Good morning, and welcome to Adecco Group's 2023 Capital Markets Day. We have an exciting and busy day ahead of us. Before we start, we kindly invite you to take a minute to review the disclaimer in the presentation. Now, a few housekeeping notes. Please be aware that there are no planned fire alarm tests scheduled for today, so if the alarm does sound, then please treat this as the real thing. The alarm is a voice, and you are requested to leave the room by the nearest fire exit. The assembly point is opposite the White Hart Pub on Great Suffolk Street, and you will be guided by hotel staff. Please remain at the assembly point until the hotel staff inform you that it is safe to return. Second, you can view all the presentation materials and today's agenda through the CMD app.
Your event badge carries the relevant QR codes for downloading and viewing purposes. Finally, your badge has a color sticker on it. This is your group color for the Akkodis Tech Roadshow. Please keep it at the front of your mind. Now, let's briefly review today's agenda. Following an introduction from the Adecco Group's Chair, Jean-Christophe Deslarzes, the Group's CEO, Denis Machuel, will highlight the Group's recent strategic progress. After a short break, we move to the global business unit sessions, starting with Akkodis. For those online, the morning session ends just before 11:00 A.M. For those here in person, we will take you to meet with the Akkodis team, and a short lunch break will follow this tech roadshow. The afternoon session, including for those online, will begin at 12:30 P.M., with strategy updates from both LHH and Adecco.
Finally, the Group's CFO, Coram Williams, will update you on the Group's financial strategy and ambitions. Coram's presentation will be followed by a Q&A session with our management team and closing remarks from Denis. For those able to stay beyond 3:30 P.M., we would be delighted to welcome you for an apero in the foyer upstairs to meet the team more informally. Now it's my great pleasure to hand over to Jean-Christophe, our Chair. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Benita. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for being so numerous in this room and, online, and welcome also on behalf of the board of directors to this year's Capital Market Day. Let me take you first in my introduction on a journey, the Adecco Group journey. I will then address what changed between last year and this year, and then we will look a little bit at the priorities. What if we were to ask ourselves how to create substantial stakeholder value? What would we look at, at the Adecco business unit, for example? What if we were to have one of the key logistics provider asking us to cover 60,000, 60,000 employees in six weeks?
What if we were to be as AI-oriented, that we would allow our colleagues out there, our candidates, to simply pick up their phone, tell their story, which is their CV, and this CV is being then portrayed on a material CV. And this material CV, because not everyone can read, not everyone can write amongst the blue-collar employees. This CV then is being matched with the job opportunities out there in the market, and at the benefit of these candidates, they can use this job matching opportunity. What if we were to train, to coach 850,000 people a year? Well, this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reality today. Yes, I will even give you another example. In Switzerland, the key watchmakers, prestigious brands, came together in order to ask the Adecco Group to help them in this talent-scarce market. And what have we done?
We've created a Watch Academy , allowing candidates to be trained and then deployed amongst the watchmaker industry in Switzerland. Amongst many other initiatives, this allowed us to create a gap quarter after quarter versus competition in terms of growth, and as you know, today, we have a gap up to 930 basis points. Now, let me stop with the what ifs, but move to LHH and tell you the following story. There's Peter, the LHH manager, who has heard from Sandra, Adecco, that he should join this German Automotive manufacturing plant, which he indeed does, because he knows that Sandra had just received a mandate to hire 2,400 people for this German manufacturing site. Peter goes, "Hey, you know what?
I know that there are some permanent employees amongst these 2,400 employees that you're presently hiring, and we're here with Ezra to help you coach these."... But also, we know that you will have to lay off 100 people because you've been very strong in creating a new GBS center in Bangalore. We're here for you. Thanks to our Career Transition services, we commit to find jobs for these 100 people in three months, which will reduce the severance cost of the company, but also increase your social responsibility. And finally, at Akkodis, Peter was joined by John. John, who is speaking to the chief engineer of this manufacturing plant, and the chief engineer has a problem to crack. Indeed, he is looking at the digitally enabled dashboard on his Automotive production line, and he's looking for help.
Akkodis is there with the 10,000 consultants available. So he's quite pleased because he's in a position with John to craft the team that is gonna hopefully crack his dashboard innovation. If you look at LHH and Akkodis, what is striking is that at the LHH front, we were able to get, thanks to this story, which I've just told you, and the magnificent opportunity to cut across our various HR services to get back to our margin corridor of 7%-10%. On the Akkodis front, continuing to increase the consulting, we will also increase our margins and in turn, increase the margin of the entire group. So the what ifs is reality today, positioning us as a fantastic leader, not only in the HR industry, but also in the ER&D business.
So let me shift gears and look at what happened between the last Capital Markets Day and today. What I've just told you, this umbrella of all these opportunities we have, would not have been possible without flawless execution. As you know, we've changed the leadership, and this one, 1.5 years ago, when Denis Machuel presented, and now precisely 1 year ago, to all of you, the way to execute our strategy, which is to simplify, execute, and grow. Now, this is a journey, but I can tell you that the board is very pleased to see the progress made. Simplify means simplifying the organization, and the executive committee has already simplified not only the administrative processes, the bureaucracy that here and there needed to be reduced, but also has simplified the organization, starting with corporate, followed by the regions and the countries.
And that, in turn, has allowed us to also create a culture of execution, where people are continuously empowered, feel empowered, and feel that collaboration will make the difference across the businesses, as I was giving you examples just a minute ago. And that allowed us to grow and to increase the gap up to 845 basis points in terms of growth compared to the competition. And on the other hand, in order to work on our margin, we have, as you know, a G&A plan to reduce EUR 150 million, and we're very well on track in this respect. And finally, the priorities. I'm very pleased to be in a position to address them as succinctly as I will do, because since we have clarity, it allows us to align the entire organization behind these priorities.
1, to continue to grow and to outperform competition. 2, to increase our EBITDA margin, thanks to operational leverage and the G&A reduction I was just alluding to. 3 is to address the U.S., and I'm very pleased to tell you that today we have our U.S. leader in the room who will present to you and demonstrate how the turnaround is progressing within Q4, having brought already now, after 1 year in the saddle, our business to profitability. And finally, 4, to develop Akkodis. Continue to drive the synergies, which you know, cost synergies are ahead of plan, and continue to drive revenue synergies. So to sum up, we are super well-positioned to help our clients, our candidates, in today's labor market, which, yes, is obviously tainted by geopolitical volatility and economic uncertainty, but we are extremely well-positioned in breadth and in depth.
We have progressed since last year with our simplify, execute, growth execution strategy, and we have very clear priorities. I'm very pleased that today you're going to learn much more about the progress in this respect. I wish to thank you very much, not only for your attention, but in particular for your loyalty and your confidence in the Adecco Group. Thanks very much. Over to you, Denis.
Thank you, JC, and good morning everyone here in London. Also, good morning and welcome to all of you who watch us through our live stream. Thank you so much for having taken the time to join us today. It's important for us. It means a lot. Let's go straight to slide 10. Let's go straight into the content that we've prepared for you. The Adecco Group is a global leader in talent and technology, with strong foundations, including a portfolio of innovative talent, solution, and services, a very strong client base, a very strong consultant and candidate network, and an inspiring purpose. We make the future work for everyone. The world of work is undergoing significant change.
