Thank you. Hello, everyone, and thank you. Thank you very much for being here with us this afternoon. Thanks for making the trip to Kings Place, and of course, thanks to all the ones that are connected online, which is plenty. It's a privilege, and we love the fact that you've decided to take some time to learn about Hexagon. Before we start, on a more personal note, as you know, I've been almost one year in the job, right? And it's been relatively eventful, I would say. But it's been a lot of fun, and I feel like I got the most out of my learning curve in year one, which was great. I spent the first half of the year predominantly looking outside in, right? I spent a lot of time with customers. I traveled.
I visited a lot of the sites. As you know, Hexagon is relatively decentralized, so I've been on the road a lot, partnerships and events. A lot of feedback, a lot of listening and asking questions. And the second half of the year has been a little bit more inward-looking for me. In between drafting plans with the divisions that you're gonna hear from in the course of the afternoon, in between working with the board, of course, the short response, but also working on the efficiency plan and other things that we wanted to get in motion.
But the more I moved throughout the year, the more I realized that I was really excited to come here today and have a chance to talk to you, to a captive audience, which happens rarely, and having a little bit more time to talk about everything that we are doing. So how we're looking at the future. And the reality is that I couldn't be here excited if I wasn't excited about the future, right? I couldn't stand up here to talk about targets if I didn't have confidence about what we are planning, what we're working on for the future. And the reason why I feel very strongly about Hexagon, and I believe in what we're doing, and the reason why the team believes in what we're doing, is predominantly for three reasons, right? Very simple.
We think we have a phenomenal value proposition that is gonna become more and more crucial for our customers, the more we're gonna grow. We think that the value proposition that we sit on is extremely strong, it's proven, and all the trends that we see moving around us will make it even more of a priority for customers. The second reason has to be: what do you do about it, right? So the more I learn about the momentum, the initiatives, the investments that we did over the time, the more I learn about everything that is happening in terms of change management, the more I grew in terms of confidence on the direction. The third one is people. It's team, it's culture.
It takes time, even if you've been in an organization for a long time, it takes time to go through the layers, understanding everywhere you look, motivation, energy levels, skills, are we ready for the future? And I would like for you to walk away from the meeting today and this afternoon with the same sense of belief. Having said that, what are we planning to do today? We basically want to talk about four things. We want to talk about the growth opportunity and how we plan to capitalize on it, and we are trying to be relatively tight on the how, right? What we're gonna do today, this afternoon, tomorrow, is gonna set us up for what 2026 is gonna look like. Secondly, we're gonna talk a lot about divisional structures, right? This is how we run the business.
This is how we draft plans. This is how we address these industries. Thirdly, we're gonna talk about financial disclosures, which basically mean the tools that you're gonna have to track our progress against those targets. And then last but not least, we're gonna talk about those targets, what 2026 looks like and beyond. Great. So table stakes. What's the starting point? What is Hexagon, right? Who are we? The way we talk about our mission is shaping reality. Why do we say shaping reality? At the end, we do something that is relatively simple. We try and build digital replicas of the world, anything that is physical in the world, and then we throw technology at it to make it count for our customers, basically, right? So we duplicate, we map reality, we measure, we position anything physical, products and processes, in the real world.
We use digital technologies to improve it, to build better quality products, build better quality cars and planes and phones and whatever that is, right? To make our customers more efficient. This is something that we've been going on about for a long time, right? The history of the group is relatively recent. 20 years of living by this value proposition, that has allowed to build an incredible footprint in some of the most transformational industries on the planet, right? Look at some of these statistics from the number of infrastructure and construction sites that we work on and that we support on a daily basis to the number of assets and production assets that we connect to on a daily basis. The number of planes, commercial vehicles, and smartphones that we touch, right? The fingerprints into anything that is discrete.
Our public safety business that provides protection through digital tools for more than a billion people. Geospatial applications. When it gets tough, that's a beautiful application for Hexagon Technologies, right? So when you wanna land something on planet Mars, great, that's something we would like to work on with customers. Burj Khalifa, petrochemical installations where the name of the game is productivity. And of course, that has resulted in a financial profile that is very solid, right? And we're gonna have time to talk about that divisional split over the course of the day, but of course, we're very proud of the growth trajectory that we have in all of these five businesses that you're gonna hear from later today.
Our revenue footprint by region is very stable, and it's a testament to the fact that we certainly have a strong foothold in mature economies, but also that we have a good way of going about growing emerging markets. We've talked about this in the last quarters, where you know that we've had a great trajectory of growth in Middle East, in Asia, of course, in China, in Latin, and the likes. At the end of the day, what's on the price list? We sell hardware, we sell services, we sell software, right? With a split that you see on screen at the moment. The thin red line that cuts across this group is a very strong DNA toward innovation, right? These technologies are complex. Making it easy to adopt is even more complex, right?
The technology components that we use for these value propositions to come alive are complex technology components, and so we invest in innovation. These are technologies that move very, very fast. So there's a constant investment in innovation, and we're gonna talk about what these areas of investments predominantly are. But at the end of the day, the end result of everything we do is on screen now, right? And this might actually be the one single slide that we are the most proud of in the whole of the afternoon. I remember looking at an extract of our customer base 10 years ago when I've interviewed for Hexagon, and that was one of the primary hooks for me to decide to join the organization. Hexagon was no simpler to understand than it is today, if that can reassure you, right?
So in my preparation for the interview, at the end of the day, this was the hook. I deeply believe that the quality of your customer base, the breadth of your customer base, the depth of these relationships, is the best measurement for extrapolating success and potential for the businesses that you also look at. When you look at this customer base, you find market share leaders, CapEx drivers, you find champions, large organizations with hundreds of facilities, but then you also find innovators, companies that are changing the game of how technology is consumed. You find a footprint across multiple industries. Being at the crossroad of those industries and being able to learn and reutilize some of those learnings in other industries has always been a key success factor for us.
At the end of the day, those commercial operations translate into an installed base and a number of people that you try and serve and make successful on a daily basis. When you look at this installed base in terms of software users, licenses that today, as we speak, are utilized, the number of components, devices, pieces of hardware, data capture devices that our customers are consuming today, those are impressive numbers. There's one number on the top right on the screen that I would like you to pay some attention to as well. We often talk about what we sell, right? Some of the key success factors for what we do is having 10,000 people in field that day in, day out, in pre-sales, in application engineering, in services, in sales, make our customers successful.
The more we succeed in making sure that they get a great payback from their investments on Hexagon through these people, the more we have a trajectory for the future. Another statistic that maybe we haven't shared with you in the past, our devices, on an annualized basis, as of today, have created 150 PB worth of data. That's data that we have captured, or that's data that customers have captured. The reason why I love to look at that data and try and keep a good handle on that data is because the power of the value proposition of Hexagon is just at the beginning. There's only a limited amount of companies that have gone beyond compliance and beyond using that data for quality and have really found more impactful ways to generate return on investment.
The level of creativity of our customers in terms of using that reality capture to generate return on investment is just at the beginning. We're gonna talk later about digital twinning, right?... The more we talk with CDOs and CIOs, and we understand that they realize that there's an untapped potential in that data, the more we get confidence on the future and the software stack, particularly, that we're building for the future. And then, of course, all of this has translated in building a financial profile, over the last 10-20 years that has been extremely strong.
From the share price appreciation since 2001, when Ola started to drive this transformation, all the way to dividend payout and EPS for the last 10 years, and of course, that's supported by operational improvements, by 9 percentage points of revenue CAGR in the last 10 years, 1.8 percentage points of gross margin improvement in the last 10 years, which we believe is one of the most pure measurements of quality in the business. And then cash conversion that we have talked about a fair amount in the last quarter, that has been at 83% for the last 10 years. This is about the past and about the present, so let's kick it up a notch and talk about what's coming, right? Let's talk about the future.
I want to be brief when it comes to macro trends because we tend to all read the same, sort of newspapers, and, and nobody's in the mood for more buzzwords, right? But at the end of the day, wherever we look at what's happening in the world, from shifting capitals from country to country, think about reshoring and automation, think about growth in terms of emerging economies. We all read GDP projections for the last three to five years, and there clearly is a divide in between what's happening in mature economies and in emerging economies. So what you want is to bet on somebody that has a track record in terms of cracking the code of localizing technology, localizing expertise, and growing with these growth markets. Emission reduction, sustainability is already today, and will be for the future, a phenomenal driver for our business. It is undeniable.
We're gonna see in a second some of the core industries that we work within. The level of transformation that these industries are going through because of sustainability requirements is phenomenal and is excellent news for us. Labor shortages, and labor shortages have multiple meanings in terms of how we need to look at these opportunities. For sure, it's got to do with digitizing experience, right? Digitizing capabilities, trying to digitize the understanding of a process, and all of that know-how in terms of what sets productivity back in some of these processes. But then labor shortages, of course, has got to do with making, for instance, the data capture way more automated, right? Can we, everywhere around the world, across applications, can we shorten the time to capture that data? Can we make it available to one operator, when in the past it was only available for two?
So everything that we do is about taking into account that there's gonna be generational shifts and shortage of capabilities and skills in the industries that we work within. These are some of those industries that we work on a daily basis. Think about the impact of energy shifts. By the time you're done mapping what needs to happen from a technology and engineering perspective as a result of engineering of energy shift, you're gonna find that there's so much new, high-quality, high-accuracy parts that need to go into windmill, into small modular reactors. There's so much intelligence that needs to go into utilities grids, just to mention one. All of that is opportunity for us. Think about the construction sector. Think about safety in the construction sector. Think about construction sector in emerging economies or the opportunity for infrastructure builds.
Think about transportation, from eVTOLs to, of course, the shifts in automotive that we know about. At the end of the day, you want to be well-positioned, and when you do business with these companies on a daily basis, when your technology is already ingrained in those industries, you're in great shape to support them as they move into the future. That's gonna generate opportunities for some of the core technologies that all of you know about. But if you are gonna remember these five areas of innovation that we all have heard of, and then you're gonna check how much of these five areas of innovation you're gonna hear about from the divisional presidents, from Burkhard later in the day, you will realize how much we are at the epicenter of a massive opportunity.
We have done a survey with more than 100 of our customers in the last month, and we're trying to keep it relatively high level. We wanted to talk to decision makers, people that truly own budgets, right? So we've talked with pretty much all the ones that you've seen on screen earlier in terms of their logos, and we wanted to understand what's their sense of confidence in terms of what they're gonna be spending for the foreseeable future. And I was reassured also from that angle to see physical digital interfaces and technologies being very up there in terms of their sense of urgency, because the industry is realizing the potential that is in these digital twins, right, in these technologies. So we said we are shaping reality. How do we do it practically, right? How do we do it?
So I wanted to share with you a story and one specific example that might be illuminating in terms of how Hexagon looks at business opportunities. So I want to talk to you about an example from the world of utilities, nothing to do with cars, planes, or phones, that my colleagues tell me I talk about all the time, right? Coming from that part of the business. So let's talk about utilities, which maybe is a slightly more left field application for 3D technologies... One of the top five utilities companies in the world has a phenomenal challenge, right? They need to serve electricity to 30 million people in the country. They have 1 million kilometers of grid to be maintained with high levels of reliability. They have 500,000 primary and distribution and secondary distribution stations for that to happen.
And then you can imagine that those have been built over a very long period of time. Those have been maintained by different people, different points in time. There's no digital records. And then you know that there's transformation coming, right, in terms of distributed energy generation and storage and e-vehicles and the likes. So how do you go about it, right? If you have 15,000 people in the field with problems of attrition, with problems of expertise that needs to be maintained, and you want these people to be as effective as possible in maintenance, because they probably need to maintain two or three of those stations per day. So how do you go about it? Well, the first thing that they decided to do was to build a perfect digital replica of their infrastructure.
So they have invested in hundreds of scanners to help them build a perfect 3D mock-up of their infrastructure. They give these technologies, handheld or drones or automated scanners, they give them to their people, 10-15 minutes for a data capture to build a perfect replica of these distribution stations. Then, of course, once you have a whole bunch of data, you have to make it intelligent, right? So how do you move from capturing data to making that data more relevant, creating insights from the data? Well, ideally, considering the size of these data collected, ideally, you want AI to do the job for you. Ideally, you want analytics to read through a point cloud and understand what's a circuit breaker, what's a secondary station, what's a substation, what's a transformer, right? You want AI to label the data inside those point clouds autonomously, right?
The moment you recognize the components, you can start thinking about maintenance, spare parts. You can start thinking about efficiency. This is what we would call the intelligence creation stage, right? Reality creation. The third stage is really immersion, what we just saw, right? Sorry if I went too quick on the, on the video, but it's a great one, so I want you to have a good look at it. What do we call immersion? What we would call immersion, and this is something that Burkhard is gonna talk about at length in his presentation. What we call immersion are cloud-based, data repositories that are highly immersive.
This is where you bring all these technologies together in a way that is highly immersive, because you wanna train your operators in those, repositories, and you wanna be able to connect as many users inside these companies as possible, right? That's what we call the immersion phase, the data immersion, the reality immersion phase, and it's got to do with collaboration tools. It's got to do with visualization. Also, it's got to do with making that data available on mobile devices. Reality activation is when you actually generate your return on investment. It's when you move 3D data inside an asset management structure, which for them, is the single source of truth to go and buy spare parts, to go and create work orders, to go and dispatch maintenance crews in field.
The more you build continuity, the more you're gonna see drop in time to uptime, time to maintenance executed in field for your service crews and maintenance crews. Okay? So this is how they've looked at return on investment. It's efficiency in field, it's time saved, it's money saved, it's spare parts that go purchase autonomously, right? It's training for these people so that when they go and intervene in field, they know exactly what those distribution stations look like. It's giving the data to designers so that when you plan for an upgrade, you know exactly what those realities look like. So what we've just witnessed is a value creation model that is relatively simple, that Hexagon tries to follow across divisions, right? Reality capture using hardware and software. Reality creation, which is basically design, labeling the data, understanding the data, creating insights.
Reality immersion, because you wanna grow the population of users within that company that have access to data and come up with brilliant ideas in terms of generating return on investment. And then last but not least, how do we improve design? How do we impact the process? How do we go and generate ROI for customers? It's what we call the activation stage. In some of the presentations, you're gonna hear from Maria and Josh, orchestration. This is when we drive quality processes. This, this is when we go back and control road train to optimize fuel efficiency, for instance, right? This is when we generate a return on those digital twins. Of course, the more we live by that, the more we move a value proposition for selling transactionally to a value proposition that a C-suite would see tremendous value in.
The more we do that, the more we create opportunities for Hexagon, right? We try and drive our harder business with higher and higher gross margin levels through automation. We try and monitor and measure the attach rate between hardware and software, so the more we link capture and creation, the better. We try and drive the consumption to measure usage for our immersion devices, because the more customers share that data, the more that data is gonna travel, create transformation and opportunities for us. And then last but not least, reality activation has got a lot to do with our sales motions with key accounts, where we try and monitor the number of solutions that we manage to cross-sell and upsell. We're gonna talk about it in some of the divisional reviews.
So what this divisional structure looks like, these five divisions try and follow a very similar path of development, of course, with the specificity of markets that are different and portfolios that have been built over the last 20 years differently. Internally, we run the business through five PNLs that are fully empowered. Manufacturing Intelligence focused on discrete, Asset Lifecycle Intelligence focused on anything process, Geosystems that pretty much supported the surveying market and increasingly more applications from machine control to reality capture, heavy construction, even media and entertainment. Autonomous Solutions is a division that has been recently built, bringing together autonomous and positioning technologies, previously reported as part of our industrial enterprise reporting segments, and bringing together mining that previously was reported as part of Geosystems.
So the fusion of these two divisions has a very strong, has a very strong, I would say, rationale, that Maria is gonna tell you more about in the afternoon. And then last but not least, it's the Safety, Infrastructure and Geospatial division that supports utilities, communication, public safety, and the like. This is the way we look at the business, this is the way we measure it, and this is the way we would like you to be able to measure our progress. So throughout the afternoon, David, Ben, and the divisional presidents will give you way more financial detail on these five divisions. And come next year, we're gonna start reporting the business division by division on a quarterly basis. Great, so we've talked about how we go about value creation. Let's talk about the future, right? What do we actually spend time on?
What's important to us? What are the plans that we're putting in motion, looking at the delivery of the 2026 targets? Internally, we've tried to summarize what we actually set in motion across three categories, and these are pretty much my priorities and our priorities as a leadership team that we try and push across the various divisions. We talk about technology, leadership, and innovation. We talk about commercial execution and operational excellence. I wanna take you through some of these specific plans and projects in-house that I thought might help you with some tools to understand the rest of the afternoon. Technology leadership: How do we drive innovation to drive growth and customer expansion? Let's focus first on what we develop before we look at the human element of innovation.
What we develop, the thin red line that cuts across innovation for us are cloud, automation, analytics. Automation intended as physical automation and digital automation, right? So cloud and automation, pretty much. Three things that are very important to us. We are on an investment phase for sure. You've seen it through our numbers, right? We are coming through with an organic innovation wave that is gonna give us way better tools to compete across all of these five divisions. And this is also why we've embarked on a journey to refresh our lineup, and every time that we look at generating and building a next-generation device, we want those devices to be incrementally data-rich, embedded software-heavy. We wanna limit the cost profile of these devices and use the power of software to generate more data through firmware, middleware, embedded software.
And of course, we wanna move edge analytics into these devices. Why? Because data becomes heavier and heavier. We wanna help customers with latency, with the cost of uploading and downloading, and we wanna have a tight handshake in between hardware and software. It's convenient, as I did a couple of slides ago, it's convenient to separate the business in between hardware and software. The more we build analytics at the edge, the more data creation at the hardware, at the point of data capture and software, are intertwined. By the way, Burkhard also is gonna tell you more about the make of our R&D operations. If I remember correctly, not to steal the thunder, Burkhard, but more than 70%, close to 75% of our innovation staff and R&D staff are software engineers.
So there's a lot of software that is built and is embedded in those devices today. That's what we call hardware, 75% of people that are actually software engineers throughout the organization. And the goal, of course, is to drive market shares, grow gross margin. We wanna keep on being on that gross margin trajectory and drive the attach rate between the hardware and the software. The second point is automation, right? We wanna drive devices that are as automation-ready as possible. We wanna drive customer TCO, lower the cost to capture data.... And what we try and do is to lower, of course, our own COGS, right? We want to have intelligent devices that we can maintain remotely as much as possible. So all of our next-generation devices will be capable to do so.
One of the reasons why we're so focused on cloud is also to make sure that we counter the cost of cloud with configurability of these solutions, to lower the amount of services that is required to deploy our software. When it comes to cloud platforms, you're gonna hear a lot about that from our divisions and Burkhard. Why cloud platforms? It's all about data continuity, generating insights from the data. It's all about growing recurring revenue, a journey that we've been on for a long time. And then, of course, there's the human side of innovation. We wanna have the right skills through our teams and partners, and then, of course, we wanna make sure that technology is easy to consume for customers. And so we're putting a lot of work.
We're thinking very hard about usability and UX, as you're gonna see in the rest of the afternoon. Let's talk a little about commercial execution. What are some of the key things that we focus on? And I wanna spend a few minutes on one that is particularly important for us. Customer success teams are investments that we are making across the spectrum of the business. We have a vast installed base. We wanna drive the attach rate between hardware and software. We wanna use customer success team so that our customers will get the most out of our technology, and so that these motions will help us cross-selling and upsell and drive an acceleration in organic growth. Let's talk about people and tools, for instance.
Something that is particularly important for us is to try and be as data-centric as possible in the way we measure our sales motion, but also try and be as strategic as possible in how we measure value creation for customers. Mattias is gonna talk to you a little bit later in the afternoon about a methodology that, if I'm not mistaken, you're trying to patent as well. A methodology to transform return investment for his customer into calculations, methodologies, also for technology deployment, that we can use throughout the life of those projects. Those methodologies, increasingly, will include sustainability and carbon avoidance, concepts. Last but not least, operational excellence. So how do we transform innovation, work on product, work on market reach and go to market, into value for Hexagon, value for our shareholders? A few thoughts on capital allocation.
