this, we actually put France in Southern Europe, so remember that when we start discussing PIGS. France is not a PIG. Asia-Pacific, 25%, and America, 17%. Looking at the various regions, we do see a recovery here in the U.S. You can look at those bars. That's the predicted growth per construction segment here in North America. From 2011, and we're at very low levels historically in 2011, we expect growth in construction in North America this year to be accelerated in 2013. We've also put in a Brazilian slide here to the right, planned government infrastructure investments in Brazil. This is quite interesting because if you look at Hexagon as such, infrastructure is interesting for Intergraph and Geosystems. Mining, same thing. Transportation is interesting for metrology, oil and gas, both Geosystems and Intergraph, and energy, Intergraph and Geosystems.
We should be able to capture a large chunk of the CNY 2 trillion, let's say one and a half. China bottoming out. This is a projection and a forecast where we expect the surveying business to go. We've leveled out on low levels. You can see where we're coming from, and we expect things to look a bit brighter as we progress throughout the year. You probably picked up this latest news that National Railway Administration has received a credit of, well, CNY 2 billion. It's roughly, no 2,000, it's CNY 2 trillion. That's a lot of money, can only tell you that, to resume infrastructure projects.
We haven't seen anything from this, you shouldn't expect us to see it because it takes time for government money to trickle down into the system where it's deployed. Two-speed Europe. Hexagon Geosystems see Northern Europe grow at low single-digit growth rates. Southern Europe, well, we should all expect that. It's strong negative growth. Eastern Europe is doing very well indeed. All in all, 0%-8% growth in Europe, and it's becoming increasingly accentuated that we really have two different regions in Europe. Moving on to metrology. Metrology, what does it look like, the business? Well, look at the bottom again, 50% software and services compared to a much lower portion in Hexagon Geosystems. Recurring revenue, significantly larger because that's the way we sell.
We sell the system, we install it, then we sell maintenance over the life of the system. We do most of our business is direct sales, you can see this is the division with the largest portion emerging markets business. Complete range of stationary and portable industrial metrology systems. We have the industry's strongest service organization, and this is important when you deal with large multinationals, that they can expect to be serviced wherever they do business. Norbert talked about that in his speech. Industries, automotive, aerospace, electronics, design, energy, and med tech. Key competitors, Carl Zeiss of Germany, FARO, that is listed here, and Mitutoyo, a Japanese competitor. Trying to find growth indicators for metrology, automotive growth is always a good correlation to growth. Aerospace production is going to be increasingly important as we go forward. Industrial CapEx is important as well.
Historically, metrology has reported an organic growth of around 6%. We'll see where that will land in the future because there is a tendency throughout the 10-year tenure that we've had it, that it's increased a bit. It seems that the large multinationals are spending more and more money on metrology equipment. EBIT margin is still below group average, but it's improving consistently. If we look at the growth profile, 50% of metrology's business is growing above 8%, 25% around 8%, and 25% below 8% growth. Here you really see how multinational metrology really is, 35% EMEA, 35% Asia Pac, 30% Americas. Within those 35% Asia Pac, 25% is China. General manufacturing is 35% of sales, aerospace 25%, and automotive 40%.
Now, this is numbers given by the global automotive, it's PricewaterhouseCoopers doing something called Autofacts, and it's basically they're asking all the major automotive manufacturers what their plans are and how they view the market. It's usually fairly consistent with the outcome. What you can see here is that total global capacity is expected to grow by 4.9%. Total global production is expected to grow by 6.3%. What's consistently good for this industry, for us being suppliers is they'll always run with overcapacity, and they don't address it. What's happening within this growth is that emerging markets is growing much more rapidly than the mature markets. As a matter of fact, we're going to see a decline in sales in EMEA this year, fairly flattish development in North America, but growth in China, Brazil, and so forth for automotive production. What's happening in aerospace?