The Adecco Group, through its Future at Work strategy, is positioned to capture all the opportunities of the future of work with each global business unit, what we call the GBU, and you will hear this acronym quite a lot today, with each GBU offering a unique value proposition to its customers. This said, the financial performance of the group was lacking, you know, proper results. To unlock the value creation opportunity that is embedded in our strategy, we launched Future at Work Reloaded a year ago, which is our management plan to reach our full potential. We are progressing well against this plan, executing methodically throughout. Consequently, we have begun, as you might have seen, to deliver an improved financial performance that we... and the one that we committed to this time last year. Let's turn to slide 11.
The group's Future at Work strategy is focused on a smart diversification and expansion into higher growth and higher margin markets, all this being driven by the group's ambition to be the global leader in talent and technology. As the left hand shows, as of today, the majority of the group's gross profits, at around 55%, is generated from professional talent and technology services, while workforce temporary staffing services generate around 45% of gross profits. The group has also a meaningful exposure to the IT, tech, and engineering sectors, with approximately 30% of gross profits coming from these end clients, and this across Adecco, Akkodis, and LHH. The right hand sets out a few of the most significant structural drivers in the group's chosen markets. We see ongoing talent scarcity and needs for human centricity.
We see shifting skills requirements, aging population, and higher churn rates, and they all provide growth potential. For example, for LHH Services across the whole talent lifecycle, or for Adecco to leverage its talent supply chain capabilities. Further, advances in digital and AI technologies are driving both the fastest growing and declining job roles, while the green transition is predicted to be the largest job creator this decade. These megatrends provide sizable opportunities for the group services, particularly those performed by Akkodis. We all recognize the volatile and uncertain world around us, which puts the flexibility of the solution the group provides at the center of any business's talent management strategy. In sum, the Adecco Group portfolio is both agile to the change in the world of work and aligned with the most dynamic job roles. It is well positioned for the future. Moving now to slide 12.
With its diversified portfolio, the group is operating in an expanded addressable market. We estimate the market is around EUR 800 billion and growing on average at around 5% per year. Importantly, the group is a market leader. Each of our businesses has a leading position in its specialty, offering a distinct and compelling value proposition to customers. At the same time, the markets we operate in are fragmented, and this provides the group with a substantial opportunity to both take market share and increase returns. On slide 13, let's now focus on customer needs and look at talent through our clients' lenses. Given the complexity and uncertainty of the business context, our clients need multiple talents and expertise, as well as flexibility in a variety of ways.
They have to achieve the perfect mix between having the right expertise at the right time, the flexibility that our VUCA world imposes, and they have to anticipate future talent needs in order to build the right organization, maximize its potential, and prepare for the future. Which means defining a workforce strategy, making sure they attract, hire, and deploy the proper talent, invest in skilling, retaining, and developing their people, and sometimes transitioning people out of the organization. They also have to perform and evolve their technical capabilities in light of both the disruptive, digital, and green transitions. This is where our unique positioning comes in, facing all these client needs.
Because answering all these client needs requires a set of services such as workforce analytics, flexible placement, coaching, HR analytics, and many others, that the group is able to articulate in a seamless way by leveraging the appropriate expertise from the GBUs. The Future at Work strategy has indeed created three expert powerhouses that are interconnected and complementary to each other, that are able to serve all the client needs in a comprehensive way. Let's now bring this to life with some examples of how we've delivered expertise in talent and technology to clients combining services to create best-in-class solutions. The left hand presents a recent staffing win in the U.S. for a client that specializes in autonomous vehicles.
This fast-growing client was looking for a partner who could offer strong sourcing capabilities in the U.S. market, both for flexible and permanent recruitment, together with the proper regulatory expertise and the capacity to provide workforce planning and analytics, supported by data and AI know-how. Adecco's consultative, data-driven approach, strength of legal and regulatory advice, and ability to scale, of course, secured this large deal. The right hand provides a second case study for a global leader in business services. Adecco was appointed as the official European supplier in a 3-year contract, and the client chose Adecco for its reliable and high-quality sourcing capability across 14 countries. In addition, the client particularly welcomed Adecco's ability to provide training, diversity and inclusion expertise, and deliver permanent hires, which were all supporting the client's HR strategy.
On the next slide, slide 15, slide 16, let me show you a few more examples that reflects our capacity to connect our GBUs and cross-sell. The left hand features an expanded partnership with a global leader in electronics, where we leverage our LHH presence together with Akkodis's capabilities to support the technical upskilling of their UK management to enhance their digital transformation. In the middle, the example sets out you know, how proactive upskilling drives loyalty, value creation, and engagements within clients. We've been combining Adecco, Akkodis, and LHH services, and the group engaged with a market-leading IT consultancy to co-build their delivery capability for their end clients. That means engineering the management of their delivery model, including the whole talent delivery strategy. One last example on the right hand. Here, a cross-GBU offering again drove differentiating value.
In this case, for a leading manufacturer of electrical vehicle equipment, the group developed a solution that included an outsourced maintenance model and a training program for field services technicians that has positioned us as a true partner. Let's now turn to slide 17. One year ago, we introduced Future at Work Reloaded, a plan to deliver better and faster execution of the group's strategy.... We recognized that the group needed to address five problem areas that were weighing on our performance: organizational complexity, performance management, sales standards and processes, IT systems, and last but not least, too much focus on EBITDA margins as opposed to reaching profitability through the correct balance of revenue growth and profit growth. We therefore embarked on a group-wide program to drive change centered on three levers: simplify, execute, and grow.
These levers address the common challenges, and as planned, have begun to improve the group's performance. Let's explore each of these levers. Moving to slide 18, and our first lever, simplify. The group is improving its operational effectiveness by simplifying the way it works. We've removed duplicate roles in regions and countries, particularly in Adecco. Managerial headcount is 5% lower to date. We are executing savings at all levels of the group and have delivered EUR 44 million savings cumulative year to date, and we are firmly on track to deliver EUR 150 million G&A cost reduction goal. Our work does not stop here. For example, a tightened procurement policy, where we, you know, spend above EUR 2 billion per annum, is in place, and we are accelerating our move to shared service centers.
To further illustrate how we are simplifying, slide 19 provides a very simple case study of how we've streamlined reporting in France to improve organizational effectiveness. Following a detailed review, management identified over 84 reporting tools, along with 24 reports being sent by support functions on a weekly or monthly basis. The review further found that 85% of reports were able to be self-generated. We've simplified, and a successful pilot has been run using only 3 tools. We can remove the rest. 10 reports have been immediately discontinued, and 6 more are under review. We're establishing training to promote self-service practices when it comes to reporting. This simplification effort is having positive impact, as you can imagine. For instance, the employee engagement score has increased 30 basis points year-on-year to 7.6.
Let's move to slide 20 and our second lever, execute, which is split into three areas. On the side of operations and to improve execution, we are empowering decision-making by those closest to customers at both the GBU and local level. To ensure local representatives, local perspectives are represented, we've appointed Ian Lee to the executive committee as President, Geographic Region. We introduced a more systematic and rigorous performance management framework to drive efficiency and accountability, accompanied by the introduction of standardized operational KPIs to increase transparency. We adjusted the group's operating model, allowing for stronger local empowerment and accountability with strengthened group guardrails. On the tech front, we combined IT and digital functions to deliver speed, better utilization, and value, and we've appointed a new leader, Caroline Basyn, in August this year, to take us further forward.
The group has responded effectively to AI development, establishing a Spark AI initiative under my leadership. To date, the group has a number of GenAI pilots at both local and group level, the majority of which are focused on operational efficiency. And third, in HR, we are driving a group-wide values and culture initiative to support plans to build a collaborative, transparent, and high-performance culture with absolute focus on clients and candidates. We have also announced last week the appointment of Daniela Seabrook as group CHRO as of January 2024. Looking forward, we have several major steps to take. We will work to reinforce delivery discipline and to improve systems and processes across operations.