You all know that M&A motions are very important to us. We're very good at M&A. We pride ourselves with our track record in terms of M&A. This is something that is very important, because we're building on technologies that are getting very rapidly adopted in the market, so we wanna have best-in-class tools and great market reach, right? But increasingly, we're gonna be very focused on having a disciplined approach to M&A, and increasingly, we're gonna be very focused on the organic side of the equation and making sure that we get the most out of synergies for acquisitions that have been done recently, that still have a lot of unexpressed potential. Portfolio optimization, I think we've talked about some of these examples in the first three quarters of the year.
We have pockets within the group of businesses that we are readdressing, that are not in line with the vision for a business that becomes increasingly recurrent, increasingly focused on organic growth, for a business that is becoming increasingly intertwined in between our hardware and software motions. In terms of driving performance, very important to us, we wanna make sure that we align our own incentives, of course, to 2026. And so we are, we are gonna move, from 2024, our own incentivization to make sure that it perfectly reflects the three core targets that we are gonna talk about, in terms of organic growth, in terms of margin improvements, in terms of cash conversion.
OpEx efficiency, I believe David will tell you more about the efficiency plan, where we are, and a few examples of things that we're setting in motion to make sure that we use the scale of the group to drive leverage from an OpEx perspective. And then last but not least, of course, cash conversion. There, too, you're gonna find some of the examples of things that we have in motion, because we want working capital management and conversion to become one of the key priorities for everybody in the organization. That all results in a financial profile that we're trying to build for 2026, a financial profile that we deeply believe is achievable. So we have a high degree of confidence in terms of achieving our organic growth targets that Ola and the leadership team have announced in 2021.
We're gonna grow by 5%-7% over the period, compensated by 3-5 percentage points of M&A, and we're building and planning for an operating margin, EBITDA including PPA, purchase price accounting, of more than 30% by 2026. The guidance in cash conversion is something that we have talked about, several points in times in the past, that we reconfirm here. We wanna stay within 80%-90%. We have, of course, a track record of doing so, and we're gonna go back to being in that range very soon. From an ESG perspective, we're very focused on this. We believe that this is a primary driver for our solution. We wanna be able to explain to customers-... how we can help them on their own journey for sustainability. Eva is gonna tell you more about our roadmaps and our goals this afternoon.
But, of course, the digitization journey for our customer has got way longer motions and time frames than a couple of years. And when we look at innovation, our innovation cycle is long. The cycle for return on investment is long. A lot of these transformations take a long time to come through, so when we plan, we plan for the long term. We don't plan for 2026. So what does the future look like? If I can give a glimpse into the business that we're trying to build with the leadership team, what does that look like? We believe in what we do today. We think that we have all of the right projects and initiatives in motion. We are very well positioned for long-term success.
We have a very strong track record, and we've already done a very strong shift for the last 10 years in terms of moving our motions to being very software-centric. The first order of priority for everybody in the leadership team is to deliver. It's to deliver on the trust contract in between all of us in terms of what we have promised and what we want to deliver by 2026. So whilst the primary focus is one on attention to detail and execution and making sure that we stand behind the 2026 delivery. But then, of course, the road doesn't end there, and a lot of what we're doing now, also in terms of the wave of innovation that we have talked about, a lot of that will pay back over the longer period.
So what we envision past 2026 is a group that is gonna get stronger and stronger in terms of its organic growth trajectory. It's a group whose portfolio is gonna be solely driven by cloudification and automation. We live by being a hybrid player in between the data capture and the exploitation of the data through digital technologies. We're always gonna be in hardware and in software. We believe in that value proposition because we see that being transformational and powerful day in, day out for customers. But increasingly, those data capture devices, those will be asset light. There's a trend to going in that direction. You're gonna hear about software-defined receivers. You're gonna hear about calibration and AI helping lower the cost structure of our metrology devices.
You're gonna hear from Burkhard, David, and others about gross margin for some of the new reality capture technologies that we brought to market. Increasingly, the vision is one of building digital reality technologies and then connecting that reality to the assets and the people that have created that reality. The more we can create data gravity, the more we can generate return on investment for customers. And then, of course, AI is gonna have a massive impact. You have understood how much data we create today. You can have a perception for why some of the cloud vendors or AI champions of the world want to work with us and partner with us, because the potential for that data to be utilized is barely tapped at the moment.
That's gonna generate a business that has an acceleration in terms of growth, that has a continued margin delivery, that gets stronger and stronger in terms of cash generation and higher and higher in terms of recurring revenue components. Thank you very much. I wanted to give you a couple of tools for you to be able to connect the dots of what we do across the divisions in the rest of the afternoon. Thank you for your attention. I'm gonna leave you now with our Chief Strategy Officer, Ben Maslen. Thank you.
Thank you, Paolo. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Ben Maslen, Chief Strategy Officer for Hexagon. I've been with the group for around six years. Prior to that, I was an equity analyst, so I did a lot of, did a lot of December capital market days. I know it's a lot of time, so as Paolo said, thank you very much for coming. I'm gonna talk about two things today. Firstly, Hexagon's TAM, how the current product footprint that we have was assembled, what the current addressable market is, and how fast we expect it to grow, and how we're positioning Hexagon, as Paolo said, for additional growth opportunities we see beyond the 2026 period. Secondly, I'm gonna do an update on our M&A strategy, and the recent larger acquisitions that we've made, EAM and ETQ.
So to start with, I wanna pick up where Paolo left off and revisit the very strong growth and margin performance that Hexagon has delivered over the last 20 years or so, which has been very impressive. This chart's a reminder that Hexagon is still a young company, younger than most of us, and has built its platform over this period, and as such, it is at a very different stage in its life cycle to some more mature companies that you might follow. Our success over this period has been built on a combination of investment in both organic innovation and also acquisitive growth.
We've been following a strategy driven by Ola and now Paolo of trying to invest ahead of the curve to position ourselves for, you know, attractive markets and growth trends that may be ahead of us. This approach can be seen in more detail on this slide, and it shows the same timeframe. Here, what we're showing is the larger acquisitions that Hexagon did historically, which formed the starting point for the five divisions that we're gonna start reporting on as of next year. The Brown & Sharpe acquisition took us into the world of metrology, Leica Geosystems, surveying and machine control, NovAtel and Mintec, advanced positioning technologies and mine planning software, and then Intergraph took us into computer-aided dispatch and CAD design software.
With the colors, you can see how these different acquisitions map to the five new divisions. On top of these platforms, we've added further acquisitions, which expanded the addressable market that we had and strengthened the market position of these original acquisitions. This is obviously not all the acquisitions we've done over this period, just the major product categories that we've added along the way. Finally, we add in some of the more transformative innovations that we've launched over this time period, like laser trackers in 2013, the BLK360 laser scanner in 2016, and the SDx software platform in 2017, which expanded our presence in 3D metrology, reality capture, and asset lifecycle information software. Together, this combination of targeted acquisitions and organic innovation have helped build the current product suite that we have today.
You can also see the different phases of growth that Hexagon's been through. Firstly, building a market-leading portfolio in precision measurement, 3D digitization, and advanced positioning. Then adding software companies in computer-aided dispatch, CAD design software, CAM software, simulation software, 3D visualization, and so forth. And then adding the tools and platforms that help combine these software tools with real-world sensor data that we can then take into customer operations or use across the life cycle of different assets. And these platforms include EAM and ETQ that we acquired recently, as well as the recent product launches of HXDR and Nexus, which Burkhard and the divisions will talk about later, and you can see being demos'd out in the foyer. So if we take these combined investments, this feeds into a map of the product footprint that we have today.
This doesn't show every product that Hexagon has, but what we try to do here is show the main product categories that we have and how they map to the new divisional structure and the end market verticals that they serve. We also try to show here where we see our, our market positions in these end markets. So those boxes shaded blue signify where we think we have a leading market position. So by that, you know, approximately top three. And without going through each one, you can see that Hexagon is, is very well positioned for the future, with market-leading positions across all of our divisions. Here, we've taken that product footprint and built it up into what we see as a total addressable market or TAM for our products.
So here we show it by end market vertical, which is similar, but not a one-to-one map to the divisional structure, because the divisions will obviously sell products into a lot of different end markets. This analysis gives a TAM for Hexagon of just over $100 billion in 2022. We expect that to grow at a CAGR of around 7% to the 2026 period, over the kind of forecast horizon. This is obviously a faster growth than the output of some of the underlying industries that we serve, and that reflects many of the positive drivers for the adoption of our digital solutions within those markets, some of which are shown on the right of that slide. So I won't go into them in detail.
The divisional presidents will talk about them a lot later in the day. But overall, you know, we see a good underlying market growth rate to support the achievement of our targets. And, you know, two years in, approximately, we're running slightly ahead of this growth rate. Now, as well as capturing the growth for investments that we've done historically, we're obviously constantly investing for future growth, and that isn't reflected in the TAM that we have today. And what I wanted to do here was just highlight a few potential accelerators of Hexagon's growth rate that we see beyond 2026. So firstly, autonomy and robotics. You know, Hexagon has a lot of core competencies in this attractive market: spatial computing, perception engines, computer vision solutions, drive-by-wire, GNSS, et cetera, et cetera.
And these technologies are already being applied in both our autonomous solutions division, and Maria will talk later about the road train project that we mentioned on the quarterly results, as well as in robotic sensors like the BLK2FLY, and the BLK ARC in Geosystems, which Burkhard will showcase. Adoption in all these industries is at a very early stage, and in the agriculture example that we show here, only 18% of global farmers are currently using precision agriculture solutions, and less than 5% are using what we would call fully autonomous solutions. Those numbers would be fairly similar in mining markets. Next, on to digital twins, which Paolo mentioned earlier.
Hexagon has a lot of technology that you can see there that, that is used to create either a visual or operational twin, of an asset, CAD design software, BIM software, reality capture technologies, and so forth. And as Paolo mentioned in the survey that we did earlier this year, we expect, an acceleration in the technology adoption around digital twins, from 20% of companies using them today to around 80%, in five years' time. Next, the industrial metaverse. A lot of hype around this theme, and I think the reality is it remains to be seen how big this, these markets can be... But if you attended trade shows like the Hanover Fair this year, you know, you will have already seen many examples of how immersive 3D experiences are starting to be used in industrial processes.
As this develops, you know, we see a good opportunity for our technologies, reality capture, augmented reality technologies, AI, spatial computing, and so forth. And this is obviously an area where our partnerships with companies like NVIDIA are working to develop solutions and potential use cases in this space. And again, Burkhard will throw more light on that later. And then finally, climate change. Eva will talk about this. Obviously, most of Hexagon's products are already geared to reducing waste, improving the efficiency of our customers, and thereby helping the environment. The point here is that these are gonna remain very powerful long-term drivers, both in terms of the investments that will need to go into segments like electric vehicles and renewables, but also, unfortunately, the increasing costs of climate mitigation, and the need to react to natural disasters.
So we'll see how these trends develop over the longer term, but we see Hexagon as well positioned to participate in the extra growth they can bring beyond 2026. So now we're gonna talk a bit about the M&A strategy and process, which has been instrumental, as you've seen, in building the platform that we have today. Firstly, a recap of our M&A strategy, which has remained basically unchanged for 10 years, and I inherited this slide from Mattias. It looks better than it did back then, but the concept is exactly the same. The ambition is that we aim to add 3%-5% revenue growth per annum from acquisitions, and that basically has translated historically into doing 10-15 deals per year. We target a net debt to EBITDA ceiling of around 2.5 x.
That's the threshold we're happy to go up to. That's actually well below the debt capacity that we do have, which is closer to 4x net debt to EBITDA. In terms of the M&A process, you know, it all starts with the strategy, the growth strategy, and we have a constant iteration with the divisions, at least every six months, where we review in detail the end markets, how technology is changing, what competitors are doing, and we prioritize the adjacencies that we want to expand into. Then we look at whether it makes more sense to buy something or develop something, and there'll be sometimes situations where development projects and acquisitions will overlap because M&A timings can be unpredictable. We always focus on the most synergistic opportunities over the longer term for the group.
And as you've seen in the buildup of Hexagon historically, we will occasionally acquire new platforms for growth, like Brown & Sharpe, and Leica historically, or EAM and ETQ more recently, and make further bolt-ons onto those platforms to strengthen their market position. In terms of the financial criteria, you know, as we showed in the TAM section, you know, we're trying to find companies that have a very strong market position. Software and services has accounted for around 70% of revenues acquired over the last decade. And as Paolo said, we remain disciplined on valuation. We reject many potential targets to get to the ones that we do acquire, so a very active screening process, and we drop them either due to unattractive risk reward, a lack of synergies or just, just unattractive valuation.
We also, as we have in the past, use earn-outs where it makes sense to bridge a valuation gap between the buyer and the seller. So now we have a quick update on EAM and ETQ, and Josh and Mattias will talk about them more later. Firstly, Hexagon EAM, which is our market-leading enterprise asset management software business, which we acquired in October 2021. EAM is undergoing a transition of its customer base to multi-tenant SaaS, which obviously drags a little bit on near-term growth, but sets the business up well for the future. And as shown here, SaaS revenues for EAM are now over half of overall revenues, and they're growing at 20%+ rates, and that's what we expect to carry on going forward.
We see great synergy potential, firstly, in terms of geographic expansion. So 2/3 of that business when we acquired it was the customer base was in North America. We see great potential to cross-sell EAM into the asset-intensive, customer base of the other divisions, and we plan to integrate it with our existing technologies, GIS, so you can position assets, BIM models for use in facilities management, and to integrate the shop floor data that we get from our discrete manufacturing environment. Synergies are not yet contributing much to this growth. It took time to carve this business out, so it was a, it was a carve-out of, of Infor, but, we expect that to start contributing going forward.
With the integration done, we see EAM well positioned to deliver consistent double-digit growth going forward, led by SaaS. Similarly with ETQ, the QMS software platform that we bought in March last year, and we see a very similar development there. It's also moving its client base to SaaS, and that's grown off a lower base at a compound annual growth rate of around 30% over the last few years, and we would expect that good momentum to continue. Synergy initiatives are on track, again, to expand outside of North America, so 80% of existing customers are in the U.S., and also by connecting ETQ with the quality data coming off the shop floor that the rest of our MI product portfolio generates. And again, it's now fully integrated and positioned for double-digit growth going forward.
So to recap on M&A, we have a consistent track record, as is shown in the chart down below. It's created a lot of value for shareholders as we've acquired these companies and built platforms. 2023 has been a quieter year, and that reflects a bit of a slowdown in the overall M&A market, but we have a good pipeline going into next year, and we would expect overall activity levels to pick up. So we're confident in the 3%-5% M&A target that we have out to 2026.
There are a few disposals we're looking at as well, and as we've mentioned on, you know, conference calls, so far this year, with revenues totaling in aggregate between EUR 100 million and EUR 200 million of sales, we'll look to see whether it makes sense to exit them going forward, because they're in markets that are not a focus for us, and they are dilutive to group growth, and profitability. So we'll announce those as they happen, as we did with the help desk services business that we exited in Q3, in SIG. And then finally, disclosures. David's gonna talk about additional disclosures we'll make around the M&A process, so you can better understand the contribution of these acquisitions, to the five new divisions that we're moving to.
So in conclusion, you know, Hexagon's built a strong footprint and has a very attractive growth outlook. At the same time, we continue to invest for what we see as a very attractive longer term opportunities, and M&A is a key part of that, and we have a consistent strategy and execution. So thank you. With that, I will hand over to David.
Okay.
I think-
So I would like to begin with a brief introduction to myself, as many of you have not met me before. I was appointed CFO at Hexagon at the beginning of July this year, but a long way prior to that, I started my professional financial career at Caudwell Communications. Probably an unfamiliar name, perhaps, but they became Phones 4U. I then moved to a division of GEC, so seeing a mixture of entrepreneurial and corporate environments, and I certainly know which one I preferred. I moved to Brown & Sharpe in 1999, and so I've been with Hexagon since that first acquisition in April 2001.
My career development while at Hexagon began with responsibility in the U.K., then expanding to the EMEA on the manufacturing, sales, and service side, and becoming MI divisional CFO in 2010, where I then began working closely with Paolo, completing several large software acquisitions like MSC, like Vero, Romax, VG, and a few more, that together with organic growth, saw MI business triple in size. So what have I found at Hexagon as CFO? I found that the divisional controlling structure is very well established, with broad, diverse skills, including M&A, and importantly, a very deep understanding of their respective businesses. And this complements the very efficient and slightly small and established group financial reporting function, which I feel is the most important. What I feel is most important is that Hexagon has a very well-defined and tested business model for value creation.
I will spend some time in the next few slides expanding on that. We also commissioned an investor survey post my arrival, and amidst the recognized strengths of the business, one feature stood out, that the business is perceived as complex and less challenging to follow. During this presentation, I will highlight some of the changes we have already made and those we will be making to address this topic. My long-term intention being to support the continued success of the organization on its next phase of the growth journey. Let's look at the three areas I'm going to focus on today: how Hexagon has and will continue to create value, some of the drivers of our cash generation and how we allocate capital, and communication.
A number of other initiatives that we have already begun to undertake and will build on further to help better understand the group. Closing with a proposed refreshed management incentive structure aligned to the targets and value drivers of the business. Paolo has already touched on the admirable achievements of Hexagon in the last decade. Here we summarize the strong financial performance of the business since 2013 to 2022. Innovation-led organic growth and market expansion, with strategic M&A driving 9% CAGR over this time period. This revenue growth consistently improving margins 80 basis points per year, from product innovation, operational gearing, and the shift in mix to higher software margin sales. This has also translated to an 11% per annum EPS growth. So let's look at the components of revenue growth. Organic growth is foundational for Hexagon.
Continued innovation, driven by our consistent reinvestment of revenue in R&D. This is a pivotal differentiator of the group. It has allowed us to open up new product categories, new markets, and to access new geographies. The divisional presidents will later discuss about the future increasing opportunities in the various end markets. We have averaged 5% per annum organic growth over the cycle, and the target is to at least maintain that level going forward. Ben has already talked about M&A, which is the supplement to our organic growth. Importantly, it has been driven by requirements for the division with strategic overview from the center on a make or buy evaluation basis. Of our acquisitions in the last five years, 75% of acquired revenues, circa EUR 700 million, have been on software, underpinning the changing shape of the group.
We target three-five annual revenue growth from M&A, achieving 3% per annum at this moment in time. This is obviously dependent on the M&A environment. So let's walk through this diagram, which is how I describe the business model for Hexagon for value creation. From continued top-line growth and expanding gross margin with simultaneous OpEx management, EBIT growth is achieved. We've seen 10 points growth in gross margin while investing 3% in OpEx to achieve this. This brings us to where we are today, or the, the line. And therefore, this brings us where-- and broadly speaking, we expect to continue to create value in the same manner, and therefore, have line of sight to achieve our 2026 margin target.
So we will drive continued expansion in gross margin by the established innovation process and with an increased software mix, and in conjunction with this, continued OpEx management. We will continue to invest in sales and marketing to drive the top line, and I will go into more detail on the elements of R&D progression, but we will see a rebalancing as the growth spend to sales percentage decreases to a degree offsetting the amortization increase as our latest innovations are released. In addition, we are progressing well with the Q3 announced rationalization program to improve the operational efficiency in the business to support delivery of our targets. Here we see the foundation of our confidence in the achieving our target. That is the strong correlation between gross margin and operating margin development, reinforcing the previous slide.
The additional information here is that the gross margin expansion is delivered from two key elements: improvements in the underlying hardware gross margin, and improvements in the software and services gross margin from mix impact and more software content. The gross margin improvement is driven by technology innovation, in terms of both cost improvement, market expansion, and operational efficiency. So, returning to the R&D topic, the bars show historical trend of gross R&D expense, and the line is the percentage of gross R&D to sales. The general moderate upward trend from 11%-13% as a percentage of sales, representative of the increase in the software mix over the time horizon, as it's a blended rate of hardware and software investment. Excuse me one moment.