Well, it's a huge transition right now. At this moment in time, we see capacity expansion in the aerospace industry like we've never seen before. To simplify things, you can say we got 20,000 commercial aircraft flying the globe today. 6,000 out of those 20,000 aircraft are going to be retired within the next 20 years. We're going to replace them with new aircraft, but we're also going to grow the total fleet to 30,000, 40,000 units over the next 20 years. It's a significant expansion for the aerospace manufacturers. It's good news for Boeing and Airbus, but at the same time, competition is increasing in this segment. You got Embraer, you got Bombardier, and you got Chinese aircraft manufacturers that are going to launch commercial aircraft in these segments, in the next coming few years.
The good news, though, is Hexagon is doing business with all of them. Intergraph PP&M. We look at the Intergraph PP&M business model, leading global provider, and I know Garrett would be proud if I said the leading global provider of enterprise engineering and construction data management software. Industries, oil and gas, metals and mining, nuclear, power applications, marine, offshore, and shipbuilding. Key competitors, AVEVA of U.K. and Bentley Systems, a U.S. privately held company. The only public peer is really AVEVA. Growth indicators. How do you follow up on this industry? Oil price is, of course, one fairly good indication. CapEx for EPCs, owner operator spending as well. Historically, PP&M has reported an organic growth above 15% for the past five years. EBIT margin is significantly above group average, and you can see it's a 100% software and services business, significant recurring revenues.
Almost 100% direct sales and fairly big chunk in emerging markets. What could that be? That's roughly 45% of its sales is growing above 8%, and 55% of its business is growing below 8%. We're in a generation shift right now. It's important to remember that the old legacy product still has a much more larger installed base than the new SmartPlant 3D product that is eating market share into the old legacy product. Americas, 35%, EMEA, 39%, Asia Pac, 26%. The dominating segment for this business is oil and gas, followed by chemical and petrochemical applications, and general power. Could be anything from nuclear and so forth. Growth drivers. What are the growth drivers? That's an iPhone. We like that. We measure the glass, so you're excused. We said oil price. Oil price is probably the best indicator how PP&M is going to fare.
From the oil price, you can basically look at the EPC activity, and from that, we can draw conclusions on how PP&M's market is going to grow. These are selected owner/operator annual CapEx that the PP&M division follows, and this is the current outlook up till 2030. Then we look at the backlog from the select number of EPCs that we do business with. It's continuing to grow. PP&M industry trends. We're happy to report 5% market share growth between 2008, when we saw SmartPlant 3D really taking off, and last year. That's a significant number, a 5% market share gain over the past few years. Intergraph SG&I. Let's look at the traits of Intergraph SG&I. Provides incident management and geospatial software solutions to help customers manage, enhance, and protect life, infrastructure, and property.
This is probably the most difficult business to understand if you're a layman, but it's not that difficult, actually. Industries, public safety, defense and intelligence, utilities and communications companies. For utilities and communications companies, for example, outage management is one of the more important products we have. Key competitors is a privately held company called Esri, and then we compete primarily with in-house solutions at our customers. Growth indicators. What should you look for here? Well, security concerns, tension in societies, terrorist threats, and so forth. Need for outage analysis and geopositioning of large events like Olympics, World Cup, and so forth. That's why we believe that Brazil is having a brilliant future, because they have both World Cup and the Olympics in the next four years. Historically, SD&I has reported an organic growth of roughly five percent or slightly below five percent per annum. EBIT margin is below group average.
We launched a restructuring program in the first quarter, and we're addressing that issue. Software and services is obviously the significant product in this business. Recurring revenues, roughly 50%. Direct sales, well close to 90% or slightly above 90%. This is the business where we have the smallest exposure to emerging markets, but it also gives us the largest potential to grow in emerging markets like Brazil, China, and India for the next coming few years. Growth profile. Some 30% above 8%, 50%, 45% below 8%, and then negative growth, which currently would be sales to the U.S. Defense and Federal Solutions, roughly 15% of our total pie. This is a very American-focused business. Americas itself is 32%. IGS, which stands for Intergraph Government Solutions, i.e., this business that is ring-fenced, where no one is allowed except for our security-cleared employees, 25% of our current business.