Under Caroline's leadership, we will finalize a new tech roadmap in Q1 2024, and the work on values and expected behaviors will be finalized by Q4 2023, after which the group will roll this out in all our talent, processes, and rituals. The third lever, grow, is on slide 21. The group has clearly prioritized ways to grow market share with the proper balance between revenue growth and EBITDA growth. To enable this, the group has just adjusted 2023's incentive plans with a stronger focus on growth and with only 4 KPIs from 8 previously. We have enhanced the group's sales mindset and improved customer focus. For example, in Adecco, sales intensity is 20% higher, and visits to prospects, 35% higher year-on-year. Alongside, we've begun to leverage the group's innovative digital platforms, successfully combining LHH's coaching offer with Ezra.
We are also unlocking MSP expansion potential across the GBUs and Pontoon. All this has enabled the group to consistently grow faster than its key competitors in each of the last 5 quarters. Going forward, we will drive sales focus on improving contract conversion, customer retention, and customer satisfaction levels. We'll continue to scale digital, and we will deploy QAPA in Adecco U.S. Further, the group will invest in expanding MSP and scaling its RPO offering. Turning to slide 22 now, and let me be clear, the GBUs are at the core of the group, each with a clear and differentiating strategy, complementary positioning and services, and armed with the tools to accelerate execution. One year after introducing Simplify, Execute, and Grow, all three GBUs have been strengthened.
Adecco has reported market share gains in all its regions over the last six months, with good Q3 revenue development, 930 basis points ahead of competitors. In operational terms, management have been driving hard. In Q3, productivity reached 2021 levels. G&A overheads were cut 7% year-on-year, and the US turnaround further progressed. Adecco's zero-touch digital platform, QAPA, grew double digits. In Akkodis, the AKKA integration is well advanced, with EUR 59 million of synergies secured for 2023, above target. Akkodis's strategy consulting business continues to grow well. Offshore delivery capabilities have expanded, and the U.S. team have adapted capacity to protect margin, given the downturn in tech staffing there. In LHH, the integrated roadmap is delivering synergies, and the EBITDA margin in Q3 was 8%. Recruitment Solutions has a new leader who is improving operational discipline.
Career Transition, as you've seen, has excelled this year, extending its market leadership. Ezra, you know, our digital coaching offer, has really expanded, and Nick will talk more about that later. Each GBU president will dive deeper on these topics in their presentations today. Let's now turn to slide 23. Alongside strengthened GBUs, the Simplify, Execute, and Grow agenda is improving collaboration and enhancing the group's synergy potential. First, there are promising indicators from working to expand the MSP business across GBUs and in Pontoon. For example, the MSP revenue pipeline has increased by 22% year-on-year. Requested distribution to the GBUs is above target and up 14% year-on-year, and the GBU's fulfillment of distributed requests is up 17% year-on-year. Second, the focus on developing cross-GBU solutions that create strategic engagement and cross-sell opportunities has traction.
To support this, we've put in place cross-selling initiatives and incentives. Global client revenues have increased by 6% year-on-year versus the group's 3% growth, and 40% of global clients have increased their spend in Akkodis. Moving to slide 24, where we set out how the group provides a best-in-class digital experience to its customers. First, the Group is scaling its digital products, particularly apps that are enabled by AI. For example, Adecco's Candidate Compass proactively engages candidates in current and future role. The app is live in France and Italy, leveraging a combined database of more than 13 million candidates. It has over 200 algorithm features, and it delivers a solid improvement in conversion rate of 500 basis points. Second, the Group is disrupting the market with LHH Ezra, a market leader in digital coaching services.
Year to date, Ezra's revenues have risen 37%. It has expanded to three core offerings, successfully tapping into distinct audiences. All this while remaining at the top of its game, with a very strong 4.9 out of 5 user satisfaction score after 400,000 coaching sessions. Third, the Group is accelerating adoption of AI, particularly through a partnership approach. In September, you might have seen that, the Group has announced the formation of a strategic collaboration with Microsoft. The Group's AI team is working with Microsoft to build a career platform product that is expected to launch in the first quarter of 2024. The product is intended to help people navigate career shifts driven by the introduction of generative AI at work, particularly via a highly personalized experience. It is set to offer coaching, microlearning, upskilling, career advice, and job opportunities.
It has a particular focus on the frontline workers who are traditionally an underserved population from this perspective. And let me now conclude with slide 25. The Group has a well-diversified, consistent, and future-proof portfolio, able to respond with agility to the changes in the world of work. The Group operates in large and fragmented markets that provide a substantial opportunity to take share and increase returns. We've delivered well against the Simplify, Execute, and Grow plan in the last 12 months. We've strengthened the GBUs and improved cross-GBU collaboration, and we are responding at pace to leverage the latest technologies with which we can improve candidate experience, reduce time to market, and drive efficiencies. In short, the Group is delivering on its commitment to better, faster execution, and we are improving our financial performance. We are on track, and more will come.
With this now, it's time for a coffee break, also for you maybe who are watching us live. Let's go to the foyer for 10 minutes before we return with Akkodis. Thank you.
Welcome back! I hope you have had a good coffee break. My name is Jan Gupta, and I'm responsible for the Akkodis Group within Adecco. I'm pleased to present to you today what has happened within Akkodis in the months since we saw each other here in London in 2022. I'm excited to show you also what are the next steps in front of us. I will guide you the first part, and afterwards, André van der Toorn, finance head of Akkodis, will share a few financial updates with you. Since 20 months, we are now in the building phase of Akkodis. We joined forces of AKKA and Modis in February 2022, when we acquired roughly 65% of AKKA. In May 2022, we acquired the remaining 35%. We created and launched immediately the new brand, Akkodis. Since this moment, we are in full integration mode.
We are today in a well-advanced situation with Akkodis. We delivered the promised synergies in year 1, and we will also deliver the promised synergies in year 2, with an in-year synergy delivery of EUR 59 million. Moreover, we'll continue to deliver on synergies beyond 2023. We brought the engineering business of AKKA and the IT and digital business of Modis together and increased utilization rates of our consultants in several countries. We changed our service portfolio towards the digital demands of tomorrow. I will come back to this later with an example of Germany. Of course, we had challenges in the last 12 months due to the downturn in the tech staffing, mainly in US. Here, our very agile US management team initiated immediate countermeasures. André will come back later with an update.
All in all, I'm happy to stand in front of you today and being able to say the building phase of Akkodis is on track. What does this all means? What are we building? Let me explain. Who we are, what we do, and how we create value for the Adecco Group and for our clients. The world is changing. More and more companies, processes, and industries need combined engineering and IT knowledge. This is exactly why we brought AKKA and Modis together. Both have complementary skills in engineering and IT to support the digital transformation journey of our clients worldwide. AKKA and Modis together have a differentiated offering in consulting, talent, and skilling.... We are rich in our tech talent portfolio, and we have a balanced global footprint and industry portfolio, supported by a clear, defined strategy and with the ambition to lead the Smart Industry.