Worthy of note, though, is the 2% increase over 2022 and 2023, up to 15%, as we are at a key and important stage of the innovation cycle, as you will see in Böckem's presentation, with multiple key platforms simultaneously coming to a fruition across all the divisions, be it Nexus in MI, HXDR for Geosystems, autonomous platforms in AS, and the SaaS transition for ALI with SDx and SIG with OnCall, and of course, multiple next-generation sensors. As I mentioned on the earlier slide, we expect the gross investment percentage to rebalance over future periods, moving towards the 13%. Due to the importance of innovation over the next slides, I want to walk you through three cases that intentionally vary in scope and impact, and importantly, represent examples of the financial gross margin improvements achieved by the continual innovation focus at Hexagon.
The image in the center of the screen is an absolute rotary encoder. This is a core technology block from Geosystems, used extensively across their product family, the BLK, the laser scanners, the total stations, and the 3D Disto. MI was using a purchase solution as the original geospatial rotary encoders didn't achieve all the metrology specifications. We embarked on a EUR 5 million investment to adapt and develop it for MI products, successfully replacing the third-party source part. The development with multiple reader heads enabled improved speed, improved accuracy and robustness, and being absolute, doesn't require homing for establishing initial position. So the initial investment is paid back annually through cost improvement for MI. This gives additional leverage on volume for Geosystems and product material performance enhancement for the customers.
And obviously, the cumulative returns are year by year, at circa EUR 30 million as we speak today. My second example is software, 3D Reshaper. This is an application and a sales development kit, and a key component providing meshing technology. This originated as an acquisition for MI, so the first example was Geosystems to MI. This is an example of MI to Geosystems, and has seen significant onward development since its original purchase. As scanning has become more prevalent in the Geosystems world, this technology was incorporated into Geosystems applications, and now provides the availability of meshing functions across the wider group's product portfolio, including HXDR. And as you probably know, meshing is an important technology building block, as it's the basis for many AI calculations.
The third example I have is of a different scale and is likely more familiar to many of you, and this demonstrates the success of internally developed disruptive technology release. The BLK portfolio has been instrumental in delivering EUR 285 million additional revenue since its release in 2017, as it provides high-quality mobile scanning, and in doing so, has changed the addressable market from around 1,500 scanners per year to now 17,000 devices in the market. There are multiple generations, but they use common technology blocks. They use the absolute encoder, they utilize 3D Reshaper. These examples illustrate the tremendous leverage of technology across the group, and is facilitated by a CTO who has worked in two of the main divisions and has a strong software domain knowledge, and you will hear a lot from Burkhard following in the afternoon.
So we've seen the value of innovation, but I want to talk about the management of the cost. This schematic is taken from our internal 60-page training document on IAS 38, and highlights the organization, the importance of monitoring and evaluating the innovation process, and the need to have strong financial oversight on our investments. I'll briefly walk you through it. So it splits between the project phase and the product life, and it exemplifies that the cash flow in the opening periods between the idea and product release is negative by the downward red line. The green line reflecting the improved cash flows post-product release.
You see the life of the intangible asset and the trajectory from beginning capitalization after you have mitigated the risk from the idea phase to year one, and then the amortization period during product release, ensuring you have the matching of cost to revenue. In the center, you see the regular actions that the organization has to take to ensure that the project is on target and that the business plan with IRR, NPV, payback calculations, is still holding. This process is in lockstep with the Hexagon innovation process and deeply ingrained in finance, development, and product management to ensure strict financial rigor on all our investments. Finally, on the innovation process, I want to highlight some of the metrics to give you additional context of the balance sheet.
The proportional mix of the capitalization investment reflects the importance of software in all our innovations, with 70% related to software and 30% related to hardware, and this is broadly in line with the development resources. The capitalization rate versus gross R&D spend is in the range of 53% ± 3%, and this information we will disclose quarterly in the future. I've also given an indication of the proportions of the gross book value split into the various phases of development. 18% of the gross book value being in the build phase, 32% being in depreciation, and 50% completely amortized, which demonstrates that the average life of those in depreciation is below six years. I want to give you a brief update on the rationalization program.
We took a circa EUR 200 million charge as a one-off and expect to deliver EUR 160 million-EUR 170 million annualized savings from 2025. We introduced this in Q3, and the numbers that you see on the bottom of the slide are the Q3 numbers, and we will give you an update in Q4 as to the progress in the implementation, but it is continuing on or ahead of schedule. I also wanted to give some more examples of the activities that are going on in the different categories. We are broadening our implementation of the European Shared Services Center by onboarding MI, and in addition, opening a similar center in the Americas. You will hear in Steven Cost's presentation that we have had a cessation in some low-margin government-related service contracts.
Finally, we're moving through our facility reduction program, which to date stands at 30 facilities. Moving to my second topic, capital allocation. We're gonna look more closely at cash generation, and in particular, the impact of working capital, as it's a focus on our business as it shifts in nature. This chart is very familiar to you, and it shows the working capital for sales has positively developed from a peak of 25 to low of 4% in early 2021, and has now come back to circa 10%. Looking at the dynamics, the improvement was brought about as the proportion of software sales in the group increased. We then saw a further marked downward shift, as during the COVID period, software was more resilient than hardware revenue. Hardware also being impacted and exacerbated by the component shortage.
Subsequently, we have seen a normalization in hardware, and this ratio was returned to 10%. Clearly, though, the general environment has changed, and with higher interest rates, we need to be proactive to sustain this level and to return to the overall downward trend. We're taking a number of measures to deliver a sustainable working capital improvement, such as stricter T's and C's, improving inventory management, and we're considering, if appropriate, to increase our supplier financing, which today is about EUR 40 million on a EUR 300 million supplier base. Moving from working capital to cash conversion. In the graph, the dotted blue line represents the quarterly cash conversion percentage, whereas the solid blue line is the cash conversion, excluding movements in working capital.
Given the explanation on the previous slide about the impact of normalization in the cycle, this shows that taken over the long term, cash conversion, excluding the impact, has remained in a relatively narrow band, typically hovering around 80%-90%, with an average of 86 compared to an average of 83, including the working capital. With a sustained working capital management program and investment management, this gives us confidence that we will return and achieve the 80%-90% cash conversion range. This slide looks at the allocation, the capital allocation in the last decade. Let's walk down the elements. I've talked an awful lot about the innovation, so it's not, perhaps not a surprise that the top of the chart relates to growth R&D. Consistent investment to drive innovation.
M&A is next on the list, and you can see that we have a history of M&A, and the block at the top shows the allocation between stock and cash for the EAM deal. We consistently return to shareholders with a payout ratio of above 30%. The share buybacks, very, very small, because we kept the scale equal, is relative to our LTIP program, but could be expanded if the conditions are favorable, with the option to purchase up to 10% of outstanding shares. Finally, we have continued to manage our financial leverage between below our internal threshold of 2.5 x net debt.
The previous slide takes us to the summary of the robust financial position as we enter the next stage of Hexagon's development with an investment capacity of EUR 1 billion, which would take us to 2.5 x our internal target. This would be well below our covenant threshold of 3.5 x. For reference, the proportion of our debt floating exchange rate is 80% versus 20% fixed, with an equal split between long and short term. So on to my last couple of topics, communication. I would like to address the topic of communication, because basically, we have listened to your feedback, looking at opportunities to help support the understanding of the group, including a more segmented reporting structure, more detailed P&L disclosure, and the proposal of alignment of management incentives.
A key area of focus since July, and in the next few months, is to expand and enhance our disclosures. We've already started to move in this direction. At Q3, we introduced the profit bridge, splitting out the contribution of organic growth, structure, and currency from sales through EBIT. We gave more detail about the components of working capital and more disclosure around the acquisitions. Today, we're introducing the new divisional structure, which should give a lot more transparency and visibility on the financial characteristics of the divisions. We will report 2023 in the current form, but for Q1, we will report the new structure, and I will now take you through a few examples. We'll make it easier to model the effects of acquisitions.
For our larger acquisitions, with seller approval, we'll tell you what the business costs, its revenue, and EBIT, and we'll identify the division in which it will go into. For smaller acquisitions, we'll give the revenues, some indication of profitability, and hopefully, this will make your modeling much easier. Perhaps the most important change, though, is that we have changed our segment reporting from the current two segments of IES and GES to five divisions. This is how I monitor the business, and with these additional metrics, it should support your understanding of the dynamics of the business. Quarterly, we will show the revenue and the EBIT margin for the five divisions, whereas annually, we'll give the broader spectrum, including gross margin. This slide draws together some of the key financial characteristics of the divisions.
I won't go through them, but the divisional presidents will touch on many of them in their subsequent presentations. But this brings the key characteristics together on one page for your convenience and should significantly help you. Having looked at how we present our numbers, we're proposing this enhanced structure, which will support more transparency by providing information quarterly that was only previously available annually. Starting on the left, we will present a bridge between IFRS revenue and the adjusted P&L, showing the impacts of PPA, LTIP, and NRI at the various levels through the P&L statement. In the center section, within the adjusted P&L, we will break down the effects of capitalization, amortization, so you can see these elements on a quarterly basis. Finally, on the right-hand side, the cash flow. You will see the starting point is EBITDA.
We will work down through EBITDA, break down the movements on working capital, and show the cash conversion calculation and the cash flow before non-recurring items. Hopefully, this will be far more intuitive... This slide summarizes the extent of the proposed changes we have discussed. We're trying to show the scale and the change we are proposing to help make Hexagon more transparent. My final disclosure slide is the proposed management incentive scheme. Historically, management remuneration schemes have been based around a single measure of absolute EBIT growth. We're proposing to broaden the criteria for management remuneration to reflect the key value drivers of the group, namely, organic revenue growth, the adjusted EBIT growth, and cash conversion. We understand from our stakeholder feedback that these are the key value drivers of the business, and we want to ensure that management and shareholder interests are aligned.
So to summarize, we're a highly successful group with an excellent record of innovation and growth and expanding margins. My objective as CFO is to ensure we continue our growth momentum by allocating capital effectively. We are committed to providing greater transparency and clarity as we strive to deliver our targets. So next, I would like to introduce Eva to talk to you about ESG.
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Eva Carranza, and I've not met yet many of you, so I'll go ahead and introduce myself shortly. I have the last, almost 20 years working in the chemical and in the building material industries, helping these companies to grow their business while improving the impact that they have on the planet and on the people and communities where they operate. And I joined Hexagon about two years ago in the Geosystems division, where I had the opportunity to learn about our process, about our people and our industry, and also to get a view into how complex our supply chain is. And since earlier this year, I was appointed head of sustainability for the group. I will be walking you slightly over what is our sustainability strategy.
I'll also give you some details into some of the initiatives that we are already implemented, and I will touch upon how our products and solutions are actually driving sustainable outputs in our customers' hands. So our strategy, I'm here to reassure you, it's still following to have sustainable business growth with the respect of people and the planet. We will be having a two-sided pillar into our impact, where we see our major impact as all the sustainability outcomes through efficiency that we bring the industries where we operate. And then we have our second pillar of the impact, which is those actions that we make, so it's the positive impacts that we create. And here we follow a program through the whole ESG, which is for environment, social, and governance. And what you see in the picture is actually one of our environmental initiatives.
This is our solar park in Spain, which is able to power almost 6,000 households on a yearly basis with its capacity. We also have initiatives on the social aspects, where you will also hear some from Mattias, who will be telling you how we use an inclusive culture to drive employee engagement. But we also have initiatives where we try to operate on a more responsible level in the communities where we're present. And you will also hear later on from Paolo, who will give you a glimpse on how we are also improving our governance structure as a group. Now, when we talk about the strategy, we're looking at our impact. And to make sure that we have the right impacts in place, we have set ourselves commitments.
Already some years ago, we decided, or we committed, to audit all our key suppliers in high-risk countries, and this was to be ended by this year. We are already in the process, almost finishing on ticking that one off. We have actually committed supplier audits in 100% of the suppliers that are strategic to us and that are located in high-risk countries. We have also committed ourselves to have 30% women in leadership positions by 2025. We have said that to follow our improvement program, we will source only 100% renewable power by 2027 in all our facilities. We have committed as well to a net zero long-term, short and long-term trajectory.
So we have committed to have a 95% reduction on Scope 1, that is mostly driven by the company cars, as well as Scope 2, which mostly stems from the electricity that we purchase by 2030. We also have a target to engage our supply chain. So we are committing to have at least 80% of our procurement spend covered by science-based target approved suppliers. Now, when we are talking about CO2, I'd like to give you a short glimpse, because 2030 looks far, but we are starting today. We have already, within the year, used the time to build up our baseline. So we have defined our roadmap in terms of corporate, and we are currently drafting site-by-site improvement initiatives to have yearly commitments on each of the locations.
We have also fast-forward our target and brought from 2030 to 2025, the carbon neutrality target. We are going further. We are starting to quantify what is the improvements that our solutions are bringing customers. We are taking a structure approach and using an externally recognized methodology, published this year by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, to quantify what are the avoided emissions on a reference case, versus the case that our customers are able to have in the, any of their workflows. We are aligning to net zero on a 2030 and also on a 2050 long-term trajectory. It's all about numbers, right? We've started already with the super lengthy, Carbon Disclosure Project, CDP. We have also already committed and reported on the UN Global Compact.
We are on the way to cover all the other type of frameworks that you need to be able to better address our progress to the targets. And we are also able to do this within a fast-forward mode, so we're already starting with the next integrated report. Now, I'd like to tell you a bit about our actions. And I already mentioned that the biggest impact we have is actually in the hands of our customers, how our solutions are bringing efficiency and therefore putting sustainability in their hands. But in our actions, we are starting by us. We are starting to see how can we improve? And we start by the people that we have.
So we are driving a program to be able to ensure and to foster a culture that is focused on inclusivity, a performance-driven culture, where any of our employees, any of our colleagues, and any of our customers feels that they belong, and they stay with us. You'll hear a little bit more on it from Mattias, who will tell you how, in his division, particularly, employees play a key role, and motivation is actually key. Then we looked towards our full value chain and see where can we generate positive impact. So we have a sustainable procurement program. We also have already started with driving life cycle assessments of our products, and then seeing how can we make our operations much more efficient. Any of our in current initiatives is not starting or ending only in our own facilities.
We're looking on how to drive actual improvements within the market, on logistics, on packaging, on customer engagement, engagement. So how do we bring customers over and try to address their ESG challenges as part of our development pipeline in innovation? And we're also looking at what happens with our products at the end of their lifetime. We already have, in some of our divisions, the opportunity to refurbish products when they have finished and used. And we're also looking in how do we scale this up and become much more circular. So I was mentioning about the supplier engagement program. Just to give you a glimpse, we have roughly, I don't know, 10,000 suppliers, more or less. But what we have done is that we prioritize them into which of them are strategic suppliers, and from this, which of those are actually located in high-risk countries.
We have then started to make engagements with these suppliers that follow the full supplier relationship management program to ensure that these suppliers are following human rights exactly at the same level that we have followed and that we have committed as an organization to champion. Why do we look into suppliers? One of the key aspects for our CO2 emissions will deal with them. I already mentioned, we have made our baseline in terms of Scope 1, 2, and Scope 3, and we have committed ourselves already to have a total of 95% reduction on Scope 1 and 2 by 2030.
But given that we have also signed the validations with the science-based target, and we are currently in the process of being validated, so the overall validation process is ongoing. We have also decided to look into the full value chain, and there is where we see that suppliers play a key component because they are actually the biggest lever we have to decarbonize. And that's how we will reach a 25% reduction in our full value chain by 2030. You will ask, "How is it that you expect, let's say, to grow our business while still reducing CO2 emissions?" And here I come. We have already heard from Ben and from Paolo, also from David, about how our growth will look like. So we will probably grow much faster in terms of software and in terms of SaaS, as in terms of hardware.
That's more or less, we want to have a balanced growth, but it's likely to be higher in terms of SaaS and software. What happens with the hardware is that we are integrating ESG criteria within the innovation process in Hexagon. You will hear from Burkhard the details on how the innovation process looks like. What I can just tell you here is we are including a life cycle assessment approach already at the moment of the starting of prototyping hardware products, to try to analyze which are those hotspots that our hardwares will have, so that our engineers can take a look into how to reduce or mitigate the impact. Now I come to our solutions. What about the solutions? You will hear from all the presidents of the divisions, how their customers are using our software and hardware.
What is important to recognize is that if we take a look at the trends that were already mentioned by Paolo and Ben, we see that the trends globally in our markets are actually increasing the demand for sustainable solutions on the short and long term. Bless you. Hexagon is very well located to fulfill that demand. Hexagon is well located to work with the customers and to accelerate this, growth.
And we are thinking on working with the customers, because what we see is that in the latest years, we have witnessed that climate change has really exacerbated, and the risk that it's posing is changing completely, not only how supply changes are working, not only how certain industries are being, let's say, analyzed, even by investors or by their stakeholders, but also it's changing how cities and normal citizens in any of the communities are being prone to their changes. So what we are doing is that we're trying to work with our customers in trying to find how do we empower the value that they bring by enhancing the link to nature. And here, I'm sure you all know, pretty much in most of the industries, economic activity is highly linked to nature or natural resources.
We're here in the U.K., and just in the U.K., we have more than GBP 45 billion per year that is directly linked to economic resources and nature. And what we see is that on the one hand, we have all type of demands for minerals and for materials increasing with the macroeconomic trends. But on the other hand, we also see that nature capital is not being able to restore itself as fast it should. So you will see from some of our presidents, including Maria, who will walk you into how is it that our customers are using our solutions into managing their own capital. How are they using maybe positioning services to understand how do they take the most out of agriculture, out of, out of forests?
How do they even take positioning services to better construct renewable energy sources, for example, when we're talking about offshore wind farms? And another topic, all of this, it's related to climate change mitigation. So all of these examples that you would, that you see, are actually related to reducing CO2 emissions. But what we have seen is that we are past just reduction. So even in a hypothetical scenario where emissions just stop now, we already have changes that have happened into different areas globally, which means that mitigation, it's not enough. We need to move towards adaptation. And when we move towards adaptation, we're talking about building resilient cities.
It's one of the topics that will be discussed afterwards by Steve, who will tell you how our customers are using data to bring in what is the real world scenario, and how are they using software to project into the future and analyze what are possible things that might happen. You will see that we can use our products to design better urban areas. We will also be able to use our products in the customer hands, to be able to be prepared in case of any disaster happens. And also, you will see afterwards from Thomas, regarding how do we improve construction. And this is one of the key aspects as well for resilience in cities and in communities, because becoming resilient means being able to sustain all the changes coming.
It's not only about increasing the amount of buildings that a city needs or growing the city, it's really about becoming much more efficient and upgrading the existing infrastructure to ensure that the city is better placed to actually withstand demands... So let me give you a glimpse example about how our solutions are actually being used by the customer into becoming more resilient and more efficient in construction. So we have a customer in the Netherlands, called Noordereng, that is actually refurbishing buildings. So what they do is that they go to houses, they measure parts, and they use prefabricated elements to upgrade the buildings that their customers have. And they want to just bring all of these buildings to the best industry standard in terms of energy consumption.
They have reference scenario, which is the use case or their workflows on a normal basis. And we also have now quantified what happens with our solution, BLK360. So what happens is that the customer is able to save material, time, and money in construction. And we've actually used the just published globally methodology from the WBCSD to quantify what does it mean in terms of the gap of CO2 emissions. So what we're doing actually is that we have helped this customer understand how can they reduce their own impact by using our products. And this is very important because this will shape our future. So our biggest sustainability impact is our solutions, and it's our solutions in the hands of customers.
So we will deploy this structure quantification of avoided emissions in a three-level approach, looking at what is the reference scenario and what is a solution scenario. We will look at all our product portfolio to strategize those industries, where we see that our solutions being the biggest decarbonization potential. We will measure the gap between reference and solution scenario to understand what is the avoided emissions that the customers have. And we will seek to scale the impact that we have as a company by forecasting growth in these markets. So I have some priorities, and my biggest one is really closing the gaps on sustainability, closing the gaps towards ESG. And then we will work parallelly together into shifting towards an impact-driven strategy.