APAC, 11%, EMEA, 32. Industry trends. Public safety is the growth industry, and we believe that public safety is the bet for tomorrow. We think we have good growth prospects in public safety. Above 8% growth per annum in public safety. Utilities and communication, sort of average growth, four percent, five percent per annum. Defense and intelligence. Since we're connected to the U.S. defense primarily, we see negative growth for the next coming few years in that segment. Government and transportation, single-digit growth. Federal solutions is the low-margin business we'd like to reduce. This is intentionally. If we look at that business, it's about running systems for public bodies. Currently, we have five mega cities as customers. We've got 44 large cities and 68 medium-sized cities, 112 small cities.
This is how we look upon public safety to address mega cities, take the various emergency and response units in those cities, work our way through the large cities, and so forth. In security, it's primarily airport, public transportation, public buildings, public areas where you need protection and intelligence systems. For utilities and communications, we talked about outage management. We got some 30 telecoms today where we run their infrastructure. We got some 335 local utilities. Government and transportation is the U.S. business, but we also have business in Europe with German Rail, Italian Rail, and Swiss Rail. When it comes to defense and intelligence, you can see it's basically United States and NATO. NovAtel, which also is reported into technology. NovAtel is a world-leading supplier of receivers, casings, and antennas, and so-called middleware for GNSS systems.
For you that haven't heard that acronym before, it stands for Global Navigation Satellite System, and GPS is only the U.S. satellite. We got GLONASS, we got the Chinese system, we got the European Galileo system, and we got some local systems in Japan and India. We're basically being able to receive signals from all those systems. Industries: surveying, marine, navigation, agriculture, aviation, construction, mining, and a large chunk of security and defense. Key competitor in this area would be Trimble Navigation as well. Growth indicators are very difficult because it's project specific. You can't really say that we're growing because of one industry trend. We're basically responsible for our own growth in developing new applications.
I think for those of you who were with us last year in Orlando, you remember Gadget, the new product that we launched back then. It's doing very well in the market. NovAtel has reported double-digit organic growth historically, and the EBIT margin is roughly at group average. Very small portion emerging markets, very much direct sales to OEMs. If we conclude everything we've been through. Geosystems seem to have bottomed out in China and Europe. Knock on wood. No signs of slowdown in Americas. Mix of product supports the theory of 8% long-term growth. One-third of its sales in emerging markets. We can stabilize and improve as the Swiss franc effect wears off. Metrology benefiting from very strong end markets at this moment, automotive and aerospace. Historical average of 6% organic growth might be too low.
Maybe it's still too early, but it seems as if some of these end markets are growing much faster. Well-positioned with 45% of sales in emerging markets. We expect margins to improve. It's been improving since 2001, and we believe we can continue to improve them. If we look at the Intergraph PP&M, benefiting from strong demand from its end markets. SmartPlant is really taking market share, gaining traction with the EPCs and owner operators. 1/3 of its sales in emerging markets. I think that's an understatement, but it's the satisfactory level of the EBIT margins that we have in that business. Intergraph SG&I has only really started. Market potential is huge. Strong backlog supports return to growth. Offering needs to be taken globally as emerging markets are probably the prime customers for the future. Margin is expected to improve. We've summarized this in a table.
You could say historic growth, 2011 growth, and long-term growth. We expect Geosystems to eventually come back to its long-term trend line. Metrology, historic growth 6%, grew by 26% organic growth last year. You should expect a slowdown from the very rapid growth that we see at the moment in metrology. PP&M, historic growth around 15%. We think it can't last in the next few years, maybe 10% is a good average. SD&I, negative growth in 2011, but should return to its long-term trend. NovAtel has grown above 10% historically, 12% in 2011, and we expect it to grow above 10% during this planning period as well. When you weigh everything in, this is basically pointing at 8% organic growth as a reasonable target for the core business. Target number 2, or component number 2 to reach three and a half billion in sales, M&A.
Technology and emerging market focus, we either want to buy technologies that we do not possess and that we need in order to deliver our comprehensive solutions, or we need distribution in emerging markets. Base case scenario currently includes several small acquisitions and a few mid-size, but nothing large. Sort of between EUR 100 million, EUR 30 million, down to tiny companies, 2, 3 million EUR companies. Other operations are going to be divested during this period, and we're not expecting book losses when we do that. We are going to finance acquisitions via our own cash flow. We have not planned to do a rights issue to fund this growth. It's going to be generated from internal funds. The net debt to EBITDA target is set at 2.5 by the fourth quarter of 2012.