AKKA and Modis are not only a natural fit from their expertise and global footprint, but also a strategic acquisition of the Adecco Group, ensuring that we as a group are a reliable partner for our clients who can address the changing requirements in digital transformation. The tech markets are today characterized by talent scarcity, but we as Akkodis are able to find and to develop talents needed in this growing market. Finally, we are contributing and building synergies across the group. For example, we just won a substantial order from a global Life Sciences leader to support them with our data analytics and AI know-how. At the same time, we opened the door for our brothers from Adecco to use their sourcing power in the recruitment process. This enabling environment of the Adecco Group, we will create the number two in Smart Industry.
But what does it mean, Smart Industry? Smart Industry is where engineering and IT merge in a digital and connected world. Let me explain you what I mean. Join me for a moment on my journey back from London to my family in Germany. My assistant had booked a taxi for me from the hotel to the airport, but unfortunately, the taxi is not coming. So what do I do? I take my phone and open a car-sharing app to get quick a car. Akkodis is developing cloud-based car-sharing apps for clients, which you might have on your phone today. I arrived at the airport and fly in an Airbus A320 to Frankfurt. Do you know that Akkodis is involved in the development of the hydraulic systems and landing flaps of Airbus? On the plane, I speak with a fellow passenger from Australia.
He tells me that he had just a very successful surgery, thanks to an advanced big data analytic platform. When he talked about it, I was wondering if this is, was maybe Akkodis produced? We have developed a platform that takes patient data and combine it with machine learning to predict better patient outcomes and save more lives in the hospitals in Australia. I arrive in Frankfurt and jump in my brand-new, full electric Mini Countryman. Might be a little bit cold today, but this car is co-developed by Akkodis engineers. At my home, I put the car in my charging station. Did you know that Akkodis developed several charging solutions, including hardware, software, and cloud systems in many European countries? Finally, I go to bed, but before I do, I ask my smart house to optimize the energy consumption. And guess what?
Systems to optimize energy management of buildings are developed for clients by Akkodis. So already today, Akkodis is every day by your side. We have the talents, the experience, and the global scale to realize these kind of projects. We have two main offerings within Akkodis. Talent services reflect 35% of our business today, with an EBITDA margin between 4%-6%. We have 5 million pre-qualified tech experts in our database to feed our client demands and to recruit our own consultants. Our biggest offering is consulting and solutions. The business accounts for 65% of our revenue, with an EBITDA margin between 8%-12%. In this high-margin business, we have 50,000 engineers and digital experts delivering engineering, IT, and digital solutions for our clients. How do these two main offerings create value for our clients?
The life cycle of products becomes constantly shorter, because as consumers, we all want each year new products with new features. New products are at the same time more complex. Our clients need unique expertise in engineering, in IT, in data, in AI for the development. Our clients can simply not afford to have all these needed competencies in-house. That is why they are coming to us to support them. On one side, we give clients a higher flexibility in their product development, and on the other side, our consultants deliver the tech content, which increase productivity. We can deliver these offerings to our clients worldwide. Akkodis has a true global footprint. Roughly EUR 1 billion of our business revenue is in APAC, EUR 1 billion in North America, and EUR 2 billion are generated in Europe.
The business in Europe and in APAC consists mainly of consulting and solutions, while the market characteristics in North America are more defined by the tech talent services. We have also a very balanced footprint when we look at the industries we serve. We are leading in Automotive and Aerospace, but these two industries count just for 40% of the Akkodis revenues. We have talents with unique expertise and capabilities to serve demands in telecom or clean technology. Our strongest growth currently is in the Life Sciences sector. All these industries have different market cycles. This balanced industry mix, in combination with a balanced footprint, makes Akkodis resilient. This global footprint and balanced industry mix supports us in winning global deals to further realize said synergies. First example is from the Automotive industry. We activated our client access for Modis and leveraged key AKKA engineering knowledge.
In this case, we took over the complete computer-aided design work from a major European car manufacturer and established a so-called CAD, computer-aided design, factory for them. Second example is from the telecom industry. Here, we won a major contract with a former AKKA client due to the extensive competence of Modis in cloud, software development, and data analytics. The Adecco Group supported in addition by providing the necessary facilities. There are plenty of other examples where our clients see a value in the merger of AKKA and Modis. These global synergy deals are key to drive revenue growth for Akkodis. Beyond this, let me show you two key strategies, how we will drive profitable growth in the years to come. Akkodis is well positioned in a future fast-growing market. Denis already mentioned several megatrends. For Akkodis, a few megatrends are crucial.
Industrial softwarization and the green transition, combined with the existing tech talent scarcity, drives growth for Akkodis. Thanks to these megatrends, our clients have an increased need to outsource their development demands to us. The development in AI will even accelerate this. We will show you later how we, as Akkodis, use GenAI to scale and to reduce time to market in outsourced development processes. Today, this outsourced R&D market has already a size of EUR 100 billion... and is growing fast. So how will we drive profitable growth in the years to come? Today, as I mentioned, our business split is 35% talent services and 65% in consulting and solutions. As mentioned earlier, the consulting and solution cluster shows higher gross margin. That's why we aim for a share of 75% mid-term. So how will we expand and optimize our consulting business?
We have two key strategies. First, we will transform parts of our existing talent services in higher value consulting business by upselling. I will show an example on the next slide. Second, we will expand and grow our share of high-margin digital practices, making changes within the consulting and solution perimeter. Let me first illustrate the upselling approach. This is an example from the U.S. The customer, Philips Connect, develops fleet management solutions. Only a few years ago, we were a traditional tech talent service partner for them. In this business, you usually have projects with gross margin of a little over 20%. We took the initiative and pitched to the client that we are able to do more. In the next step, we took over the responsibility to manage complete IT teams and timelines. In these managed capacity services, we increase the value add for the client.
It translates into a higher gross margin for us. With Akkodis, we took the next step. Today, we develop for Philips Connect a cloud-based platform using AI for predictive maintenance, supported by our near and offshore delivery centers. Again, the added value for the client increased, and again, this translates to higher gross margin for Akkodis. This might sound a little theoretical, but let's hear from the team and the client how it works.
Philips Connect is revolutionizing trucking. They reached out to Akkodis to engage us in a traditional talent services model. During that process, we also presented the solutions and tech practices under our recently combined businesses, Akkodis. As a result, we engaged with them in a managed capacity model. In this program, we delivered largely out of the U.S., Canada, and Eastern Europe. But when they saw the tech talent in Bulgaria and India that we could bring to the table, they became more convinced that they could entrust Akkodis to run their program and deliver at the highest quality. So from a managed capacity model, we migrated into a fully managed tech solution model, where Akkodis takes end-to-end responsibility for the quality of the product, for the timelines, and for budget.
Today, I'm very proud to report that we were able to deliver a highly successful cloud and IoT application using AI for predictive maintenance for our client in a tech solution model.
The decision to partner with Akkodis as our technology partner was one of the best decisions we've made because we are scaling our business. We're growing very quickly at Philips Connect, and we didn't have the time or the resources to build out all of the specialties within the IT group that we would need to have. What we get with that, with that partnership is really the full menu of services that we need from an IT standpoint. Everything from cloud to architects, product managers, project managers, engineers. It's been a one-stop shop for us to really be able to scale our visions. We didn't need to hold their hand and pull them along. They were more pulling us along, making recommendations, and with that, we were able to make some really good decisions and move much quicker.
Akkodis has even helped us fill 2 permanent roles with senior managers that we have on Philips Connect. So it's been a great partnership, and we look forward to the future with Akkodis.
Engineering a smarter future, together.