What that means for us is quantifying at our customers, how much are we making them more sustainable, and being able to show them what alternatives do they have with the different set of products that we have within the portfolio. This way, we will be able to use sustainability as a key driver for business growth.
Hello, everyone, and welcome back. Hopefully, we didn't lose too many of you during the break. It doesn't look so, although I'm quite blinded by the lights up here. Maybe first, just to do a brief introduction about myself, this is my first Capital Markets Day. I've been with Hexagon about nine years. I spent the bulk of my time in Hexagon running the mining division, and then more recently, in leadership roles within Geosystems as the chief operating officer and chief digital officer. I've had the pleasure to follow Paolo's footsteps in running the Manufacturing Intelligence division, as he mentioned earlier, as he stepped up into the larger role. He left some big shoes to fill, as you saw earlier, but I'm trying to do my best to fill those shoes. What we're going to talk about today? We're gonna talk about the future of manufacturing and discrete manufacturing.
Maybe first, starting with our overall business profile. You saw some of these metrics earlier, but we're going to go a bit deeper into those now here today. Our revenue in 2020 finished at close to EUR 1.9 billion in sales. We've been averaging a 7% CAGR, or compounded growth rate, during that time, organically, and more than double of that organically over the past three years coming out of the pre-pandemic. Our gross margins have also improved from that time to 62% and our EBIT finishing at 26%. Although, based on the question I heard earlier, I think there's even more room for improvement. But seriously, I think we are the market leader in both gross margins and EBIT in most of our categories compared to our peers.
I can't say all categories, but I also do like the idea of aligning that with the Hexagon ambitions, and that's our own personal ambition, is to be at the Hexagon group average in the next five years. Our recurring revenue makeup is 30% recurring. Maybe one interesting data point of that is we're growing our recurring revenue at double the rate of our revenue growth, which is by design, and we expect that to continue into the future. You'll see and hear more of that throughout the strategy update today. Our business model is predominantly direct sales at 69%. I'll explain a bit further on why that's important for us, and our software and services are 56%.
If you break this down by sales, by industry, as I mentioned, discrete manufacturing being at the core of this, our big three industries are automotive, aerospace, and general manufacturing of all shapes and sizes, from large OEMs, that you can see some of the logos there at the bottom, to machine shop operations. We do, however, have an expanding presence into what we call emerging industries. Life sciences, made up of both pharmaceuticals and med devices, energy, which you heard some of that supporting the green energy transition, so the maker of wind turbines, panels, solar panels, blades, et cetera, and consumer electronics. Those industries are growing at roughly double the pace of our core industries, where we're also growing. But again, that was by design as we're diversifying our portfolio strategically to further penetrate those industries.
If you look at our revenue makeup, we're almost evenly distributed throughout the world, with close to 29% of our business coming from the Americas, 30% in EMEA, and 41% in APAC. Of that 41%, close to 29% is coming from China, and then the difference being in the rest of Asia, where we're also doubling our growth in what we call emerging country markets. Similar can be said for the Americas. If you look at Latin America, we've more or less doubled our business in the past three years as well, and we think there's a huge amount of opportunity and upside to further penetrate into those local country markets.
Most of those growth, there's an example, came from Mexico and Brazil, which we still think has a huge amount of upside, but there's also a lot of other countries in those types of emerging markets with a growing manufacturing base that we are positioning ourselves well for. Our strategy, I'm not going to go into all the details, because that is kind of the, the, the basis of this presentation here today, but I'll summarize it, that we aspire to be the experts in all things quality and quality manufacturing throughout our customers' value chain. We call it multi-persona based, meaning we service the quality-related needs at the shop floor, at middle management, and at the C-suite or the top floor, as I heard it called recently.
All in all, if you look at our install base and what this equates to, is we're serving over 70,000 customers annually. We have over 500,000 active software licenses in use today, and we ship over 15,000 devices per year. That compounds and adds up to over or close to 1 million active hardware devices in use today. We've grown our overall install base in the last 12 months, close to 13% as well, which is also a nice, promising leading indicator for us. One other comment on our overall strategy I thought would be worth noting is the amount of internal transformations that we've been on as well. And I heard that brought up in a couple of the questions related to the sales force, and I had to have an example on that a bit.
But this is a major effort for us to better service and support our customers. Also, for us, as we scale our growth in the most efficient and effective ways, not just for the size of the business that we have today, the size of the install base that we have to manage, but also our ambitions and aspirations of where we're going. And so just to look at that in a bit more detail... Clicker. There we go. We call this our go-to-market transformation, and so all in all, we do have a very high touch model for our customers. We have over 1,600 sales professionals and 3,200 employees also focusing on customer success and customer support as well. So more than 50% of our employee base is front-facing, interacting with customers on a daily basis.
However, we did have an urgent need to truly unify the sales force overall, and that's what we've been embarking on. And so if you look at the different ways that we segment our customer base, we have enterprise accounts at the top. Those represent roughly EUR 5 million per year in turnover. We have major accounts in the middle, between EUR 500,000 and EUR 5 million, and then we have small, medium-sized businesses, which typically represent below EUR 500,000 per year. We've organized and optimized the ways that we can touch and penetrate our customers. So concepts like key account management, we extend that much further to having dedicated account reps or leaders that can represent the entire breadth of our portfolio, to things like technical account leads, heads of customer success, marketing support.
It's very much the high-touch model at the top that we're striving to do. Maybe just to show the effectiveness that it's having, we've been able to grow our enterprise accounts close to 15%, 15%-20% year-on-year as well. It's clearly working and paying off right now, and our customers are seeing the value that we're able to provide to them. As you move on down the pyramid, though, we get into more of the value in volume selling. You're talking a lot more volume of transactions. Things like efficiency become very important for us, not just for us in how we manage and optimize our own business processes, but also how we can support our customers, because they have the same levels of burden, typically, as well.
And so we've introduced things like inside sales or overlaid sales models, e-commerce platforms, expanding a lot of the automation capabilities and how we can transact and interact with our customers and also channel partners as well. Underpinning all this is the massive transformation tied to our own digital transformation. We've gone from 20 different CRM applications down to one, and we've also gone from 40 different customer portals down to one as well. And through that is a complete redesign, aligned to our different personas and customer journeys along the way, and trying to optimize and streamlining all those underlying processes. We're not quite there yet. We're about 80% in full transparency, but the amount of steps we've made in building out the foundation and the layers is there, and we've done a bulk of that heavy lifting over the past couple of years.
And we're doing the same in our business operations, and we've also done the same already in our portfolio and innovation teams, which I would say is the furthest along. Addressable market. You saw this earlier, so I'm not going to go into that in a lot more detail. We do have our core markets. I already mentioned the diversification strategy, entering into new markets. We do think it's a sizable market as is, roughly $29 billion, and we expect it to grow over 7% in the next coming years. Whether or not there's some variation, as Ben mentioned earlier, that's to be determined, but between a lot of the strategies we have put in place, we're quite confident in our ability to continue to penetrate that, capitalize on that. So how we're gonna do it?
First, I think it's important to start with our evolution and kind of the journey we've been on. Many of you, as I heard referenced earlier, the days of Brown & Sharpe, going back to the original Hexagon acquisition 20 years ago, where we were basically the producers of multi-sensor CMMs, or coordinate measuring machines. That still continues to be one of our cash cows. It's growing, it's innovating. We've been enhancing that and improving that along the way. But throughout that time, we've pivoted into adjacent areas and new emerging areas, like portables. More portables made up of laser tracking or scanning solutions, and in more recent times, automated inspection. I'll show you two deep dives on those later on, but it's quite impressive to see the evolution to not only grow our core market, but expand into new adjacent areas within the world of metrology.
And we didn't just stop there. We also expanded into production software or CAM solutions. Started first with CNC machines, but now we can do all different machine types. One of the most recent additions that we launched earlier this year is an end-to-end suite for additive manufacturing, as just another example within that, and further efficiencies through things like automatic parts programming and other efficiency gains for our customers, and really optimizing the use and productivity of those assets that our software is running on. If you step into about seven years ago, through the acquisition of MSC, we got into the CAE space. First, I would say it started with multi-body dynamics or multi-body physics. Since then, it's continued to evolve as well into things like virtual manufacturing, getting into the production environment, simulating all these real-time conditions, et cetera.
Even in the more recent times, getting into concepts like generative AI, advanced simulation, the shift to the cloud, and so on as well. That's also continued to develop and evolve overall. But if I had to summarize this, this was more or less our portfolio, as you would recognize us at the last Capital Markets Day that we physically had. Since then, if you've been following us closely, earlier this year, we launched Nexus. Nexus is the platform of the future to connect all of our software and hardware devices. But what exactly is Nexus and how does it work? It's much more than the shift to cloud. It encompasses entire new redesigns of all of our solutions, driving so much faster and better user experiences or functionality that they didn't have in the past.
It will also host cloud-native applications underpinned by a multi-tenant architecture, a complete redesign of our data models to optimize performance for not only our customers, but also for us. We've started with some select applications that you can see here, but it will go through rapid app deployment over the next 12-24 months, and as I mentioned before, you will see all of our solutions connected and powered by Nexus in the future. But we didn't just stop there. As you heard about the acquisitions of Enterprise Quality and Enterprise Asset Management. With these, we've further expanded into our customer enterprises. Now we're dealing with the CIO environments, more of the top-level, decision makers and economic buyers, but also in connecting quality and factory-related workflows, truly end-to-end across their value chains.
I'll show you examples of exactly what that looks like, but first, maybe just a short highlight on ETQ. What is ETQ? It is tailored and optimized specifically around industry standards such as ISO or other compliance and regulated industries, but it also drives overall digital transformation for quality-related systems. A lot of this is still disparate in nature and/or paper-based as well, and it's the system of record for all quality-related events. So anytime there's a quality-related event, this is the single source of truth for our customers across their entire quality value chains. Making up what they call the Reliance Platform, are 42 different unique applications built on one multi-tenant cloud-native platform, and it is portable to Nexus, and it will be continuing to be more and more, let's say, embedded and inclusive into the Nexus environment. And the same applies for Enterprise Asset Management or EAM.
EAM, we are targeting first in discrete, as you heard earlier, focusing on automotive and aerospace. Why? Because they're both heavily asset-intensive industries, but they also have many sites that they need to digitally connect with throughout the world. We're seeing a true demand pull from our customers for both enterprise asset management and ETQ solutions that you heard as part of the globalization strategies that we have behind them and scaling them outside of the Americas, but even more than that, into further penetration into these industries, digital adoption transformations that they're doing and so on. So what does this look like? In summary, we have a leading position across enterprise quality management and quality-related solutions across the entire value chain. And within that, if you look at each one of our sub-portfolios, we're in the top categories as well. So we're definitely in a position of strength.
To take this down into the personas that I referenced earlier, starting first with data capture, I just wanted to show a few examples. Looking at our portable metrology portfolio and laser trackers, if you go back to 2009, we've been averaging close to a 14% CAGR, and that's all organic. What's really interesting, though, if you look deeper into that, is where the growth is coming from, what we call diversification and differentiation. Things like ease of use. Ruggedization opens up a whole new wave of applications, getting more in-line, near line, and then automation is just taking us to that next step. You saw some of the efficiencies also that we get out of that with common components like encoders, and so on. All in all, that leads to a 27% market share that we have compared to competition.
The next level, what we call process managers. To show an example of what that looks like, our automated inspection cell is opening up a whole new value of opportunities for us. I heard a lot of the customer needs and kind of those fundamental drivers mentioned earlier. I would say the top two, if I had to select two, is by far the skilled labor shortage that we see at the factory floor and higher flexibility, meaning being in line, near line, and modularized to the factory floor layouts of our customers. The use cases are quite clear in the effort of time, which I'm running out of up here. I'd like to talk about the Hexagon value that we're creating.
If you look at this, let's say, on an individual sale basis, if we did not have this type of truly end-to-end turnkey solution, we still would have sold a laser tracker or a scanner. But through having this complete solution set, we're able to compound that with automation capabilities, robotic, et cetera. So you can see not only are we growing the overall component value of our hardware, but we're also adding a heck of a lot of additional software and services, and increasing the average deal size close to 233%. But it doesn't just stop there. With the addition of Nexus and ETQ, we're adding on additional levels and opportunities for not only software content, but also recurring revenue....
And finally, for the last example here, if you take ETQ or enterprise quality and process organization across the entire value chain, maybe just two examples to highlight. We've opened up a whole new buyer personas, one being an example in the supply chain management arena. One of our reference customers, Wabtec, saw a $30 million annual savings in quality programs related to supplier-related quality event issues and events as they occurred. Through this implementation, they were able to directly and digitally connect with their suppliers in real time, and that generated $30 million in savings opportunities. It also penetrates further into sales, customer support, and so on. But lastly, because I'm out of time here, I had to rush there at the end. If I had to summarize our strategy in, in a short summary, we'll continue to lever-leverage our position of strength.
We'll continue to expand our portfolio, driving our strategy and penetrating into new markets, and we'll continue to implement a multi-persona growth strategy through 2030. And with that, we will empower the future of manufacturing and have a massive impact on society as a whole. Thank you all. I will now bring up Mattias to talk about the Asset Lifecycle Intelligence division. Mattias?
All right. Thank you very much, Josh. Okay. Good afternoon, everybody. Good to be here. A lot of familiar faces, some new ones also. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Mattias Stenberg. I've been with Hexagon about 14 years in several different roles, but in the last six years, I've been the president of Hexagon ALI. So let's talk about that. What is ALI? We are a leading software provider to a lot of the Fortune 500 companies in the world. So what do we do? We design, construct, operate, and maintain these facilities for them to basically help them make them more safe, profitable, efficient, and so on. But that's what we do. I know you guys are here for numbers, right? So let's talk about numbers.
A lot of numbers on this slide, and I'll, I'll try to walk you through it so you get a sense of it, right? So if we start with the revenue we did, this is 2022, all the numbers you see on the screen, right? So we did EUR 728 million last year, and we had a CAGR the last five years of 5%. That is organic growth, right? So excluding M&A and any currency fluctuations. I think two important things to note with that CAGR. One is that, 2020, we had negative growth of, I think, roughly 3%, and that was obviously because of COVID, and also because the oil price collapsed, right, as you all probably remember, back in 2020.
Without dwelling too much on the past, that is one of the reasons why we decided to go on a diversification journey in this business over the last five-six years. As you can see from the pie in the middle here, oil and gas is now 38% of our revenue. It used to be a little bit above 50% five years ago. So I'm not gonna have time today to go into every detail, but we've changed our portfolio, we've changed our go-to-market, we've changed a lot of the internal ways how we've digitalized internally and so on, to really expand our customer, customer base and our footprint. And you will see this evident in, in a lot of these numbers, right? So if we start...
I'm sorry, the second thing I should say about the CAGR, one thing also that's important to note with us is that today, roughly 20% of our business is SaaS, right? All of our business, apart from 15%, is software. With 15%, percent is services, the rest is software. Out of that total revenue, 20% is SaaS. If you look five, six years ago, SaaS was a very small number, right? So SaaS has been growing a lot faster on the cost, if you like, of the perpetual revenue. So when you look at our CAGR over the last five years, there's probably, I would say, about a 1-2 percentage points negative drag from perpetual kind of being replaced by SaaS. But as I'm sure you guys know, that's obviously a good thing for the long term, right?
Because we're building a much more recurring business. Okay, if we move down to the profitability side, as you can see, we do high margins, 80% gross margin, and last year we did 36% EBIT margin. We have about 7,000 customers today. That was roughly 5,000 five years ago. So another evidence that we have expanded our footprint and really gone after a lot of different customer industries, let's say, as you can see from the pie here as well. It's a direct sales model. It's well over 90%, so think of it, we're selling enterprise solution software, right? We have a few resellers in a few countries, but predominantly, it's a direct sales model. Like I said, recurring revenue, 74% last year.
15% is services, so that's not recurring, but we do think that's a very strategic part of our business. We need, call it high-end implementation services to deliver our, our software, right? And I think Paul or Ben, I can't remember, mentioned also, of course, we worked- we work with big SIs as well. Our goal is not to build the world's biggest services business, but we do think a certain, you know, smaller, high-end services business is very much needed, right? The other part in our revenue that's not recurring is then the perpetual revenue. We have about 10%, 11%, 12%, depending on the year left there of perpetual revenue. So I know you guys like to model things. So, I mean, that is the revenue that over time, of course, we think will shift to SaaS gradually.
It's, it's going to take time, but that's going to happen gradually. We have 4,500 employees, and I hope you agree with me that there's a lot of good numbers on the slide, but the number that I'm most proud of, to be honest, is that number that says 74%. That's the engagement score, and that's something that Korn Ferry, the organization, they measure this globally for different companies by doing interviews and surveys. And what they call a top-performing tech company, has an average of 62% on this engagement score with their employees. We have 74%, so obviously, I think that's very good. And without going into all the details, I think we've done a lot of investments in our talent management, in our benefits, and how we kind of work with people and so on.
So I think it's super important, because in the end, right, we're a software company, so what assets do we have? It's the people. So that's where we really need to focus, to make sure we have the best talent, the smartest people, and so on. Okay. On the other side of this slide, I've tried to split up our revenue into three buckets to give you some help of what drives our performance. So the biggest bucket is still design and engineering. That's kind of the legacy where we come from, so a little bit over 50%. If you would have looked at this five, six years ago, that number would have been more like 80%. So we have clearly diversified, right? What we call project planning and execution is about 12%. That's kind of our construction bucket of software.
And then the bit that's grown the fastest the last couple of years has been the operations and maintenance, right? Which is now a little bit more than 1/3 of revenue. Okay. Saying a few words about our market, I think Ben mentioned this. This is an external study from a mix of companies, Gartner, IDC, Frost & Sullivan, and also 120 expert interviews of decision-makers in the industry. Basically, their conclusion is that our markets, as they define them, should grow about 7%. And that's a blended rate of—they're saying that what they call the core, core markets, oil and gas, and chemicals, should grow slightly slower than that. But kind of the areas that we have been expanding into should grow faster, so at a blended rate of 7%. Okay.
But let me try to give you a little bit of a look into what we actually do. What does our solutions look like, and why did we pick this name, Asset Lifecycle Intelligence? Well, if we start with the assets, like I've tried to allude to here, we cover a broad range of assets, right? It's not just oil and gas facilities. Whether it's a data center, a pharmaceutical facility, manufacturing facility, could be a ship, could be an airport, could be a fleet of vehicles, we cover a lot of different assets. But other than just covering them, we really follow our customers throughout the life cycle. If you look at where we came from, where this business started 20, 30 years ago, right, it was design and engineering. We are the market leader in this space.
Doesn't. Just because we've had it a long time, doesn't mean that this is a business we're not investing in. We're investing a lot into this. It's still growing, it's still generating a lot of, of money for us. So you see some of the latest innovations here in the video. And without going into great detail, I would say to you that basically what we've been focusing on here has been integration, technology, and UX. It's not a feature function game anymore, software, it's all about integration and UX. But what we realized very, what you say, clearly the last, call it 10 years, is that even though customers spend a lot of money in design and engineering, that is not usually where projects go wrong, right? When a project goes over, over budget, over schedule, it's usually because something happens in the execution phase, right?
The construction, the building of it. So we decided over the last decade to really build out our portfolio in this area. We did this through innovation, like Smart Materials, Smart Construction, Smart Completions, but we also did some acquisitions. You've heard about Bricsys, EcoSys, Jovix, iConstruct, right? To really build out this offering. And as you can see from the videos here, we're also connecting our software to the sensors and solutions from our sister division, Geosystems, which Thomas will talk more about soon. So as I'm sure you have figured out already, we didn't stop there, right? We said, "Okay, you've designed it, you built it, now you need to operate and maintain it for many, many years," right? So here is where we've really expanded the last five, six years. Our biggest innovation here, you've heard it mentioned several times today, is something called SDx.