In some simulations, we could even bring that down further, even though we'll do heavy investments in organic growth as well as this M&A. In a recession scenario, we'd be prepared to do more bold M&A. Like if you think about it, what we did with Intergraph was we analyzed them over a couple of years, then we had the dip in 2009. Already in the first quarter of 2010, we were ready to act. I don't think we would have gotten Intergraph for the price we actually paid for them back then, right now. Synergy projects, that's the third component to reach EUR 3.5 billion. We're currently running seven group projects. The way we operate is we have a central R&D that develops concepts, then we allocate these projects to the divisions that we have inside Hexagon.
Right now, we're in the process of allocating these projects so that we get the project owner. You've seen the dam monitoring project that we're running in China currently. It's got huge potential, and it's a big market. We have a customer that is willing and has money to spend on dam monitoring. Virtual assembly, both Norbert touched upon it and we touched upon it in the PP&M presentation earlier today. To bring metrology technology together with CAD design, that's the way for the future to really improve all sorts of industries, from aerospace, automotive, to oil and gas, and power generation. We have a small development. This is just a funny thing we've done. We've done an app for an iPhone where you can dehaze or take away clouds when you take pictures with your iPhone.
Eventually, you're going to be able to download that from the App Store. The commercial application for this is really satellite imagery, where we've found a way to clean up the satellite image so that currently the operator can only sell maybe 30% of that picture. With this technology, you can sell up to 70% of that picture, and that's a huge yield improvement for the satellite industry. Precision agriculture is the other project we can talk about, and we showed a few examples what we're doing there earlier today. I think if you go to the synergy area in the tech center, you're going to see this dam monitoring project. We got some eager and willing people there that will tell you all about the benefits having a comprehensive dam monitoring system.
The other three projects are in sensitive stages right now. It's a bit sad that we can't show them to you today, but we're basically filing for patents and so on. If we showed them, it would be gone, and that would be a shame. We believe that from these seven projects, we're going to reap synergies and revenue of roughly EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million by 2015. Expect revenues to trickle in as of the second quarter 2013 and grow to EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million by 2015. Margins from these projects are significantly above group average. This is another way how we can leverage and improve our EBIT margin for the group. If we summarize sales targets, basically, we post sales of EUR 2.1 billion in MT last year.
We expect that to grow realistically by 8% per annum, which will take us to EUR 2.9 billion by 2015. Revenue synergies, organic growth, another EUR 100 million-EUR 200 million, depending on how successful we are. We could grow the organic business to EUR 3 billion-EUR 3.1 billion with these initiatives that we presented to you earlier today. Sales and M&A add EUR 200 million-EUR 600 million, depending on how the market fares and how things develop. That's how we reach our EUR 3.5 billion. Now, let's look at the EBIT margin expansion for a while. We've talked about the growth. We've talked about the EBIT, where it is right now. Geosystems at group level, Metrology below, PP&M above, SG&I below, NovAtel at group level. We recorded an EBIT of 21% last year. The trend, the current trend right now is Geosystems is slowly recovering. Metrology's trend is up.
PP&M's trend, flat is stable. SG&I is recovering, NovAtel is improving as well. We believe that in this scenario, with organic growth of 8% per annum, we should be able to boost this above 21% by 2015. If we summarize the EBIT margin, the core business will be above 21%, four years from now or three years from now, actually. M&A will be below the group average. We say above 15%, but below the 25% that we're aiming at. They will be diluted. The EBIT margins from these revenue synergy projects are quite rich, and they're going to bring us back to the 25%. That's how the math works. Summary, Capital Markets Day. What we've talked about and described is year one in our new financial plan. We're basically growing in line with the base case scenario.
8% long-term organic growth is supported by the underlying business trends that we do see for the next coming three years. Emphasis on organic growth will be to generate substantial free cash flow so that we can meet covenants, finance relatively large acquisitions, finance our own internal development without raising new capital. Revenue synergy projects are starting to materialize. We should see meaningful numbers from them by the second half next year. That's it. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for listening. I expect that we're Sorry?