A very good example to show how we deliver high-value solutions to our clients. Now, let me come to the second profitable growth strategy: the expansion from our traditional practices into digital practices. Today, our share of high-margin digital practices is already 56%. Midterm, we will move it up to 70%. So what do I mean with moving from traditional practices into digital practices?...Let me explain it with a simple example. In the past, a car development was focused on engineering power, transmission, and design. All three are pure mechanical engineering practices. Today, you need still this knowledge as a basis, but it's by far not enough. Today, smart cars are defined by their connectivity and user experience. You need to know that as a developer, practices like cloud, cybersecurity, or data analytics to design a car for the future.
The same, by the way, goes for washing machine, but also for production equipment in factories of the future. We can offer this unique skill set to our clients. We are in the process worldwide towards expanding digital practices. Let me illustrate with an example of Germany. In 2022, we recognized that our German entity was focused on traditional practices and didn't use offshore delivery capacities. We had a low project margin and limited growth. Mid-2022, we defined a new technology portfolio for Germany. We phased out several commoditized businesses. We upskilled a significant portion of our engineers in digital technologies. We reduced our footprint in Germany and started ramping up offshore capacities in India. Today, just a year later, Germany shows an operative improvement of 200 basis points. Clearly, moving the focus towards digital practices creates profitable growth.
A key element of profitable growth in Germany is offshoring. This is also true for our other entities around the globe. Today, we have dedicated delivery centers on three continents. We have several thousand tech consultants working in our delivery centers globally today. Our ambition in the years to come is to ramp up our delivery capacities significantly. So let me summarize. Why we win today in the market. First, we are recognized by our clients as a new leader with a strong global footprint. We, as Akkodis, have direct access to all Adecco and LHH clients around the globe. We have the capabilities to source and skill tech talents in a market of scarcity. Second, our clients are aware of our strong credentials. We are leading in industries with our tech expertise. The complementary skill set of engineering, IT, and digital makes us a strong partner for them.
We excel in the digital practices like data analytics and AI. Last but not least, we help our clients to scale their projects in a very agile way. We have a powerful base of tech consultants, and in addition, a database of 5 million pre-qualified tech specialists. Furthermore, growing offshore capabilities will create additional value for our clients. So we know where we are, and we know where we want to go. Let's have a look at concrete actions in the next years. Now that we have completed the building phase of Akkodis in 2022 and 2023, we will accelerate in 2024 and 2025 to scale up. We'll increase our sales intensity with global deals. We will further balance our diverse industry split. We will drive profitable growth by expanding into the digital practices and at the same time, by upselling our talent services into consulting.
Lastly, we will grow our offshore delivery capacities over the next years. With this, I'd like to hand over to André, Head of Finance of Akkodis. André, the floor is yours. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Jan, and great being here again in London. Let me share a financial update with you, which also includes an update on the delivery of all the work done on the integration of the last 20 months. But before we dive into the numbers by region, as I know many of you had questions around the acquisition of AKKA, let's first have a look at the performance of our consulting and solutions offering. As you might recall, Europe was the area of focus for the acquisition of AKKA, more specifically in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. So this is the region and line of business where we primarily focus on the value creation from the transaction and the related integration. In Europe, for our consulting and solutions offering, we are sequentially expanding margin in line with plan.
I'm pleased that we reached a margin of 8.3% in the third quarter, driven, as mentioned by Jan, by the expansion of digital practices in Germany, strong delivery in France, and the implementation of cost and initial revenue synergies. With the fourth quarter typically being the strongest in consulting and solutions due to project delivery, we anticipate this annualized sequential margin growth to further expand. What makes me excited is that this trajectory confirms we are on track to deliver the promised value creation being EVA accretive in 2024. The team is very proud of this achievement following 20 months of very hard integration work, whereby the initial phase was focused on delivery of cost synergies, with the focus now switching to pipeline and the delivery of incremental revenue synergies as we enter the next year, 2024.
So now let's have a look at the third quarter and specifically on the dynamics by region, which have been quite materially different year to date. In Europe, now including not only consulting and solutions, but also including our talent service offering, our EBITDA margin is up 160 basis points versus last year. The talent line of business in the Benelux and the UK has shown relative weakness, impacting the average margin for the full region. Also in Europe, we see solid growth, especially if one corrects for some of the margin dilutive offerings we stopped in Germany as we executed the expansion of digital practices. Corrected for this impact, the underlying regional growth was well above 4%. Now, let's look at Asia Pacific.
In this region, our margin is down year-on-year, mainly as a result of our investments in expanding the consulting and solutions business, rebranding, and from a margin decline in Australia, driven by the IT staffing segment. Looking at top line, on one hand, we see solid growth in consulting and solutions, up 11% year-on-year, whereas on the other hand, revenue pressure, we experience revenue pressure in our talent service line, especially in Australia, which was down 16% year to date versus 22. The IT services weakness impacted in Australia, but given the scale of the business, the market impact, the market decline, the impact of the market decline was much more profound in North America. In North America, we have actively responded to a significant decline in volume as our overall market is down by 16% year-on-year.
The team immediately reduced costs, reaching a 55% gross profit recovery ratio in the third quarter. But despite the significant and fast cost reduction efforts, this still leaves a significant EBITDA margin decline for the region. Given the scale of the U.S. business, let me show the developments in North America in a little bit more detail and by service offering on the next page. In North America, on one hand, one sees the material decline in revenue of the IT staffing segment. The impact on billable colleagues was comparable to the impact from COVID. However, this time around, on a more gradual pace. Key is that the cost structure is adapted in a way that we can capture profitable growth for when the cycle turns. And with a 55% recovery ratio implemented in a period within six months, we have implemented these measures.
So all in all, with an 18% decline in the IT talent service offering, the team delivered what is in line with market performance in what is a very tough market climate. At the same time as dealing with the cost reduction measures to offset the gross profit impact from the IT talent service market downturn, the team was also able to invest in fueling our consulting and solutions offering growth. The team levered our capabilities in Europe, especially on our newly acquired capabilities following the merger, contributing to initial revenue synergies and delivering 24% growth. Very significant and a double-digit EBITDA margin. Of course, we started from a smaller base, yeah? But the team is building a great franchise for the future, as the booking number on the slide shows.
I'm really proud of what this team achieved in North America. Now, let's have a closer look at Europe, and especially on how the synergies have contributed to consistent margin expansion. In Europe, we have expanded our margin sequentially from 2021, delivering on our synergy target set at the start of the merger. The 2021 number is a combination of the two standalone reports from before the merger, from both AKKA and Modis, but it helps to illustrate the sequential impact from deal synergies since the closing in February 2022. From the year 2023 versus 2022, most of the year-on-year margin improvement does come from synergies, but the average margin is also impacted by weakness in the talent market in North EMEA and some one-offs in the consulting market in the Benelux region.
Together, this led to a net 7% EBITDA margin for the region for the combined offerings, being both consulting and solutions and our talent offering year to date. In addition to this margin expansion, we also deliver on cash conversion, having improved our underlying DSO. We are pleased with this trajectory so far and confident on the implementation of our strategy to expand margin further. Now, let me show you the key levers by which we plan to expand our margin further on the next page. This shows the bridge for our total business unit at Akkodis, starting from the last 12 months margin of 6%. Lever one, portfolio offering mix. With consulting solutions in North America growing at a double-digit rate and double-digit margin, we have, for example, a very favorable effect on the mix of the portfolio. Lever two, project excellence.