And that is the video. Let's see, that's the one you see on the top there. The other two videos are showing EAM and then some laser scan solutions. So basically, other than SDx, we've obviously acquired a couple of companies, EAM for sure being the biggest, and I'll talk a little bit more about SDx and EAM and how they integrate and so on. And then we've done some smaller acquisitions. You've heard of maybe about j5, AKMS, PAS, which is our cybersecurity offering, to really build out this, this portfolio. So today, we would claim, I would argue, that we are really covering the full life cycle of a customer's process and workflow. And, I mean, I guess many companies can put up a slide like this and say, "We cover the full workflow." That's great, right?
But why we are unique, I would argue, we, we are the only ones that can put up this slide and say that we are natively connecting these processes on a data-centric level. It is not copy-paste, it is not file transfer, it is truly data-centric. What does that mean? It means that if you do a change in the design, it will ripple through the other software you have connected to the system. It could be EcoSys, which is the project planning, scheduling, costing. It could be the EAM, right, the maintenance of the asset. It could be many different things, but if you connect it on a data-centric level, you can get a lot of value from such a system. So I guess this is what people use the buzzword to say, a digital twin. To me, that is what it is.
Rather than me maybe trying to explain it to you in words, let me show you a short video that kind of explains what I mean. We're looking here at SDx, the info map, this kind of where a user usually starts the journey. In this scenario, they have a problem with a heat exchanger. The customer opens up SDx. He then goes in, in the 3D software. This is a different product, right? He finds the part, the heat exchanger. He then opens up the diagram. This is a third product, it's called P&ID product. He finds that on the diagram, clicks on that, and can then open up the different sensors that are attached to this heat exchanger.
The sensors giving him real-time data, or her, showing the customer that, you know, the history, how this has performed, and he basically, customer finds out that, okay, there seems to be a problem here with the filter. So he opens up EAM, right? So now we're in a fourth product, sending out somebody to have a look at this filter. Does it need to be replaced? Does it need to be cleaned or whatever, right? So that was just one example, one asset, a heat exchanger. It was using four different products. But my point is, we cover thousands of these assets, right? And thousands of workflows. I showed you one here, but the point is really, the more different type of data you can connect to the system, the more valuable.
But again, rather than me telling you how fantastic I think it is, I picked a quote from a customer that implemented a similar solution to this, this year from Cargill, and their head of the digital twin area said this, right: "In the last 30 minutes using SDx, I found more information than in the previous six months." So to me, that's a very clear value proposition, right? What a customer can get from this solution. Final attempt of explaining what it does is putting this slide here, right? Here, I'm trying to put one picture on all of the kind of data that it collects or that you can connect to it. So most of this is Hexagon products or data, but some of it is also third party, right? This is not a closed Hexagon system.
If you're operating on some other software, some other data, we certainly can connect to that, right? Okay. So how do we sell this stuff? And Paolo talked about, you know, how we try to build operational excellence, and we have actually built a process around how we go to market that we call AdvantX, right? Everything with Hexagon has to end with an X. That's the naming policy. So we actually have a patent pending on this, without going into all the detail, similar to what Josh talked about, right? Of course, this is depending on high touch, low touch, depending on the size of the customer, but basically, we are connecting our marketing, our sales teams, our customer success organization, support and service. Everything is connected through the life cycle of the customer. It's selling software today is not like 10, 15 years ago.
You sell some software, and you leave, right? We, we try to follow the customer throughout the life cycle. And of course, we do this to, to sell more, but we really think by investing more in the beginning, maybe a higher cost model at, at some point, we get more value out of the life of the customer, right? They, by them realizing value, getting a return on investment, they will hopefully buy more with us. So one way to look at that is to look at retention, of course. And I would say our, our gross retention is in the high 90s, but if you look at our net retention, I mean, on the SaaS business, it's well above 100%, right? So we see this model working. We, we're expanding this, this every year.
We're currently covering a little more than, I think, it's about 50%-60% of our customer base. The goal is not to take it to 100, right? Some are gonna have more low touch model, but in general, this is the way we go to market. Okay. So I mentioned one company, Cargill, but let me show you a couple of other customers to give you kind of an idea of how this is used and what they do with it. So the world's largest retailer, company you all know of, I'm sure, they use this in their American distribution centers and facilities to manage all of their different assets. Another one would be the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.
They have, I shouldn't say all, but close to all of our different solutions to both design, construct, and operate their, call it, growing list of manufacturing facilities. Another one would be one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies. They use this to manage their very high-end facilities. Another one, which I think is an impressive one, is, of course, probably the world's most advanced research organization center. They use this to monitor and manage their particular accelerator, but also many, many other assets within their operation. And this one, I could really have picked any of those customers in that space. I would say all of them, more or less, use this technology. I picked one of the big ones. But I think important to say here is also that, you know, I talk about diversification.
We have diversified a lot, but so have our customers, right? If you look at these type of names, they have also diversified, so that has certainly helped our kind of mix in industries, right? And finally, I picked a more maybe unexpected one to show you that we are truly covering all kinds of assets, right? So Legoland Korea is a customer, and they use this solution to deliver a world-class customer experience, right? How's the crowd moving? What attractions are open or not? Or, you know, is there a flow problem with one? Do we need to send somebody there? So yeah, you can imagine, right? If you have an asset, we have a solution for you. Okay. So in summary, if I were to summarize our strengths, I think we are the market leader in most of our segments.
We certainly have an A-plus customer list, as I'm sure you will agree. We have strong financials, a high recurring revenue. SaaS is growing a lot faster than all other revenue streams. I think we have proven also that we know how to do M&A, and we know how to integrate them. We integrated EAM over the last two years, and it was certainly a big, big effort, big task, but I would say it's gone, gone well. I'm very proud of that advantage I showed you. I think we have a world-class sales and marketing machine, and again, I'm very proud of my colleagues that I work with. I think it's a great, great team. I would also argue that we have a good market position.
Our traditional markets are growing, but like Ben said, right, if you look at the whole digital transformation, it's all, it's a buzzword, but the truth is, it's just very early in that hype cycle, even though we're already tired of the word, right? The adoption is still to happen. And also, I would argue, like I said in the beginning, we are very well positioned to help our customers with productivity, efficiency, and ultimately, sustainability. Right, Eva? Yeah. Good. Okay. And then Paolo asked me: Can you talk about the three biggest growth opportunities for ALI? And it was honestly hard to pick three. I think we have a lot of growth opportunity, but certainly one would be EAM. Like I said, we bought it two years ago, almost.
Still very much North American business, so we have built now an organization in China, APAC, South America. EMEA, they were already pretty strong, but I think that's a big opportunity. Another one, the biggest one, is probably the story I've been telling here today, right? The whole digital continuity with SDx. SDx has had a CAGR of 100% the last five years. We hope and think that that should continue, but also, I think it could and will pull through other Hexagon solutions and technologies. Getting repetitive, but like I showed you, the more you can connect to it, the more value you will get. And the final one I would mention is our diversification. We have changed a lot in the last five, six years, but yeah, still a long way to go.
If we can win, if we can win more customers like the one I showed you, the six different examples, right, we can certainly diversify even, even further. So that's it from me. Thank you very much for paying attention. And with that, I'll introduce my friend and colleague, Thomas, who will talk about Geosystems.
Thanks a lot, Mattias. There's been never a better time to get digital solutions into vital industries. Hello, everyone. My name is Thomas Harring. I'm President of Geosystems. What we are doing, we make work easier, insights available, and decisions better, and with that, we pace away to a more sustainable future. Let me start with the business profile, and firstly, some financials, which you have seen already. We have achieved a revenue in 2022 of EUR 1.6 billion of revenue, which is a CAGR of 8% from 2018 to 2022. On Russia, we lost 1% of growth over that period, which corresponds to roughly 3.5% of our business. We had strong improvements on gross profit, ending up with 65% in 2022, and EBIT 1 was growing stronger than gross profit and sales and ended up at 33% in 2022.
25% of our revenue was recurring. All of that, we achieved with 6,000 people, 6,000 colleagues all around the world, and more than 1,900 in R&D and related functions. We have a healthy distribution across industries, with surveying and geospatial being roughly one-third. Building infrastructure, slightly more than 1/2 of the business, and more than 10% in adjacent industries, such as media entertainment, forensic, rail, and a few others. Our regional distribution proves our truly global approach. Americas is close to 1/3, EMEA is 47%, and Asia, over 20% of our revenue. We are benefiting from strong growth drivers, which I will explain throughout the presentation, confirming how we are pairing technology leadership and domain expertise in our growth industries. Moving to the next slide. Talk a little bit about our customers and our operations.
We have a global presence with local representations in 43 countries of the world. We have innovation factories, which are stronger than ever. We have a well-established software and hardware and assembly capabilities in many countries in the world, and additional software development centers in many other countries, being close to our customers. You heard before that over the last years, we established our global business service center in Barcelona, which we scaled up during the pandemic. And since many years, we have broadened and strengthened our Asian supply chain, which proved to be very resilient during the pandemic and all the supply chain shortages which we experienced.
We have many long-term channel partners in many countries of the world, and we've added new ones for supporting our customers wherever they do their business, and whatever kind of support they need to get, and we implement customer success through our distribution channels as well. The strong Hexagon brand, which we are using, is supported by strong solution brands which have a very good reputation in the industry, such as Leica Geosystems, IDS GeoRadar, Leica BLK, OxBlue, or BricsCAD, and AGTEK. Everything we are doing is centered around our educated view on what customers actually want. We are increasing their loyalty, satisfaction, and retention, and this in turn will help us to connect to even more customers, and we'll be able to capture more sales with that and, of course, increase the economic value for them.
Our customers have also a strong network effect within the organizations and among different stakeholders in the industries which we are serving. This is, for us, the flywheel effect, which really is the foundation for our long-term growth, powering market share expansion in our existing industries and providing an even more resilient business moving forward. If you look at our total addressable market, all the different sub-segments are growing. That's a prediction. Our addressable market is in total, slightly over $40 billion, and it's assumed to have a growth rate of 8% until 2026. It's very important to mention that our future term also encompass things which we actually don't contemplate right now, like in autonomy, artificial intelligence, which will provide future opportunities moving forward.
Please don't forget, our broad positioning in different industries and throughout the whole life cycle of building infrastructure, makes us resilient, even as one of the sub-sectors is going under pressure. Turning to our strategy, it is a simple and it's a granular strategy. Our ongoing business transformation and collaborative industry-centric approach. Founded on key capabilities, which shown on that slide, we put them together, software, hardware, and platform capabilities, and we create portfolios, which are then applied to the different industries. You see many capabilities we have, like CAD/BIM, like simulations, generative AI, visualization, cloud and edge processing, machine automation, positioning, scanning, radar, and so on. And these portfolios are clustered either in what we call field solutions, where the value starts to be created in the field, on a construction site, on a film set, or somewhere else, where operations are getting done.
And then data are created, and these data getting processed and into the office. In the office, the value starts to be created in what we call AECO software solutions, which stands for architecture, engineering, construction, and operations. There we have many different capabilities as well. If you look at some of the solutions on this slide, you see reality capture, you see machine automation in different industries on the field solution side, and you see software like BIM, CAD, project management, and software for digital twins as well, throughout the different industries, with some overlap.
AECO software has grown stronger, has a much higher share of recurring revenue, but it's very important to mention how strongly field solutions have been growing as well, with roughly 7% over that period, and where we increased significantly the gross profit due to more innovative solutions and more software content. So over the past years, we have also continued to work on collaboration platforms. You see HXDR on that slide, which is, for us, essential. We launched different applications powered by HXDR to utilize geospatial data across all the different industries, across different customer organizations, across different stakeholders in our markets. We have and we will shape markets by pioneering innovation. And these successive innovations enable us to encourage diversification and accelerate a shift towards more growth opportunities for the future. So we are activating our capabilities to grow.
Our granular strategy, which you see on that slide, helps us deliver our proposition to be a high-performing business and become even more resilient. Let's look what we're actually doing on that slide. What we're doing right now, we are bringing together the capabilities in the area of the digital continuity in buildings infrastructure throughout the whole life cycle, and this is enabled by one of the freshest line-ups in industry. From pre-construction, design planning, to construction, to operations and renovation, supporting all the different stakeholders along the life cycle, whether it's architects, engineers, general contractors, sub-trades, facility managers, asset managers, and so on, and not to forget the asset owner, which we take with us. We take through that process right from the beginning. It starts with capital planning and continues through to 3D surveillance, protecting assets or creating digital twins at city scale.
This is our proposition, and this is an open and inclusive approach within Hexagon and, of course, in the broader ecosystem, with many well-established industry partnerships, which Burkhard will talk about later on. Our strategy is granular. We are making choices, and then we relentlessly executing on them. Achieving our ambition comes down to two things: understanding our customer needs, the customer problems, to deeply understand what they actually want and need, and then quickly turn that into software solutions or products, and doing it better and better. For our customer, really, what matters are the results, and for us, the results of our customers makes a difference. So whether it's accuracy, productivity improvements, safety or sustainability, that's what we need to develop and need to achieve with our solutions.
On the following slide, I would like to explain certain solutions, certain areas where we really, today, solve customer problems, and how we embark them on the journey. And it's an exciting journey. It's a journey towards the future, and that future is very much driven by innovation, convergence, and platforms, which play a fundamental role. Let's start with the successful Doing Both approach. You heard David talking about the BLK story. Until 2016, we developed hardware and software for experts in laser scanning. Please remember, laser scanning is a rather young technology, so you'll see some pictures how it looked before. And then in 2016, we implemented our Doing Both approach, which means we had separate tracks for differentiated and disruptive innovation. We implemented sales enablement, coupled with commercial selling skills and inside sales.
Our channel partners have been—some channel partners have been selected to become part of the premium approach for the BLK. We strengthen our loyal customer base and accelerate the network effects among customers, among stakeholders, also via industry partnerships. What did we achieve? We launched the BLK360 back in 2017, and this really unique success story, as you've seen before. And we launched the RTC360, a very differentiated laser scanner back in 2018. A tremendous success story, also. Until today, as you see on that slide, we have released eight disruptive solutions under the BLK brand, from static scanners to mobile to flying sensors. But not only the BLK family has grown substantially. As you can see on the chart, the differentiated products under the lead of the RTC360 have gained momentum and strong momentum as well.
In total, we have been able to 9x the number of units since 2016 until end of 2022 on a yearly basis, which provides significant potential for us to deploy more software platform technologies moving forward. And trust me, we are not stopping by this. We have a roadmap of new disruptive innovation coming up, and with the launch of our digital reality platform, HXDR, we are just getting started. There's so much more to do in creating digital twins in all these different industries, digital realities, and we are all excited to move forward, to really create digital realities for everybody, for all. Coming from Doing Both, going to Pairing Both. How we successfully integrate M&A and provide real, tangible value for asset owners.
You have seen on Ben's slides two acquisitions, one being OxBlue, a leading webcam solution with business with strong growth and very much very quality revenue, and the experience of over 35,000 projects. The other one is about Projectmates, a project management software for asset owners with more than 20,000 users. It's also about AI analytics and how we translate data into insights. The combined solution, which we see, you see on the second video playing, creates distinctive capabilities in the industry because it provides real-time process and progress updates on construction site, productivity and safety. It allows you to benchmark project performance for an asset portfolio and support safety and security during the construction, as said before. Put simply, we support asset owners to realize their full potential, harnessing data to learn from every project and then make the next one better.
Looking ahead, it's about expanding and ensuring digital continuity from capital funding to asset management. With solutions such as Hexagon EAM, you have seen in Mattias' presentation, and with that, keeping the digital reality updated and progressing towards the Industrial Metaverse. Let's move from asset owners to general contractors and towards 5D Project Delivery. 5D means adding time and cost to the three spatial dimensions of CAD and BIM. Our proven approach is to co-create technology adoption together with the customer … by implementing data-centric workflow solutions. Right now, we are bringing new unique workflows together with Virtual Design and Construction teams to projects. We call it from workflows to integrated solutions. Whether it's about job site progress, building progress, or digital handover, that's what we are doing.
It's all about sustainable value creation for general contractors and their subtrades via turnkey solutions, where we provide everything as a service, or we provide, of course, do-it-yourself solutions as well, where we then provide hardware, software, and quality assurance as a service as well. 5D Project Delivery means insights at every step of the process, and ensuring a digital handover into operations, keeping the BIM models alive and updated during construction, and most importantly, indicating critical deviations real time. Let's go to a customer, PERI, a leading manufacturer of scaffolding and 3D printing material for construction, with 2,000 engineers in 70 countries in the world. They wanted to further improve their 3D BIM and collaboration with Open BIM, and the implementation required a seamless transition because the engineers had to work with highest precision and highest performance.
They're using our Hexagon BricsCAD solution, engineering software, and they're developing a PERI, PERI software, PERI CAD software on top of that, all together with us. Clearly, looking ahead, we see a lot of potential to use AI during the design and collaboration process for workflows, as you can see in that video, like Scan-to-BIM or others. That's the future for design and collaboration. Another example would be Mortenson, a general contractor, quite strong in sports facilities, renewable energy in the U.S. During a recent prefabricated project for a hotel, they really drove the use of technology to an extreme because they want to connect all the information to all the different stakeholders on the field and in the office. They applied and deployed multiple Hexagon solutions, such as webcam, visibility, construction progress tracking software, and reality capture solutions.
Looking ahead, technologies which we have, and you'll see something later on, on that as well, such as spatial anchoring, our immersive technology, will provide location-based insights virtually on site, so the industrial metaverse becomes a reality. Another example, the last example, from Urbach, a company working in road construction. On that project, for 38 kilometers of road construction, they wanted to make the magic happen. Increase time, speed, efficiency, productivity, all of these criteria, but at the same time, ensuring safety in the construction, during the construction as well. They benefited from multiple Hexagon solutions, which we had, so 3D for asphalt paving, 3D grading, personal alert for safety, and so on, and cloud-based collaboration platforms, and reality capture as well. And the future there is clearly autonomous and safe construction. That's the path we are going. Let's see, let's look at the summary of Geosystems.
We are a business geared for growth. We have moved over the last decades from instruments to digital solutions. More than 60% of our developers are in software. We have impactful, differentiated, and disruptive innovation. Our doing both approach is deeply anchored in our organization. We have a strong, loyal customer base and strong brands, which provide tangible business value and support recurring revenue creation. Our go-to-market approach is optimized, and customer success teams are in place for the continued expansion of our different business models to serve customers even better in future. For sure, we can do much more, and we can accelerate with our attractive business mix. We can expand in that strong markets which we are in. We can power innovation in the broader Hexagon Group, as you have seen some example, how Geosystems technologies is applied in different groups.
We are leading customers to the future and supporting them and creating network effects within their companies to connect different departments within their companies. With that, we lift business value and increase recurring revenue. For sure, with all the capabilities we have in place, we can realize the full impact of our software platform technologies and capabilities, because we see ample opportunities for integration play in construction and all the other industries which we are serving. You know us by our track record, and you can count on us going forward. Going forward, we will accelerate our transformation to upgrading to a unique powerhouse. We remain ambitious, as we are. We are ambitious team empowering digital realities for all. We are focusing on 5D portfolio and project management.
We are focusing on autonomy and robotics, and we want to achieve the digital continuity in the markets we are serving, in our core markets and beyond, and with that, supporting a sustainable future. All of that supported by our strong teams and our strong Hexagon culture. In summary, we have a granular strategy, and the potential to create tremendous value for both customers and investors is there. Being an innovation powerhouse, supporting shifting expectations in a changing world. Thank you so much. And with that, I would like Maria to come on stage.
Okay. Hi, everyone. I just want to shortly introduce myself. My name is Maria Luthström. I joined Hexagon in 2015. I was recruited by Mattias Stenberg, and I know some of you here today from my days in investor relations, but since 2022, I run the autonomy and positioning division, which is a part of autonomous solutions division today. Okay. So autonomy is solving some of the biggest challenges of modern time. It's a very bold statement, right? But I'm going to explain to you today what Hexagon's autonomous solutions division is doing to solve these challenges. And it's a highly profitable business for us today. So let's start with looking at these big megatrends. The world is going autonomous.
Everything from automotive, mining, agriculture, logistics, everything is going autonomous, and it's going to be the industries where there's a huge amount of labor shortage, which is going to go fastest. Mobility safety regulations is going to become tougher and tougher, and especially when autonomy comes into play. The demand for natural resources, like minerals and agriculture, is going to continue to grow, especially when there's more electrification and the population growth. Also, you need to produce more on the same amount of land or even less amount of land with less erosion. Currently, our division, or in 2022, our division had a revenue of closer to EUR 500 million. A strong growth, double-digit growth of 13% on average in the past five years and 33% EBIT margin.
We're addressing a TAM of $13 billion today, but that's projected to grow by 11% on average in the coming years to $20 billion. And with our technology, we're perfectly positioned to capture these megatrends and the TAM. So what are the customer problems that we're solving today, that our division is solving? Well, first of all, everything autonomous, you need to know where it is and what's around it. We do this with high accuracy positioning technology, down to centimeter level, and perception technology. These are core capabilities in the autonomy and positioning division today. You also need to make sure you operate safely with technology like collision avoidance, fatigue monitoring, also perception, and remote control operations. And you need to optimize your operations by orchestrating and monetize your fleets and assets, and this we do with enterprise software.
These technologies are core capabilities in the mining division today. We do this in many different industries, but the biggest ones is mining, agriculture, aerospace and defense, automotive, and marine. All of these technologies are subsets of autonomy. It's semi-autonomy and automation. This is a mature technology today, and it's highly profitable. But if you put all of these technologies together, you will create a full autonomous solution. This is a horizontal technology, meaning that you can apply to many different verticals, and this is the reason why the autonomy and positioning division and the mining division came together to create one division, the autonomous solutions. I'm going to highlight two growth industries where a big focus is autonomy. It's mining and agriculture.
So in mining, we started by solving one customer problem some 15 years ago, and the strategy has been to verticalize this industry, meaning that we have added on adjacent technologies to solve more and more problems in the mining ecosystem or in the mining life cycle. There's been a consolidation in the mining tech industry, and today we have become the market leader in mining tech for planning, safety, and operations. Some 10 years ago or 15 years ago, we had EUR 10 million in revenue, and today it's closer to EUR 300 million. Our solutions are used in over 1,000 mines, and over 50,000 mining vehicles are using our safety solutions. So what's the strategy going forward? Well, we heard Paolo talking about immersive data and activation.
The data analytics spend in the mining industry is projected to double in the coming years, and by going from point solutions to integrated customer workflows, you can connect the mine with our cloud-based platform and use data analytics to optimize your mine safety. Well, I said that we are the market leader in mining safety, but it's still an underserved market. Still today, the market penetration is only about 15%. And with stricter safety regulations coming in place, this is a big opportunity for us to continue growing in this industry. Autonomy. Autonomy is going to be the next big wave in mining. It's going to outgrow any other mining tech. We're already delivering autonomy technology that solves the semi-autonomous or automation, like remote control or collision avoidance and vehicle intervention. But we're also creating full autonomous sites from pit to port.
I'm going to talk to you just in a bit about a customer case where this is actually becoming a reality. Another industry, which is very similar to the mining industry when it comes to the customer workflow, is agriculture. Today, we are the market leader in supplying OEMs with precision ag technology, solving positioning. Similar to the mining industry, we started by solving one problem in this industry, and recently we have added on adjacent technologies like machine control solution and software for planning and optimization of your operations. The growth strategy going forward in agriculture is to continue expanding the portfolio and continuing to verticalize. We want to focus on autonomy to solve more of these customer problems. As many other industries, agriculture is facing a huge labor shortage.
It's estimated that there's a yearly financial loss of $300 million due to the shortage just in the U.S. Autonomy, just like mining, is going to be the next big wave. We are investing in perception technology for autonomy, which is used in to increase safety with our object detection and object classification algorithms. But we're also going to use perception to for agronomy applications, to develop new applications in agronomy. We're also going to grow with a broader customer base, OEMs, integrators, but there's also a new market of autonomy-first robotics, which is exponentially growing, and that's going to continue to grow a lot in the coming years. An enabler to grow with these new customers is to introduce a new business model with positioning as a service.
If we introduce positioning as a service, we're going to bring precision ag to the masses by expanding the technology to the mid-range greenfield market, so the lower horsepower market. Today, we're mostly addressing the high-end market, which is the high horsepower market. The adoption rate of precision ag today is only about 15%. So by bringing this to the masses, we're going to open up a whole new market for us. So what happens when you put all of these technologies together and create the full autonomous solution? Well, you remove the driver from the cab, or you remove the cab altogether, but that's really unlocking the true value of autonomy. For years, we have been delivering more full autonomous vehicles to the research industry than any other company in the world.
But research is now turning to full development or full production. You always talk about these industries that are dirty, dull, and dangerous, and it's usually these industries where there's a clear return on investment, which is going to go faster in this... in full autonomy. So take Western Australia, for example, where the mining industry is really struggling with labor shortage. To operate one truck for 24 hours, 365 days per year, it takes on average four drivers, and every driver costs on average EUR 1 million. So there's clearly a lot of cost to cut if you cut the driver out from the equation. I'm going to show you a customer story where this is becoming a reality today.
MinRes is developing the first mine-to-ship dust-free iron ore project in Australia. The Onslow Iron Project will be one of the biggest iron ore projects under development in Australia and will unlock billions of tons of stranded iron ore from the West Pilbara. In a world first, autonomous jumbo road trains will transport the ore via a dedicated haulage road to the port of Ashburton. This will be the shortest pit-to-port project, with road trains traveling just 150 km from mine site to port. Road trains will deposit the ore onto a conveyor belt, running to a fully enclosed storage shed.... MinRes plans to transition up to 170 road trains from diesel to electric. This will displace around 44 million liters of diesel each year and reduce carbon emissions by approximately 120,000 tons per year.
Okay, impressive, right? Okay, so we have partnered with Mineral Resources to build the world's first and fully autonomous road train system in Western Australia. We're going to transport iron ore from the processing site to port, and we're equipping 120 trucks with by-wire systems, collision avoidance, perception, and also software for planning and orchestration of the full autonomous site. So it's a combination of sensors, software, and services with a recurring revenue profile of 60%. But there's really no difference in transporting iron ore than it is to transport grain in agriculture. So this technology, as I said before, is horizontal. We're going to apply it to many different verticals where it makes sense and where there's a clear return on investment. Okay, so to summarize all of this, in 2022, we were closer to EUR 500 million in revenue.
We're growing fast, double digits, 13% on average in the past five years, with a strong EBIT margin. With our strategy around autonomy, safety, positioning as a service, data analytics, we're going to continue to grow, and we're going to continue to grow subscriptions and recurring revenue. This is just the beginning, right? We're super excited about the future and all of the opportunities that we have in front of us. The world is going autonomous, and we're perfectly positioned to capture these trends in the new economy. With that, I would like to thank you all and welcome Steve, Steven, to the stage.
So, I came to Hexagon through the Intergraph acquisition back in 2010, and I've been with SIG for most of that period. You can see that our products touch about one in eight people globally, and that's through our public safety, as well as, as our infrastructure products, energy and spatial. You can see the markets that we serve, and ultimately, our technologies support national security, safety in our communities, and the resilience and sustainability of critical infrastructure. I'd like to take a minute and at least talk briefly about our products and our solutions, and it'll play into some of the examples that I give later on. So the first is our Hexagon OnCall portfolio. It's an industry-leading, cloud-native public safety, computer-aided dispatch.
When you call 911, our software runs the 911 center, also in the asset deployment of the police car, the fire truck, or the ambulance. We then have further solutions that handle the records. If you happen to be arrested, all of the record that's generated behind that is all of Hexagon software. The second product is a video management product that we bought via the acquisition earlier this year of Qognify, and this is used in. It can be used in retail settings, ports, campuses. It's really been a nice adjacency for us, and I'm going to talk a little about that. Hexagon Networks is another GIS cloud-enabled product that is used in gas, electricity, and water for asset design.
Then the last two products are Luciad and Map Enterprise, and those are geospatial products that are taking almost real-time map data and creating operational pictures. The two biggest customers, and where that is sold the most, is in national security. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in the U.S. and NATO are the two larger customers in that setting. So I'm going to start over on the right, and let's talk about the growth strategy and what are we doing to really energize SIG. So the first thing is to leverage this recently released OnCall platform. We made a significant R&D investment in it. I believe it's a industry-leading platform.
We've got good momentum, and backlog that's growing, and we want to not only sell our products, not only across our, our internal verticals, but also across all of the Hexagon verticals as well, as well as bring some of their products this direction, EAM's Mobile Workforce Management. You can see the connection with the mobile workforce that happens in utilities, in our division as well. Bolt-on M&A, obviously filling gaps, in our product offering. The Qognify was moving into an adjacency, different lanes and different agency, software opportunities that we're looking at. And then lastly, really building out, and capitalizing on our cloud, enablement and adding to our recurring revenue. You can see that sales by region, that the Americas represent 63% and EMEA at 29%. So predominantly, in Americas and EMEA.
Then if you move to the next chart, the 39 and the 15 represent public safety and security, as well as infrastructure. Those are very sticky businesses. Most of those, customers have been customers for more than a decade, and when you have one, they generally are retained for that long. Maintenance is almost always taken just because of the criticality of that infrastructure and the uptime, so it does drive some recurring revenue. The 30% in geospatial, a large portion of that, is with the U.S. federal government, as well as other, defense agencies around the globe. I'll move to the right and talk about the 23%, EBIT margins and some of the things we're doing to address it.
By doing that, I want to talk about the 17% wedge, which is a quite significant portion of our business, and that is comprised of unrelated services businesses that have been a part of this business for decades. It is where the divestiture that was announced in Q3 took place. We're also defocusing on some of the low-margin defense business, services-only business that we've talked about at some of the quarters along the way. So that's where those businesses are, and we are actively working to defocus on that and focus on driving software content. So what does the macro look like? The macro is actually quite good, with about an 8% addressable market growth. And what's driving that? Well, in both public safety and infrastructure, public safety agencies are threatened every day now by cyber.
New Orleans was recently completely locked down due to a cyberattack, and so pushing into the cloud to really push that risk out of their IT staffs into the cloud is driving some migration to the cloud. Additionally, renewals and renewable energy is obviously driving the infrastructure macro. Climate change and additional hurricanes and natural disasters are making cities and municipalities really drive toward updating their technology stack to make sure they're taking advantage of all the citizen apps and all the information that's available. And then lastly, terror. Acts of terror, active shooters, all of that, really making cities invest in their infrastructure to stay current. How does SIG go to market? You can see we talked about that it's primarily a, an Americas and an EMEA business.
It is inverted because of the number of customers in public safety in the U.S. versus the number of utilities, and geospatial customers in EMEA. 8,000 customers globally, so it's spread out, you know, pretty wide. Really, no customer has any significant concentration across the board. But we do have presence in Latin America, as well as Asia as well. Very little in China at the moment. So I wanna talk about a couple of ways that we're enabling our growth strategy. The first one is in cities where we are having multiple agencies within a city come onto Hexagon platforms. We've had this in Toronto as well as Munich, but I wanna talk about Miami today and some of the products. Granted, some of these came from acquisitions.
You can see public safety with, with the OnCall suite, the Qognify suite, as well as, ALI's EAM. And so, first of all, the video management solution of Qognify is up and running. This is gonna ultimately be about a EUR 25 million deployment. Most of it's done. There are some pieces that are still underway, and that includes the, the install and the first-year maintenance. The University of Miami is a Qognify, so they have the video management around the perimeter for security, an adjacency that we're moving into with our OnCall, and I'll talk about that in a minute. The Miami Airport has both Qognify and EAM for mobile workforce management on the ground at the airport, as well as the security, the doors, the cameras, all of that in Miami.
The Port of Miami, obviously another place that security is very important with the camera physical incident management system of Qognify's. And then, ultimately, we've put it all together, and all three exist in Miami-Dade County. This supports 2.7 million people. They have our full OnCall suite in the cloud, obviously the EAM product, as well as the Qognify product. And then recently, in public safety, we picked up the fire and EMS. That's an active and ongoing implementation. And so two things happen here, right? Number one, each of these relationships open the door for additional Hexagon people to come in and sell. So do we have one person that sells it all?
No, but we have relationships that I can get an appointment and get a meeting with somebody that's a decision-maker to continue it. And then, here in the lobby, we have Hexagon Connect, and Hexagon Connect is our form of having one pane of glass for a city to ultimately see. It's a fully multi-tenant cloud solution that you can subscribe to. We have fire and EMS on it now, or will be on it. And it's a subscription, so each of these agencies can put their data up and then see what's going on across that platform. Think about a hurricane in Miami. It would affect all of these, some large inauguration, something, an active shooter that's moving through the city. Having access to that information really enables decision-makers and first responders to react in a very efficient manner.
So the next one is also a cross-selling, except this is geospatial and infrastructure. There's almost 10,000 km of rail in Czech Republic. This was about an EUR 11 million opportunity. We're continuing to implement this today, and we're taking our enterprise asset management, it's a GIS-enabled asset management product, and then we've overlaid it with the Luciad map layers, and so you can see all the assets as well as the map data for vegetation coverage, change in what's going on, but really a full suite for Czech Rail. Again, the first time we've been able to marry those two together and bring a reference customer forward.
So one of the ways that we're working to better margins is to take OnCall and move outside of public safety, working around government funding, budget restraints, tax dollars, and moving outside of that lane, and we've done that, with BMW. And so we've taken Hexagon OnCall, we partnered with a security company, and we now have installed on a large industrial campus, our OnCall suite. And we've now done this, at five, or will be doing it at five BMW campuses around the globe, and we hope to expand this to have more than 30 total. So another way to cross-sell and really move outside of the public safety lane. So our products, our customers don't compete with each other, so one city does not compete with another city, and so they share a lot of information. Referability becomes paramount for us.
Resiliency of our platform also becomes paramount. Recently, late in 2022, we went live in Lee County, Florida, which is Fort Myers, Florida, and there's about 1.2 million people there. We happened to go live eight days before Hurricane Ian hit. We put people on site. They lived in the, in the comms center there, both before, during, and after. The product was resilient and stayed up, and they ultimately became a very valued reference for us and were directly responsible for us winning Alpharetta, which is a place just outside of Atlanta, and it's really helped with our reference selling of our OnCall platform. So talking about driving OnCall's backlog, and really, where is it going and how does it help SIG grow? So you see, these are all booked business that we have between 20 and 25...
2020 and 2025, and all of these are additional bookings that we have and will be going live, one including London Met Police, and so we're actively in an installation there. And so you can see the number of backlog and the number of opportunities of all booked business, and so we're really gaining momentum and really driving some maturity into this product. So real quick, to summarize, for SIG and where are we going and how are we growing. Look, we're completing the divestiture and some of the defocus of some of our low-margin business, coupled with the gaining maturity of OnCall, and you can see some of the momentum with the backlog there.
Our new infrastructure cloud offering in the utility space, and then an 8% total addressable market growth, I think, really sets the stage for SIG to move forward with growth going forward. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over. I think we're gonna have a short video, and then I'm gonna turn it over to Burkhard. Thank you.
Here in Switzerland, Heerbrugg, there are about 400 R&D engineers. Additionally, there are about 150 product management professionals. They are representing the customer during the innovation phase. What makes this location unique is its ability to not only develop the world-renowned, long-lasting hardware, but at the same time, hand in hand, the associated software which goes with it. Not as hardware, not as software, but as impactful and powerful solutions for our customers.
Hongdao Intelligent Parks covers an area of 140,000 m² . I'm now at the inquiring center of Hongdao Industrial Park, which is our window to serve customers and partners. With these solutions, we aim to strengthen our relationships with customers along with the changing market.
Our primary focus in public safety is harnessing technology to elevate safety measures, optimize infrastructure operations, and create sustainable solutions for ever-evolving needs of our public safety clients. What I'm excited about is the innovation ecosystem at Hexagon, where, particularly I'm involved, is a fellowship research initiative from our division, where cross-functional teams come together, brainstorm the ideas, implement, and add the strategic ideas into the product offerings.
This downtown building has grown so much over the last years. We now have 200 employees, and we house many services for our clients. Here on the fifth floor, as you can see behind me, we have the Experience Center. We designed this to be able to show our customers and potential customers and our community how our technology works, and how we can bring it all together in one place.
Understanding our users' needs is how my team brings innovation into our products, and our division's usability lab, located at the Huntsville, Alabama, campus, is a big part of this. This lab enables us to conduct research that drives user interfaces, that not only help us address the current challenges our customers face, but also help us to anticipate their future needs, keeping us on the cutting edge of our industries.
Welcome. My name is Burkhard Boeckem , and I'm the Chief Technology Officer of Hexagon. Today, I want to show you three things. I'm going to discuss Hexagon's R&D strategy, and I'm going to talk about our ability to efficiently innovate from ideas to products. And I'm going to show you examples of our technology leadership and how it creates business impact. Innovation is our past, our present, and certainly our future. We have an unmatched combination of sensors, software, and platforms, and we create products and solution that achieve a significant impact in any ecosystem, in any industry where we play. And we believe in a reality that is enhanced with insights and improved by actionable information. We heard today from Paolo, unlocking human potential, and that is our purpose, driven by customer demand and delivered beyond expectations.
You heard Thomas talking today about differentiated and disruptive innovation, and understanding the customer's demand, and delivering the right product, and going beyond. How do we do this? We call it HIP, Hexagon Innovation Process. Every single project is treated like a business, some like a startup, and every R&D investment follows a strict business plan. The HIP framework is aligned to a stage gate process. In between the milestones, agile methods are deployed, and this is how we drive efficiency throughout the process. It is our R&D and the related functions that empowers Hexagon's innovation. Let us take a closer look on what we mean with powered by innovation. Globally diversified teams of highly skilled individuals. We have almost 6,800 team members in R&D and related disciplines, distributed over all five continents.
We have R&Ds embedded in our divisions and a central innovation hub that serves the group. This approach places us directly in the domain where we operate, speaking the language of the customer and the industry, paired with an incredible talent pool. We prefer smaller, agile teams and innovative hub over large, centralized corporate structures. If you look at our R&D skill set, and Paolo was already talking about this, 76% of Hexagon's engineers are actually software engineers, followed by 11% QA engineers, 9% hardware engineers, and 4% of project managers. David and Paolo were talking about is our gross R&D cost 2023 year to date amounts to EUR 610 million, which is a 15% of sales.
And this 15% of sales reflects that we are in a key phase in our innovation cycle, and that includes investments in platforms such as Nexus, HXDR, and Autonomy. Transition to new SaaS-optimized architectures, you've heard a lot of times, such as multi-tenancy and exciting next-generation products. We also strategically categorize our projects by type. More than 50% are innovation projects, which include a large number of industry firsts. If a product goes into a new generation with added features, functionality, new UX. Then we speak of improvement projects, which are around 27% in the current portfolio. Having innovation and improvement project in this magnitude shows the unmapped innovation power of Hexagon. And this is followed by 12% lifecycle projects for the group. Here we maintain market relevance throughout the lifecycle, adding features incrementally and refining the user experience.
The other category are visibility projects, technology scouting, but also core module developments. We are holding more than 5,500 patents, which gives us a significant competitive advantage. In this year alone, we filed more than 59 new significant patent applications. We have released 432 major products in 2023 as a result of the strategy. We are proud of our philosophy of doing both, and you heard Thomas talking about it, and we are proud that our technology leadership is recognized through industry accolades and commercial success. Earlier today, Paolo illustrated how Hexagon drives customer value by leveraging 3D reality data. We underpin this value, this value creation with our core competencies, with precision technology. It's reality capture, measurement, scanning, positioning, modeling the physical world at any scale. All our sensors play here in all our devices-related workflows.