Jan mentioned the improvement in Germany, but we still have room to improve utilization and daily rates further in consulting and solutions, which is having a material impact on the average margin for our consulting and solutions line in Europe overall. In addition, in 2023, in APAC, as I mentioned earlier, we invested in our consulting line of business. We expect to see positive impact from this investment in 2024 and 2025. Lever 3, global delivery. Now, many people think about wage arbitration. That is not unimportant, but even more important is the source of talent in what is a talent-scarce market globally. This is essential for FTE and thus revenue growth.
Now, global delivery goes hand in hand with lever 4, global deals, because selling larger and multi-year projects drives revenue synergies, and it allows for a higher degree of global delivery as part of the solution delivery for our clients. Finally, number 5, SG&A leverage. With scale comes SG&A leverage. Our group-wide cost and simplification initiatives come at the right moment for Akkodis to also drive this wave, to drive further cost synergies and reach a contribution to and contribute to our margin, midterm margin target of 10%. Shortly, Jan will come back on stage, but before that, let me summarize. 1, we focus on in-market performance, including improving our offering mix. 2, we build and leverage our global delivery platform, amplified by global deals. And 3, we deliver on our cost and revenue synergy plan. And with this, back to you, Jan.
Thank you, André. So let's come to the key takeaways. We created Akkodis, and we play in a growing market with significant market opportunities. We are already seen by our clients as a key player in the Smart Industry. We are executing on a clear plan to drive profitable growth, a relentless focus on upselling, expanding, and growing digital practices. We are able to win in our market because of our deep industry competence in combination with a huge variety of skills in engineering, IT, and digital. We are delivering the promised value creation from the AKKA acquisition. Last but not least, improving financial performance year by year.... Let's engineer a smarter future together. Thank you. So, we are coming now to the next topic of today, the Akkodis Tech Roadshow. We would like to show you now four selected projects we are working on.
We will show you, for example, one example from Life Sciences, how we brought engineering, IT, data analytics, and AI solutions together to support our clients. Next, we have a demo where we will show you how data-driven engineering will improve the sustainability in the Aerospace industry. In the Automotive section, we will tackle the topic of battery technology, which is key for the future mobility. And last but not least, of course, we have to talk about AI and GenAI. We are using and developing AI solutions for our clients since many years. We will show you what is possible with our GenAI agent to scale up and accelerate the product development process. At this moment, I would like to say thank you to those that joined us for the live stream. We pause now until 12:30 P.M. GMT local time.
Good afternoon, and welcome back to our Capital Markets Day. I am Gaëlle de la Fosse, the President of LHH. This morning, you've seen how Akkodis has transformed in a Smart Industry powerhouse. Today, I'm excited to show you how LHH has evolved over the past 18 months, and how we've created a new powerhouse in the professional talent market. We are now a clear leader in this space. Last Capital Markets Day, I was less than 60 days into the job. The Adecco Group had announced its future work strategy, and the LHH Global Business Unit had existed for just over 1 year. This had meant putting together the original LHH brand, the outplacement leader you know, with the 7 distinct professional recruitment brands the group had in its portfolio. We started to rebrand the recruitment business in March of 2022 in the U.S.
After that, we rolled out all our key markets, and today, 90% of our recruitment business operates as LHH. So why did we do this? Well, we believed that serving our clients across the talent life cycle as one single professional talent solutions player presented a significant profitable growth opportunity. And today, I'll show you how we're progressing as the new LHH, now a leading global professional talent solutions player in a market with positive structural trends and a new ability to capture profitable growth. Our business is structured in the five interconnected business lines that you see here. We go to market mainly through the LHH brand, but the businesses also use the Ezra, General Assembly, Hired, and Pontoon brands to market select services.
In 2022, the business generated a revenue of EUR 1.9 billion globally, with over 50% of revenue generated in the U.S. Our ambitious transformation has been driven by the collective effort and passion of our 10,000 colleagues around the world. Now look at how the new LHH serves clients throughout the entire professional talent life cycle, and why it matters to our clients. As Denis pointed out earlier, the world of work has changed tremendously and become increasingly complex. Talent has become a true competitive advantage. Companies must successfully tackle a rising number of talent issues, especially for their white-collar populations. Hybrid work, talent scarcity, the need for new emerging skills, massive employee engagement and retention issues, together with a multigenerational workforce with very different expectations towards work.
So this is why human capital has become a top priorities for CEOs, and why they're investing more in this space. Recent studies show that the companies that invest in their talent see clear benefits to their top line and are more likely to ensure their organizations are ready for the future. Let's take a topic like employee retention for instance. Historically, this was not a topic the C-suite had to worry much about. In the new world of work, retention has become business-critical, and two out of three CEOs say retaining their best talent is now a key priority. But this isn't easy. It requires attracting and hiring the right talent in the first place, onboarding them effectively, developing their skills, giving them multiple career paths and promotion opportunities, making sure they have well-trained managers, and building a strong and diverse company culture.
What's also clear is that as these topics become increasingly business-critical, companies can no longer approach them in isolation because they're all interdependent. The talent lifecycle must be approached holistically to have the desired impact. But the market is very fragmented, and most players in the HR space provide point solutions that companies are having trouble connecting. And today, the new LHH is among the few global players able to provide solutions for clients across the entire talent lifecycle as one single expert partner. Professional talent services is a large and dynamic market, which holds strong growth potential for LHH. With the combined services we provide, we have now access to a EUR 400 billion market. We all know that these markets have been volatile during and after COVID, with unprecedented ups and downs.
We believe that the strong underlying need for talent services will continue to drive market potential upwards in the midterm. This provides us with very positive growth opportunities, and we're now in a unique position to capture increasing market share. In addition, our balanced mix of cyclical and countercyclical businesses also gives us more stability across the economic cycles. Now let me share with you how we cover the different stages of the talent lifecycle, starting with talent identification and sourcing. I already mentioned that we had combined the strengths of seven leading professional recruitment brands. This has actually created a new global leader in professional recruitment. LHH Recruitment Solutions helps identify and attract the right talent, whether companies need full-time employees or temporary resources to meet their business goals.
We're able to support companies from hiring new individual experts to building entire departments or functions, placing professional talent at all levels of seniority, from entry roles to mid-level managers and executives. The core of our business in this space is focused on permanent and temporary staffing. For high-volume needs, we provide MSP and RPO services through Pontoon. As you will see later on, MSP is a key growth lever for Adecco. Next, in a time of talent scarcity, the area of talent creation, upskilling, and reskilling is becoming increasingly important. Companies are investing more in training and skill building for their employees to meet their transformation needs. Especially now with the advances in AI, tech is the number one area where companies need re- and upskilling. At LHH, we have General Assembly, the top brand in this space.
You might know General Assembly mainly as a B2C brand, but we have significantly developed the enterprise side, where we partner with blue-chip companies across multiple industries. We've already integrated AI modules into both our consumer and enterprise courses and have created new AI-specific courses, which are gaining strong traction in the market. We do not only up- and reskill existing talent for our clients. With the Hire Train Deploy services we launched a few months ago, General Assembly now offers to create the new talent our clients want but can't easily find in the market, job-ready from day one. Moving to the next phase of the talent lifecycle, talent development and culture. As the world of work has seen major shifts, so has the role of the leader.
We've just discussed the need for up- and reskilling, but there's also a growing need for modern leaders to develop soft skills, including communication, emotional intelligence, trust building, and collaboration, so that they can be effective in this new environment. LHH enables organizations to develop the skills necessary for their leaders and their teams to thrive through culture and leadership consulting, behavioral assessments, team leadership programs, and individual coaching through Ezra. Lastly, in the talent mobility and outplacement space, we see our clients facing complex challenges caused by the unprecedented combination of uncertain geopolitical and macroeconomic conditions, together with a shortage of talent. And helping companies transition their people to new careers, whether inside or outside their organization, is where LHH comes in, and we're proud to be the undisputed number one global player in this segment. Finally, our advisory team.
They connect all of these capabilities, helping clients see interdependencies and trade-offs as they make decisions on any combination of these four areas. In essence, advisory is set up to drive downstream revenue by positioning us more broadly on our clients' talent strategy issues. To summarize, LHH is a new talent solutions leader with a powerful combination of market-leading offerings, with a unique and distinctive value proposition on the market. Let's now look at some examples of how LHH is growing market share and delivering value via our portfolio of solutions. More and more of our clients are engaging with us across multiple stages of the talent lifecycle, resulting in profitable growth opportunities and enhanced customer loyalty. In each of the case studies on this slide, our relationship with these clients started with a single solution.
We've successfully expanded these relationships, growing across multiple countries to encompass the breadth of services highlighted here. On the first example, we showcase how we grew our relationship with a pharma and biotech industry client. In this case, LHH began as a transactional advisor for Career Transition services and quickly evolved into a strategic partner. As the company embarked on the execution of their new growth strategy, their leadership recognized that successful execution was dependent on a significant shift in their overall approach to talent and culture. They believed every element of their talent strategy needed to be revisited. Through LHH's breadth of services and internal relationships, we were able to establish a full 360 view of the client requirements. We developed a comprehensive coaching and leadership development program and provided internal mobility services to help drive employee satisfaction and retention.
Our support here also extends to senior executives, who we guide through internal career developments and external transitions. Thanks to our collaboration, we are proud that the client has received multiple industry awards for their innovative approach to leadership and performance management. In the middle of the slide, we highlight a world-leading food and beverages conglomerate, a longtime client in outplacement and recruitment. Building on our client relationships, we were uniquely positioned to help them more globally in a wide-scale talent transformation. As in the first case, their top leaders believe that their talent is at the heart of their performance. The company wanted to shift from a hierarchical structure to a more collaborative and flexible talent ecosystem. They wanted to empower individuals, create personal learning journeys, and develop a strong internal talent pipeline, creating a true shift in their culture and new ways of working.
We were able to significantly expand our revenue with this client, offering a powerful combination of coaching and leadership development programs, as well as mobility services for new managers and high potentials. The third example is a long-standing global professional services client that launched a large cost optimization and business transformation. While LHH's primary focus was on outplacement, the client also turned to us in parallel for support for talent development and recruitment. Overall, LHH has engaged in more than 3,000 of their employees around the world across multiple areas of the talent lifecycle. LHH has been an all-encompassing partner for this client, guiding transitioning employees, developing the skills of their existing teams, and boosting their recruitment efforts in many countries. In short, these examples show how LHH has become the go-to partner for these clients.
By helping them solve their professional challenges as one source of comprehensive solutions, we are creating new growth opportunities with accretive margins and increasing business stickiness. And in all three cases, the strength of the Adecco Group is also fully present, with Adecco and Akkodis also supporting these clients, thanks to cross GBU referrals and cross-selling. Let's now turn to LHH's strategic priorities. Our first priority is to continue to strengthen our leadership positions and grow market share through relentless focus on execution, providing the best service for our customers. Second, we are boosting digital innovation, investing in data and technology to enhance our service capabilities and keep us at the forefront of industry advancements, which is critical to maintaining a winning, our winning edge in the market. Third, now that we're integrated, we are focused on accelerating portfolio selling.
That means selling to our current clients a wider range of services across our portfolio. And each year, we serve about 15,000 clients, and most of them buy only from one of our verticals, so there's a lot of potential. And as the client examples illustrated, this is a key lever to grow our revenue, increase our margins, and create stronger client stickiness. Fourth, we're simplifying our organization to improve responsiveness and agility while improving efficiency and cost. We're simplifying and managing costs in all our businesses, and our new integrated business model has also given new opportunities for synergies. Moving now to Career Transition and mobility. LHH Career Transition has been the number one player in the outplacement industry for years, commanding over 20% of the market.
We support the largest companies in the world and help more than 500,000 people each year transition to new jobs. We decided to protect capacity during the 2021, 2022 market downturn in the outplacement activity, and this has really paid off. The business was very well-positioned to capture the strong market rebound we saw this year. Even as layoffs have slowed down in the tech sector, we're continuing to see restructurings increase in multiple sectors, such as financial services, healthcare, and retail. Year to date, we've experienced revenue growth of nearly 80%, and the business has gained significant market share with over 2,600 new logos. As a single brand, we're also driving meaningful operational synergies with the recruitment business to drive up both engagement and placement rates.
Because having a recruitment arm connected to outplacement is proving to be a real competitive advantage. Clients clearly understand the value it brings, and operationally for us, it improves our delivery KPIs. Market leadership isn't simply about scale and global reach. Innovation is the key requirement to staying number one, and this is why we're proud that in 2023, thanks to our innovative solutions, LHH has been recognized as a star performer by the Everest Group, a leading ranking authority in our industry. As the leader, LHH will continue to innovate, setting the course for the industry. Our research is clear: the industry is shifting rapidly. Today, an increasing number of people who lose their jobs are forced to explore career pivots. There is simply no more demand for the jobs they had been doing.
With LHH's new AI-driven tool, the LHH Career Canvas, which we've co-built with clients and outplacement candidates, we will be able to help individuals find new careers more quickly. Career Canvas helps people explore new careers in different industries and functions based on today's rapidly changing labor market. Using GenAI, the tool helps candidates align their interests, career passions, and skills to the jobs that are available now in the market. Career Canvas is then able to connect job seekers to a variety of LHH resources that can support application and interview preparation. This effort is consistent with the group's overall strategy to be the leader in AI, with the recently announced collaboration with Microsoft.
Beyond Career Canvas, LHH has several new AI-driven products in the pipeline for 2024 and 2025 that will help people reinvent their careers and also increase the productivity of our teams and secure one of the most important KPIs for our clients, the number of people laid off who find jobs thanks to LHH's outplacement programs. Moving to leadership development, which was previously known as learning and development. This is also part of LHH's historical assets. As I mentioned, the skills that leaders need to guide today's workforce are changing. Companies are increasingly investing in developing the soft skills of their teams, which is, again, an opportunity for growth for us. Soft skills are valued more and more as key drivers of productivity, innovation, and collaboration.
LHH has a long track record of developing award-winning leadership programs, and in 2023, once again, we earned several high-profile industry awards. Each year, LHH assesses, develops, and coaches over 50,000 professionals across numerous Fortune 500 companies. We support all types of leaders, from first-time managers to executives. Over the last 6 months, in order to be able to capture market growth in a more profitable way, we've refocused our portfolio to better align to current market needs and implement more scalable delivery models. One example of our successful programs, shown on the right side, is our Women in Leadership program. This program enables organizations to make meaningful progress in gender parity and expand their leadership pipeline of women. As with all our programs, this leadership journey includes a combination of assessments, interactive development workshops, and one-on-one coaching.
Coaching, it's a key element of the learning journey, where leaders receive personalized support to accelerate their development. This year, to simplify our go-to-market, LHH has combined all its coaching offering in Ezra, our digital coaching platform. We're continuing to invest to expand Ezra, with the business already delivering excellent growth and strong gross margin levels. It's already a market leader, and as you will see shortly, there's still significant opportunity in this business. So before I pass it on to Nick Goldberg, the Head of Ezra, we'd like to show you a quick video.