And reality creation, design and simulation capabilities in our software portfolio, paired with a strategy to enrich the data and to use AI to unlock actionable insights. And reality immersion, making information accessible to everyone, being able to share and collaborate on data in real time, creating an immersive user experience by visualization, and you heard Thomas talking about spatial computing. And reality activation, delivering tools, integration, and services that empower the customer to make real-world impact, predictive maintenance and feedback loop, see processes and transfer designs into reality. Let's take a closer look on how this creates business impact. Each action of our strategy has a clear business focus. Cloud-native platform with a data strategy and AI combined create a higher degree of revenue, increase recurring revenue. Visualization and collaboration technologies expand the reach of 3D data.
Next-generation devices and full ecosystems lead to continued gross margin percentage accretion. A robotics-enabled portfolio drives customer ROI for commercial impacts. Very important, assembling the best R&D talents leads to best-in-class portfolio and commercial wins. You will hear in a special section, partnerships provide access to scaling innovation technologies, while Hexagon focus on its core developments and owning the TAM. We diversify our project roadmap for the most efficient use of our R&D resources, and we think thereby in three categories: strengthen our technology leadership position and maintain our loyal relationship with our long-term customers, and this includes updates, improvements, and refactoring and face lifting on products, so they remain viable to the market then. Growth. Investing in growth includes the evolution of software by developing new features and making it deployable on different platforms. Simply put, transform.
It transforms the market or the industry by technologies disruption, where none of our competitors or even startups can follow. We invest about 35% of our R&D spend into the strengthen category across the group. For the growth category, we invest around 50%, and for the transform category, it's currently around 15% of the portfolio, and especially in the last five years, we had an amazing track record here. Let's have a look on the development roadmap on the product releases for the last three years. The number of releases clearly indicates the innovation pace we're on. And as an example, out of many, we see ALI's Smart 3D in the strengthen category, an improved version of our next-generation collision avoidance.
Picked one release out of many SDx update releases here, our public safety platform OnCall, and our metrology arm, RA8, in the version three in the growth category... and the BLK360, the second generation Reality Cloud Studio, powered by HXDR, as examples in the transform category. All products releases have been strategically positioned to achieve maximum impact in the market. Let's have a closer look towards the strengthen category if we look into the divisions, and the percentage number indicates what is the invest of the R&D portfolio for the division in this strengthen category. We see that different divisions serving the various industries have slightly different dynamics. The technologies in the strengthen categories are clear and established market winners. They are delivering consistency in revenue for Hexagon and serve the needs for our customers, and that is proven.
Our customers who are working with these technologies depend on the consistent value and continued development that we deliver. Being very close to these customers with continued R&D investments and value added through our portfolio, we here protect our market share and our market relevance. Coming to our growth category in the R&D roadmap portfolio, these investments are paired with innovation that grows significantly our market share or grow the market at all. Let us focus now on two examples, one from ALI and one from our autonomous solution division. Let's start with ALI, and Mattias was talking already about SDx, our smart digital twin solution, and SDx, to summarize, this creates a reliable digital twin, fully compliant and connected to project work processes.
Diving a little deeper in the technology, as engineering works on the updated design, especially 3D, the data and documents are being shared in near real time to what we call the digital backbone, and this happens that various enablers in the digital backbone begin their work in checking for consistency, consolidating data for each project, get the documents into formats for fast viewing, and provide updates to other systems, for example, project control on progress. Another example in the growth category comes from Autonomous Solutions division, and Maria was already talking about it. It's 120 trucks orchestrated to operate in the most efficient way possible, from loading ore at the extraction site to unloading at the port.
Looking at the technology, we are leading the breakthrough to autonomous haulage at scale in the mining industry to increase safety of life, solve labor shortages, increase operational efficiency, and reduce fuel consumption. So autonomous road trains enable efficient operation in extremely remote areas where, of course, labor shortages are a very real challenge. They increase safety by instrumenting these massive trucks with advanced perception sensors, drive-by-wire technologies, position technologies, radar technologies, imaging technologies, vehicle intervention technologies, and of course, positioning technologies paired with our correction services. And with central orchestration of all machines on site, operations flow smoothly without unnecessary waiting or bottlenecks, and we think that 120 trucks is just the beginning. It's a world first, as you can clearly see, and it's the first of many.
Talking once more about R&D efficiency, if you want to innovate and release products in fast pace, as we do, you have to build on common shared modules and platform components. The depiction shows the number of core modules we base our products on. By developing hardware and software synchronous, we can always decide what gets deployed at the edge or what gets deployed in the cloud, and this is a huge competitive advantage. For us, building on the foundation of shared modules and platform components look very similar if you're talking hardware. For a laser tracker, a metrology arm, a 3D DISTO, a laser scanner, a BLK product, or a total station, starting from a modular framework, fast tracks go to market and allows development to focus on the core market differentiator that these products will bring.
For example, let's dive into a total station, and now we break the sensor apart, and you see various components in there. Let's pick one, and David already talked about it. Let's focus on Hexagon's encoder platform, an absolute encoder with sub-second angular accuracy. What does it mean? Think of measuring the width of one hair in a distance of one kilometer. Our encoder is the most advanced in the industry, by far, I would say. And it's proprietary, available only to us, only to our sensors, where we build it in. It's fully IP protected, and as David was saying, an investment of EUR 5 million led to a device that is up to 10 x less expensive to make than to buy. And close to 85,000 encoders are produced every year.
To lead the transformation of future-proofing Hexagon's technology stack and serve our division, which is very important, we serve our divisions with the most relevant technologies, we set up in 2015, our Hexagon's Innovation Hub. Within the innovation hub, we strive to lead the industry in terms of sensors, robotics, visual computing, software, native cloud technologies, AI, UI/UX, and industrial design. And this is all paired with the domain expertise of the divisions to develop world-class products to create their business impact. Let us proceed to the transform category. An example that we heard a few times this afternoon is to transform the market by technology disruptions, as we did with the BLK series.
It started in 2016 with the original BLK360, and for us, this kicked off an innovation sprint that saw these releases of the new BLKs coming out every year, and we will continue to do so. Each BLK technology applies our mastery of photonics, mechanical precision, and simplicity in all aspects of the design, and it's also built on the aforementioned shared modules. In fact, it has two of these miniaturized angular encoders in there that I was mentioning before. It's very miniaturized in every component in a very all-inclusive way. Let's talk about the business impact. The first BLK360 changed the industry as we knew it, and Thomas was speaking about this, and today, the BLK series has a globally distributed installed base.
You see on the map the blue dots, and it's serving 50+% of customers that are brand new to Hexagon and delivering a 75% gross profit. So BLK data is creating value for customers from reality capture that was once only available to experts. Talking about R&D efficiency in the context of software, the same modularity as in the encoder example applies as well. Building on the foundation of shared modules, microservices, and platform components increase the speed and efficiency, how we develop. And currently, all Hexagon software platforms are developed with this technology. This is the method of platform engineering. Hexagon continues to develop industry-transforming software platform, as some examples are shown on this slide, and all our platform allow us to rapidly innovate and deploy valuable new functionality to our customers.
Let us take a closer look at Nexus, and Josh already talked a bit about it. It brings together teams from every discipline. It's about collaboration, it's about connectivity. It's an open platform to connect manufacturing, technologies, and digitalization, data-driven insights to improve operations and quality. The platform streamlines developments. It allows for a design adaptation and simulation. It ensures quality production. It eliminates any issues with data handling, which is, in fact, a big issue in the manufacturing world, and Nexus provides unprecedented collaboration tools for all our manufacturing customers. We developed HXDR with the vision to process, fuse, and share digital reality data at any scale. HXDR can be described with three things: collaboration and visualization, paired with user management that gives you access and privacy, cloud storage for very big data, and automated processing for insight creation.
And we connect existing Hexagon products to the cloud, and we use there HXDR for, and it's in completely new applications that are powered by HXDR, as we call them. We can visualize, as you see, entire cities, environmental simulations, build custom industry solution, connect people to digital twins. You heard me probably talking in our Hexagon Live in June 2023, when we launched few applications. Since then, we have doubled the number of applications available on the platform. So we have apps for data purchasing and licensing. It's mostly geospatial content data. We have apps for smart cities, for immersive visualization. We're talking spatial computing here, and we have apps created by our customers. Focal to our platform strategy is the flow and accessibility of data.
It's from software to software, it's from sensors to software, and from ecosystems to ecosystems, and this is why we have partnered with other leading technology companies. These partnerships allows us to leverage our technologies in expanded markets and user groups.
Microsoft and Hexagon are shaping the future of industries, defining new ways to collaborate, and unlocking the true potential of emerging technologies to deliver value at scale for our customers. One example is combining capabilities to build digital twins more rapidly. Hexagon will bring their Nexus platform for smart manufacturing on Azure.
HXDR will allow customers to combine previously stovepipe data and stovepipe expertise to build highly advanced digital twins that always reflect the actual state of the physical system. It'll also allow us to experiment faster and with much less risk, and to test and fix failures and user experiences before modifying the physical systems.
Our team is constantly looking for and integrating the latest imaging technologies to help bridge the gap between the real world and the virtual world. We use a lot of VR and AR headsets, and also Leica's BLK360 laser scanner, which allows us to literally bridge that gap.
We co-developed with Hexagon team for BLK2GO PULSE. It enable the scanner to capture the depth data with spot precision. The partnership with Hexagon is working very well for us, and it bring us new vision on how our sensors can be utilized in wide variety of Hexagon products.
I am so excited to see Hexagon connect to Omniverse. Our ecosystem benefits from Hexagon's digital reality expertise, geospatial reality capture, sensors, software, and autonomous technologies, so our customers can build, simulate, operate, and optimize these virtual worlds faster, more accurately, and easier than ever.
Coming down a little closer to the NVIDIA examples. With our NVIDIA partnership, we combine three platforms to create an interconnected industrial metaverse. It's HXDR's Nexus and NVIDIA's Omniverse. And the flow of data across the platform is strengthened by open data formats like USD, Universal Scene Description, and we're in the consortium together with NVIDIA, Adobe, and others to define this format. And our industrial metaverse technologies are complementary, as you heard, for example, Jensen talking about, and they offer an end-to-end toolset for customers for planning and retrofitting industrial plants. And this is a real example that we did jointly together with NVIDIA. We created a digital twin and used it to simulate and optimize the manufacturing process.
Hexagon's portfolio of sensors, software, and platforms is ideally suited to realize the potential of industrial metaverse, and this is where multiple digital reality technologies really converge. Talking about AI, and we are building AI. And we have done, in fact, quite early on, so. We began investing into AI as early as 2012 with our first projects, and I remember them well. We started 2014 with productizing machine learning applications, and when deep learning emerged as a new technologies, we developed classifiers for identifying objects in terabytes of 3D point clouds.
Our initial experience with generative AI started in 2018, and as we all know, 2022 marked the breakthrough, but also marked a breakthrough for us, and we were happy that we are invested that early on this, in order to capitalize on our investments. We have already incorporated our AI capabilities into multiple products that are active on the market today, and we are working now on strong acceleration with our partners, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and AWS. We use generative AI for Copilots and products across several industries, and internally for operational efficiency. Furthermore, we leverage generative AI to enhance our trainings for deep learning networks for scenes and scans, and we keep pushing the boundaries on domain-specific AI for devices and sensors.
Coming back to the strong partnerships, where do we use the partners? For Microsoft, for example, supports us in regards of large language models, for the productization, for document management, for the processing industry. NVIDIA supports us to fuel our deep learning models with long-tailed scenes. And we train our AI assistive devices, which is very, very unique to us, with the help of stable diffusion by AWS, and photorealistic scenes in Omniverse, as you can see in the middle, for an autonomous solution, autonomous project.
... We've been talking about reality capture, reality creation, reality immersion, and reality activation. Let's talk about a tight integration of all those competencies in one embodiment. Let's talk about robotics. We turned theodolites and total stations quite early on into robotic total stations, and we made laser trackers precisely orchestrate industrial robots, and we created automation cell using robotic scanning technology, and made reality capture, as you can see here, autonomous. So Hexagon has always been on the forefront of robotic systems. Today, I've shown you three things: how our R&D strategy creates R&D efficiency and serves our customers, how we innovate from ideas to products with a focus on platform convergence, and third, on how technology leadership allows us to rapidly deploy emerging technologies. Thank you very much.
Hello, everyone. I'm Hongquan Li, in charge of Hexagon Greater China. I work for Hexagon since year 2000, now is 23 years. I start my job, the industry metrology, since 1990, now is 33 years. Actually, Hexagon Chinese management team have been working for Hexagon more than 20 years. I'm very proud we had a very loyal team in Hexagon China. We had one slogan in China called One Person, One Life, One Career. In Hexagon China, we are focused on industry workflow solutions. This is our smart empower center. In fact, Hexagon Smart Park was built by Hexagon in-house technology, we call Smart Building Technology. So this factory is the biggest manufacturing for HMI around the world. With Hexagon's smart manufacturing solutions, we are target on the lighthouse factory nearby in the future. As a plant, we will organize the investor meeting in Qingdao next year.
Looking forward to see all of you in Hexagon Smart Park in March 2024.
Thank you very much for and congratulations for the resilience and the throughout the day and throughout, I don't know, many hundreds of slides. But I think this is a phenomenal opportunity. For those of you that can head to China in the first period of March, this will be illuminating. Not only because of the facility that we just have witnessed, it's one of those places in which the soul of Hexagon comes alive, right? We've talked about the capture, the creation, the immersion, and the activation. In China, those teams have practiced going to market that way, and to see all of those solutions in the same area, really opens everybody's eyes in front of the capabilities of the group.
But also we would like, during that week, for investors to have direct access to our customer base. So in between Qingdao, between Shanghai and then Shenzhen, there's gonna be an opportunity to visit fantastic customers in e-mobility, fantastic customers in consumer electronics, and companies that are really changing the world. So I think it will be very stimulating above and beyond what you're gonna hear and see from from Hexagon. So in closing, I wanna share a couple of concluding thoughts with you, maybe more of a reminder in terms of what we have discussed throughout the day.
Very important, we wanted to, basically, to lower the threshold in terms of understanding the group and the drivers and the financial metrics, and how you can not only model the reality of Hexagon and the future of Hexagon, but truly understand: how do we compete in the world? How do we try and grow? How do we try and improve our financial profile? And I think that by the end of today, I hope we have accomplished the mission for you to get a little bit more under the skin of what we do, and because I believe we have phenomenal plans across the divisions to really drive towards the 2026 and Vision 2030. We've talked about the value creation model. We have talked about capturing the data, gluing software to the data to extract the full potential of that data.
The handshake between the hardware and the software, for us to go and keep on becoming that modern company that lives by full fusion between the physical and the digital, it's super important for us. The more we're gonna win on that strategy, the more we're gonna be able to lift and create value on both of those portfolios. Immersion truly is about building usage and making sure that that 3D data travels inside those organizations. A lot of the logos that we have seen this morning are very large organizations operating across several continents, with tens of thousands of engineers, consuming a lot of technology from a lot of vendors, right? So if we want to move the needle and create these realities in a digital space and have that 3D data fully being utilized, we need to adopt cloud.
We need to use the full potential of AI. We need to visualize better than anybody else. We need to make sure that that data is consumed, and then live by return on investment, and make sure that the organization become as proficient as possible in developing those return on investment cases, because that is gonna lift the value of the entirety of the portfolio. At the end of the day, a lot of what we do, right, is not about hardware, it's not about software, but it's about people. It's about energy levels, it's about skills, it's about desire to win, right? It's about how we build the right chemistry by being an organization that has grown through acquisitions and through a relatively short period of time, right? So we've built this business and always been incredibly enlightened in having this vision constantly in mind.
But we've built this business over 20 years, through a lot of acquisitions, integration with high expectations in terms of growth, changing and being in a constant stage of evolution, right? So how do you think about culture in a group that is so diversified and so global? I love to see three elements and drive three elements, and think about three, three dimensions that are considered to be exceptionally important. We want to have the culture of the place that we do business in. We don't want to have one culture within Hexagon, right? Nobody wants that. We want to have an organization that is heterogeneous, an organization that is powerful, right, that leverages the value of the various teams that we are in, right? But we wanna have a couple of key common threads across these teams and organizations.
I like to call them empowering, entrepreneurial, and diverse, right? And pardon me if, with my broken English, that's not the best definition for it. What do I mean with empowering? A lot of, a lot of you, especially those that are, more related to the Swedish investment communities, know Hexagon for being decentralized, right? And that truly is the case, but I find that an organization can be very decentralized without being empowering, right? Empowering means you take that one level further. Yeah? For me, empowering means making sure you fully entrust people, that you select this team and you fully entrust people, giving the clarity of the objective, right? And then creating an environment of full accountability that releases the potential of people, right? Empowerment also means speed.
At the end of the day, the technologies that we've talked about today are all in a fast-moving phase, right? There's so much that we need to go and master, and very often we are in a speed race more than anything else. So you wanna have an organization that is vibrant. You wanna have an organization in which decisions can be made as close as possible to market and to technology. Entrepreneurial, I spent a fair amount of my career in Hexagon doing acquisitions myself, right? And as you know, we have, by now, almost a statistically relevant sample of small and mid-sized companies that have been acquired by Hexagon through the years, and entrepreneurs that have remained within the organization. So we know a thing or two about being entrepreneurial, right?
If I think about the individuals and the entrepreneurs that I've met in my careers and those that I've met in my career with Hexagon, a lot of those have these three characteristics in common: people that are highly open, very transparent, very open for change, very open to ask questions, listen, take on board the feedback and change. People that are absolutely market-centric. People that are absolutely laser-focused on the market opportunity. And the more we can live by it across the organization, it doesn't matter in which function you are in Hexagon, it doesn't matter what your role is, right? You need to know exactly why we win and what is the value that we create for customers for that win to come. And then there's an ambitious level.
There's an ambitious level that we have, I believe, that we need to nurture, right? And that very, very often entrepreneurs have, and that ambition level is within the organization. We think that there's an untapped potential in Hexagon that we're gonna be able to release over time, that we want to live by in each of the teams that we facilitate. And then it's about diversity, and as Eva said, we can do more to build an environment that is, from an ethnic perspective, from a gender perspective, as diverse as possible. But diversity of thought is something that we have nurtured pretty well in the organization over the years. If you think about what Burkhard has talked about, there's so much technology that we need to go and master. There's such a diversity of skills and experiences that we need to nurture and bring together.
The diversity from an industrial perspective, the verticals that we do business with, the lessons that you learn in industries that are at very different rates of digitization from each other, is a treasure that sits within the group. And then last but not least, diversity in terms of market exposure, right? You want to localize your business, you want to be able to have a very bilateral conversations with your markets. A lot of this as well, has got to do with communication and transparency. And communication and transparency is a lot of what we have talked about today, also, when it comes to constantly upgrading and improving our governance at all levels in the organization, so that we can go and become best in class in everything that we do.
We've talked about new reporting segments, we've talked about disclosures, aligning the incentives, but of course, you've also learned in the last couple of weeks that our board is becoming wider, and that we have the privilege of bringing on board come next year two more independent board members that are gonna bring even more incredible experience that all the leadership team, including myself, can tap into. And that, of course, will come as well with new leadership for the audit committee. In conclusion, what is the opportunity ahead? What we have. What have we observed today? We have an incredible foundation to build on. That foundation is the track record of the Hexagon Group.
9 percentage points of CAGR over 10 years, 65 percentage points of gross margin, more than 80 acquisitions, and the capability of doing more, and the capability of integrating with the right level of common sense in between adding value and keeping the identity and the vibrancy of those cultures. In terms of market, we play in a vast market. We play in a market landscape that is, that is vast, that offers opportunity, that is growing strongly, and that is supported by macro trends that are undeniable and very much aligned to the essence of the group, our value proposition, and what we do very well.
In terms of plans, we're trying to align everything to be to be ready to capitalize on those opportunities, and we have very solid change management in place as we speak, at all levels, commercially, from an innovation perspective and from a, an operational excellence perspective, to build the best possible, possible quality business for the future. We have the right culture to enable all of this change, and we're very serious about ESG, not only in terms of the demand that it can generate for us, but also in terms of our own role in building a world that is more sustainable. Last but not least, we have talked about financial guidance for the next three years, and we've talked about our full confidence in achieving the goals that were expressed already to the market in 2021.
And with this, thank you very much again for spending time with us. We have a little bit more time for a Q&A, so I invite the presidents and all of my colleagues to join me on stage. Thank you.
Now to the questions, and thank you, Fabio Stefanini. Okay, we're gonna start with, and this is one for all of you, I think. How would you think about Hexagon in the biggest slowdown? In the past, Hexagon's been more cyclical, but now you've created a much more diverse, dynamic company. I didn't write that myself. You talk about 5%-7% through the cycle organic growth, but how's that positioned if we see a larger than anticipated slowdown?
Yeah, but I can share a few thoughts, and then you guys chime in. I think you can look at the strength of the business from multiple angles. There's the end market that we work within. So you want to be as leveraged as possible, as equally footed as possible in between growing economies and mature economies, and in between industries that are, like we see already today, more exposed to a slowdown in demand, than industries that are a little bit more resilient, that have drivers that are different.
So from this perspective, I mean, you're gonna get to appreciate, I think, even more later this afternoon, how we have businesses already today that are confronted with a slowdown in terms of demand, but they've managed to open up the number of verticals that they work within, and industries that are carried, and have been for the last several quarters, by trends and drivers that are much more long term. So I think that's an inherent strength in the way you look at the business. And then, of course, there's the secondary aspect of the resilience of the specific product drivers and product areas. I mean, today we have a percentage of our recurring revenue that is in and around the 40%, and that's of course, that's a big area of focus.
It's something that has steadily grown over the years, and that's an increasingly important sort of cushion from our perspective. So yeah, there's a couple of levers that help the group navigate these areas, these moments of slowdown, but we stay, we stay very positive because that's something that is, you know, that we live by as we speak, right? In a market that has become increasingly sort of complex and diverse, area from area, industry from industry.
Yeah, and I'd maybe add on the five to seven percent organic growth target. I mean, when that was set, as always has been the case with Hexagon, you know, you kind of bake into that five-year period, the idea that there will be some kind of slowdown. You obviously don't, you don't know, but that's normally how business cycles work. So if you look at the first seven quarters of that period, you know, we've grown above the top end of that organic range, you know, despite having to exit Russia, and the exit of some of the businesses in SIG. And if there's no recession between now and 2026, then we'll obviously do better than 5%. So let's see.
Great. One more for you, . On M&A, do you expect doing more strategic transformational M&A deals? And if so, will you be focused mainly on hardware or mainly on software, or can hardware fit in there as well?
Yeah, I mean, you know, we've just done two big acquisitions, and I, as I described, I mean, the idea is that they will become platforms for the group. And, you know, there are a lot of synergies that we can extract from them. So there's no urgency to do a transformative deal. If something comes along and the time is right and it makes sense, we'll obviously look at it. But, you know, you don't go out with that ambition. The pipeline that I mentioned going into next year is more small and medium-sized deals. So we'll... Yeah, we'll see how that develops. On hardware versus software, yeah, I mean, you know, I think we're in different...
You know, I think that you know, if a great hardware business comes along, you know, we have hardware and software and it fits and it's synergistic, then we definitely will look at it. But what I would say is, if you look at both Manufacturing Intelligence, Geosystems, and Autonomous Solutions that have the hardware, they are already market leaders in their field, so it's easier for them to expand their addressable market with innovation than it is by buying something. Where software we didn't have, we've added those technologies over time.
Yeah, but I think there's also the, innovation capabilities in these areas that have been different at different points in time. So sometimes it's, as you said before, make or buy, right? I mean, I think we have so many capabilities in terms of hardware development, sensor fusion. We've built so many capabilities in that area that very, very often it's a complete no-brainer from a financial return perspective to keep on innovating in that part of the business. Anything that has got to do with sensor fusion and automation is something that we're very strong at. What happened in the last couple of years is that partly because of multiples and partly because of innovation capabilities, we have leveraged having an incrementally bigger innovation capability in software to develop these new platforms, right?
So when you look at HXDR or Nexus, when you look at, SDx for Mattias, when you look at, the one mining platform in that part of the business that Maria is gonna talk about, or when you look at OnCall, that, Steven Cost will talk about, that is having a lot of adoption, all of those are homegrown capabilities. So I think there's been a complete step change in the last five years in terms of the innovation capability around software, cloud platforms, and analytics, and that changes the way you look at M&A, right?
Great. Okay, David, when you look at the free cash flow conversion, what are the low-hanging fruit you see to improve?
I mean, obviously, I talked about the working capital, and I think we have seen the environment and working capital change, and people become tighter on their cash, so we need to be stricter, too. And I think that's an area where we can see an opportunity. And obviously, with the investments that we've been making, we'll now see that those investments tick down, and we'll see the amortization come up, and that will equally help us on the cash flow basis. So they will be the two I would see as the fastest opportunities.
Great. Okay, Eva, this is a long one, but I think I need to give it, you the whole question. So can you confirm if the new target of 95% S1 and S2 by 2030 includes offsets? If it does, what is the commitment excluding offsets, which is what the SBTi will validate as a short-term target?
Yeah. I can confirm that it does not include offsets. We are only talking about offsets by the 2025 target of full neutrality, where we are working with our own solutions to drive carbon credits and working only with high-quality offsets. But when we talk about the 95% reduction on Scope 1 and Scope 2 by 2030, this does not include offsets. This is the target that has been already given to the SBTi and which is currently under validation. No offsets are allowed.
Okay, great. There's a little bit more that I'll give you as well. So if it does not include offsets, then it's effectively net zero by 2030 under SBTi definitions and is accordingly a peer-leading target. Can you clarify that?
It is. Totally-
Great.
Right. Mm-hmm.
Okay. What gross margin supports your midterm operating margin target?
I mean, as we know, the group is around the 65% margin, and we saw on my business plan that the trajectory needs to increase. So I would expect mid-60s% is a mid-high 60s% is the area we need to be in for the future to achieve our target.
Great.
I think a good frame of reference is the improvement that you have mentioned that happened over the previous 10 years, right?
Mm-hmm.
We... There's absolutely scope for a continuation from that perspective. And that's gonna come as a by-product of volume in certain areas. It's gonna come as a by-product of next-generation technologies. We need to keep working on our cloud vendors as we expand the SaaS business. We need to keep working on our services delivery. There's parts of the business in which I think we can get better at working with system integrators that are taking more and more interest in our enterprise solutions, to go and deliver some of those service dollars on our own solutions. So there's absolutely scope for that to materialize.
Then, as David said before, we're gonna keep on working on normalizing our R&D spend, and be very, very focused on the payback from the innovation that we've worked on for the last couple of years. We need that future cycle to continue, but we think we have very good line of sight on for that to happen.
Okay, moving on to the addressable markets. So with the TAM growing by 7%, how come you only target 5%-7% organic growth? Is this conservative, given the discussion on the wave of innovation within the company?
Hmm.
Yeah, there's a good question. I mean, it kind of follows on a little bit from the question that we just had, you know, and there's a difference in approach here. I mean, when the external parties that put these TAMs together forecast them, they don't, they don't bake in any slowdown. You know, it, it's what's the industry gonna grow at, and what's the penetration of these products in that industry? So if there's no recession, then we would have TAM growth of 7%. Our 5%-7% targets bake in a slowdown during that five-year period, so there's an inconsistency there. If you didn't get a downturn, as I said, then, you know, we would, we would, as we have done in the last seven quarters, grow, you know, above the 5%-7%.
Mm-hmm.
Okay. And then how do you see software progressing as a percentage of sales by 2026, and then looking further ahead to 2030?
Hmm.
Yeah, I mean, we love all of our revenue streams equally, right?
Mm-hmm.
We're very democratic that way.
Exactly.
A dollar is a dollar is a dollar, right? So, and what I, what I thought it was important as a takeaway from today, again, I mean, the hardware/software classification is interesting, but that's not really the reality of how we want to go to market, and we, incrementally we try and do so. The better we get at using software and analytics for customers to build value on the data that we generate, the more they will see value in purchasing premium devices, which is what we bring to market, right? And the opposite is true, pretty much, right? So it's a business case that incrementally we want to see in its totality. We wanna see great growth from hardware. We wanna see great growth from software.
When you look out at 2030, I mean, we know where we stand in terms of recurring revenue. I think in 2030, we're probably gonna have the majority of our revenues that are recurrent, and that's gonna be a by-product of several things coming into play. I think an important takeaway from the morning as well is that when we plan out for 2026, there's an acceleration in terms of recurring revenue, but it is an acceleration that doesn't come at the expense of the margin profile for the group.
Mm-hmm.
This is why we, you know, we have reconfirmed the targets that we have talked about, but we keep on working on our revenue mix.
Okay. David, what tax rate is a good number to use for our models?
Okay. I mean, currently, I would stick with where we pretty much are. Obviously, there's changes in the tax system going on, but right now, from my line of sight, I wouldn't change from around the 18% that we currently utilize today.
Hmm.
Okay, a bit of a different topic here. So moving to solutions and more integration requires a change in the type of salespeople you have, and you might need more central account executives who can sell all of Hexagon versus salespeople who... in the business units. How far along are you in shifting to the new model? How much training is needed? How much more to do?
I mean, I think it's a great conversation also to have with the divisional presidents later on in the Q&A, right? In the sense that these industries buy in a very different way, right? The purchasing patterns in the world of construction is extremely different from what happens in an industry like mining, right? That is highly consolidated with a lot of those digitization decisions that are made in a relatively small number of key accounts by a relatively small number of people, right? So those dynamics is something we need to keep in mind. We don't plan to build a big work, a big, sort of, account execs team in corporate. That is not gonna happen.
But what I see in all of the divisions is that the team is very focused on constantly rethinking the sales motion, knowing that, you know, there's complexity in the portfolio. We wanna protect and defend the business and build incremental layers of solutions and, and software-centric revenue.
Okay. Eva, can you confirm whether the benchmark for the SBTi targets have been resolved, and when we can expect the SBTi targets to be approved?
So the benchmark or, like, the baseline for the SBTi will be 2022 full year. That will be our baseline. We have... We are in the process of validation, which just started. I mean, we submitted back in July. The targets, as maybe many of you may know, there is a huge increase of workload on the SBTi side, so we are in the validation process, and it's expected to be finished within the next three months.
Okay.
She's asking for more people, I think.
Yes. I, I don't have that, but we have an agile-
I won't move on to do my turn now.
Exactly. Yes, please, FT.
Um, okay.
Um-
... On SIG and MI, they both have EBITDA margins below the targets and the other three segments. What's your view on the EBIT, EBITDA margins for these segments, the reasons for the margin difference, which may be more appropriate for the divisions? And are there any reasons why they could not reach above 30%?
Yeah, I mean, I think, of course, there are reasons why those margins are where they are now. It's also important, I think, to benchmark those margins with peers. There's different dynamics in those industries, so it's important to use various benchmarks. I mean, I love the benchmark against the group, the group average and the group level. I prefer the one against the leading divisions in terms of EBIT delivery. But I think those markets have different dynamics. I think it's interesting if, you know, Steven and Josh later maybe spend a few comments. I think there's content in those presentations in terms of how they've both looked at addressing cost, addressing areas around the performance, growing the software mix to constantly be on a gross margin trajectory.
Okay, great. And the last question for now. On the organic innovation wave and investment normalization, what is the timing? Have we turned the corner already? i.e., is the balance between investments and product solutions generating revenues, profit improving as of today?
Yeah, great. I do think that we are at the peak. I think for us, 2024 is gonna be a super important year in terms of bringing a lot of these new technologies to market or really starting to scale the commercial impact for those that have already been released, right? For some of the software, some of the platforms, it takes some time. You need to build usage before applications that are built on these platforms get consumed and turn bookings into recognizable revenue. And for some of the hardware, the dynamics are a little bit different, and we're gonna launch products that we will want to have an immediate, very positive impact in 2024. So yeah, that's what we stay focused on.
How has the customer feedback been so far on Nexus and the HXDR platforms, and what do you see as the key delivery mechanism to realize those opportunities?
I guess I'll take that one. Yeah, as you saw some of the statistics from Burkhard, we have over 30,000 users already in the platform, and that's within roughly six months. That was one of the major goals originally, is getting users on the platform. I would say to look at the commercial opportunities and truly unlocking it, it's really just getting those first reference customers underway, which we're doing right now. And then typically from that, once you prove it out with those customers, and they'll go through their own kind of pilot phases, implementations, et cetera, it will trickle and cascade out.
As I mentioned before, we're seeing a lot of pull from the market, so I'm incredibly optimistic in not only just getting users on the platform, but with the rapid app deployments coming and then the commercialization of those apps coming in the next two years.
Great.
Maybe to add on HXDR, it's extremely encouraging if you look at that. The same applies what Josh mentioned for Nexus. If you separate our customers into three different groups, we have our existing customers, which is a benefit of collaboration, of data exchange and all these kind of things. We are working with many innovation centers, like the VDCs and general contractors, architectural firms, to create feasibility studies as well, to really connect different applications on HXDR. And then we are to really going towards enterprise accounts, which really want to have one geospatial platform in place for sharing data across continents, across organizations. That's something which takes a bit more time.
So our approach is bottom-up, through the existing organization, in the middle management, so to say, in these kind of innovation centers, and then really on the C-level as well, providing an enterprise solution on geospatial data.
Great. Maria, we've had a couple of questions in agriculture on the recent activity with Trimble selling their business. Can you kind of give us a bit more context on your position on that, how that impacts us?
Well, as I talked about today, we have a lot of opportunities. Yes, some of the bigger OEMs are building their own technology, but there's a whole other market out there with OEMs, integrators, and the robotic first, companies that are gonna grow as well. We're introducing positioning as a service, which is gonna be a differentiator as well, and autonomy. We're investing a lot in autonomy and perception. Perception is not only gonna be for agriculture, that is what we're starting with, but that's gonna be applied to mining, construction, et cetera. It's... Autonomy is truly a verticalized, a horizontal technology for different verticals. So there's a lot of opportunities in agriculture.
Great.
Definitely.
Okay, Burkhard, so a data question for you here. You clearly have access to very large quantities of data, but how do you access it if it sits on premise in machines or software? And how do you manage what is relevant and usable given the scale of the data created? Can you give some examples of where you're applying AI to this data to drive value for companies?
That's a very good question. Maybe start with the data and the content. As you all know, we have a content program, which includes a lot of geospatial data, and this is for us, first of all, a very vast source to train our models on, and then basically later give the insights back to our customers in terms of land cover, object classification and segmentation, can be point clouds, but it can be everything from, we have currently, I think, 27 land cover classes on this. So that is our own data, where we make it usable and then basically train models for the wider use.
... Then also our own operations, like we have in Geosystems, with construction progress monitoring. And you saw, for example, this example with the video cams in Thomas' talk. This also gives us vast data. And maybe as a third pillar to say, all of our new sensors are fully connected and IoT enabled, and there we get already the data on it. If it's on premise on machines that have not yet in our installed base, this connectivities, normally they come once, at least once in the last, come back into service and these kind of things, then we can read out a lot of things.
This holds true for construction and MI devices, surveying devices and all of it. And then the other thing is, the nice thing is, if you operate in a very high accuracy range, then you can also utilize your own data that you have obviously for from assembling and calibration the devices and testing the devices, whether they are in specs, and you take this data and train the models. And this is normally in a accuracy range that is can cover all the other devices that are not yet connected.
Okay, thank you. Mattias, where specifically are you on predictive maintenance, or APM in EAM? How strong is your position in that market?
Yeah, that is a good question. I think, I don't know, for you, for those of you who made use of the time and paid attention out there, there was two booths out there, SDx and EAM, and he was actually showing the APM capabilities out there. So the answer is yes, it's included in our EAM offering. It's also true that that's kind of a market that's at a very early stage, so we're investing a lot into it. And yeah, we see it as a big growth opportunity. So in short, yes, we have an offering, but the market is still kind of early stage, I would say.
Okay. Okay, we'll revisit one from earlier now. So Steven and Josh, we had a question earlier on SIG and MI, on the profitability of your divisions, particularly with the reference case of the other divisions in the group. Do you have any thoughts on that, on expanding the profile of your businesses from that point of view?
Let me start. So look, it's a fact, right? And it's a journey. We're addressing it from both sides by moving away from some of these businesses that are very low margin. We've had a divestiture earlier in the year, moving outside of government and public safety customers into the industrial sector, where margins generally tend to be better. But it's gonna be... It's gonna take some time, but we're definitely moving in that direction.
Yeah. I would say similar to Steven, we're also looking at divestments that are either low margin or just a different quality of revenue with ARR and other factors coming into play or are non-strategic. So we're also undertaking on that journey. I mentioned before some of the internal transformations we're doing. A big part about that is unlocking efficiency, especially as we scale our growth. And so that will also help us dramatically improve our OpEx and our margins. And then, as I mentioned before, I was pretty kind of pointed, our own goal as a division is to be at least at the Hexagon group average, because I feel like we should be aligned with the Hexagon ambitions, and so that's our personal goal and ambitions.
Okay, another one for Burkhard. Can you give us a sense of your innovation? Do you measure the number of products launched within the last three years or something similar?
It was referring to the answer to the slides I've shown when I showed the segmentation of the roadmap, and I've indicated that in the last three years we did about 1,200 releases, combined in these three categories. The category where we or how we innovate in is set by the divisions and by the product teams, because they have the knowledge what is through a lot of market research, feedback, et cetera, what is then basically wished for and desired. And we have a large funnel of ideas.
We have a even larger basket of technologies, and then only it looked like massive innovations that we have in numbers, but only a few make it really in the stage that we write a business plan to it and give the go ahead in the productization phase.
Okay. Josh, within MI Software, what plans do you have for offering consumption-based or flexible licensing, as some peers have begun to do so?
Yeah, we actually already do that today with our token license system, and Nexus also will have consumption-based elements to it, too, tied to the cloud consumption, et cetera. So we are doing that. We also have other flexible arrangements. I think we have 12 different license types. We're taking that down to 6, and a good portion of those are consumption-based today.
Great. Okay, last question of the day, and it's gonna be one for Paolo. In terms of, China, a broad question here: so obviously, it's in the news a lot. There's quite a lot about tensions and different political environments and things like that, particularly geopolitical relations. How do you manage that, in terms of data, IP, managing competition and things like that?
Yeah, very good question. So first of all, I mean, as you know, China has been, has always been a powerhouse of growth for us, and very impressive in terms of how they execute on business, not only in terms of the end result, in terms of the financial performance of the team, right? So we've talked about creating solutions that are more and more software-centric, having an approach that starts to lean a little bit more heavily towards large accounts and towards key account management motions. And this is something that in China have always done very, very well. Our business in China today is primarily focused on Manufacturing Intelligence, Geosystems, and ALI, less so on the other two divisions, and we have a lot of opportunity to pursue in the future.
In terms of how we think about IP and sort of checks and balances, I mean, we, we of course apply to the letter the rules and the regulations that are in place through, through teams that do oversight, through tools that are in place, through processes that are in place. So every time that there's matters of IP, of export control and the likes, we work very closely with the, with the bodies that are sort of in charge of reviewing our processes and the likes, and we feel that we are very advanced from that perspective.
What we need to keep on doing is making sure that we build capabilities in China, so that the teams are very self-sufficient in terms of not only technology development, not only manufacturing for the product categories that we commercialize in China, but also in terms of software development capabilities. And we start to have a software development center in China that is very, very sizable, so that we go and develop capabilities that are unique for that market, with front ends, with workflows that are very much adapted to the way software wants to be consumed in China. And that's something that we're gonna keep on doing for the future.
Fantastic. Okay, well, thank you very much to the panel here for all of the... answering all of those questions. Thank you all for coming. I very much appreciate seeing you here. Thanks for everyone who's dialed in online as well. That concludes today's session. We look forward to seeing you all in the future.
Thank you.
Thank you.