When we ask the participants at the end of the program what had the most impact on them, and Ezra Coaching tends to come up on top. It improves the engagement of our employees and also improves the retention of our employees.
With the support of coaching, we're seeing people new to our organization really succeeding now, which is really elevating our performance.
I'm part of the women's network, and we started coaching programs specifically for women, and we see a massive difference. So as a result of coaching, our organization has changed, not just behaviorally, but our strategic goals has actually had a uplift.
I would say the biggest impact that coaching has had at Cummins is just to open up a culture of feedback. It wasn't something that we had before, and I think the more people are receiving coaching, the better it's getting.
This is a longer-term investment. You know, it can't be solved in a month. It'll be 6, 12, where we'll see the value of more senior leaders done a six-month program who have expressed a desire to extend that program. I guess what we're seeing is the groundswell is coming from our people wanting more.
The positive impacts are people are feeling invested in. The feedback we have is amazing. They absolutely love the opportunity and the investment in their own kind of personal skills. People love it, and people are wanting it.
Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Nick Goldberg, the founder and head of Ezra. Ezra is a self-created venture within the Adecco Group. By combining entrepreneurial and agile mindsets with the power of the Adecco Group, we have built a business that is disrupting, changing, and growing an entire category. Last year, I stood on this stage and introduced Ezra to all of you and talked about how we democratized one-to-one coaching. A year on, we are continuing to have significant impact on individuals and over 600 organizations all over the world. We just wrapped up Q3 with a significant milestone. In September, we delivered nearly 20,000 sessions in 91 countries in 26 different languages. That's the kind of momentum we've got in this business right now, as it's nearly double what we did the previous September.
Part of our momentum is driven by our strategy to evolve our product and extend our portfolio. So let me show you how. Last year, I introduced Ezra, the yellow box you see on the screen. Ezra is a one-to-one unlimited coaching service, typically delivered to mid and senior level managers in an unlimited fashion over a six-month period. And companies buy it in two ways. Firstly, they buy it and align it to leadership development programs in order to, in order to sustain that development and give people a more personalized experience. Some of those programs Gaëlle discussed, like Women in Leadership or high potential programs. And the other way that companies buy Ezra is they pre-pay for hundreds or thousands of licenses to be able to offer coaching at scale to mid and senior managers in their organization. And there are two main reasons behind Ezra's growth.
Firstly, it's our obsession with the coach quality and the user experience, and secondly, it's the fact that we continually measure the impact and the ROI for the clients that buy it, and I'll get back to more of that in a moment. We wanted to extend our portfolio, and during the pandemic, it became apparent that executives had got far more used to receiving support and advice on a one-to-one online basis. We had clients like Vodafone and Spotify who came to us and said, "You're delivering Ezra to all of our mid and senior level managers, but our executives also need this service, so can you develop an executive version of Ezra?" And working with our colleagues at LHH, who had delivered executive coaching for over 50 years, we co-created a new solution, Ezra X.
We needed to evolve Ezra, so we did a couple of things. The first thing we did is we added even better coaches, more credible, more qualified coaches that could stand toe to toe with some of the most senior executives around the world and deliver a quality service. And secondly, we needed to improve the platform, so we added more flexibility, more ability for the coachee or the executive to choose the length of their session. We also added a couple of other things, something called tripartite meetings, where the executive will meet not just with their coach, but with their line manager as well at the beginning and end of the program to track their progress. And finally, a feature that proves incredibly popular, our executive assistant scheduling service.
The executive assistant of our executive coachees have the ability to have a separate login and manage the appointments and the calendar of the executives, something that's incredibly important for user engagement. The other advantage of coaching some of the most senior executives in the world is they turn into buyers of our service, and they want to buy Ezra for their teams or for their entire departments. That led us to our third solution, Focus. As I've explained, we coach mid and senior managers, then we moved into the executive space, but there are tens of thousands of frontline leaders and individual contributors that our service wasn't stretching to. We developed Focus. Focus is a combination of one-to-one coaching, microlearning, and AI. Clients pick from a catalog of very specific career moments for large volumes of people.
The participants then receive three coaching sessions with a professional coach, together with very specific microlearning nudges and our digital assistant, Kai. And what Kai does is it analyzes the answers that people give through their microlearning, gives them in-the-moment feedback, and prepares them for their next coaching session. Out of all of the solutions we've developed, Focus has been our best launch yet. We only launched in July, and we have several companies buying it for thousands of individuals in some of the largest organizations in the world with fantastic results. Focus gives us the ability, by combining coaching with AI, to scale at a price point that makes it possible for clients to give this to tens of thousands of people, whilst also providing strong gross margins for the group.
And as I said, one of our biggest factors for growth is our ability to measure the impact of the work that we do. This is one of the areas that stands us out in the market, and we do that in three ways. Firstly, every single session that somebody has on any of our apps is rated. And across, as Denis said, across 400,000 sessions since we started, we're still averaging around 4.9 out of 5, which is something we're incredibly proud of and keeps the user coming back for more and more sessions. The second area is something called the Ezra Measure. Our clients choose the behaviors that they're looking to develop, that they believe are gonna be the most important behaviors for them developing their organization.
We measure individuals' proficiency in those behaviors at the beginning of a program and at the end of the program in a very simple user experience. What we're then able to do is show the individual and the organization the progress that has been made around the different behaviors that they're looking to develop. Third, and finally, and kind of the nirvana moment, is that we're able to show business impact. When we partner, for example, with one of the largest banks in the world, they give Ezra to 500 call center managers in APAC, and they don't give Ezra to the other 500 call center managers....
What they did at the end of the year is they looked at the productivity of those individuals who worked for managers that had had an Ezra coach versus those teams that hadn't, and there was an 18% difference in the productivity of those that had received our coaching versus those that hadn't. Now, of course, what that does is it makes our job very easy when it comes to expanding that account, because this bank can see that by providing Ezra has a significant impact on their business at a relatively low cost for the impact that it can have, and it's enabled us to grow and expand that client. Speaking of expanding clients, of our 600 companies that we work with, roughly 400 are what we define as large-scale enterprises.
This actually is a real slide from a real client, who you can see buys all of the different Ezra propositions for all different moments in people's career and at all different levels. So they'll give Focus to people who are onboarding in their first 100 days, or they'll give Ezra to people on a high potential program or on a transformation or women in leadership program. And then they'll give X or Ezra X to their most senior people when it comes to owning transformation or strategic leadership initiatives, really using everything from our portfolio. And this also is one of our competitive differentiators. In our market, we're the only organization to be able to support individuals right from the top of an organization, right the way down to individual contributors. And to show you what this looks like, again, in a live client.
So this is actually a client that Gaëlle shared with you on a previous slide in a case study that LHH work with across a number of different solutions. And again, being part of the group, we were introduced to this client back in 2020, and we sold them a program for just over 200 people in Canada. And over the last 4 years, you can see how this client has grown with Ezra, not just geographically, but across our entire portfolio, resulting in this year, us delivering over 4,000 programs to over 4,000 people across the world, and we're expecting this to grow again next year. So I shared with you, we have 400 enterprise clients, and I wanted to give you just a little bit of perspective on how big Ezra could be. We have 400 enterprise clients.
Within those clients, they employ 20 million people, and on average, we work with about 0.1% of any given enterprise organization. But there are some organizations where we've managed to expand and grow our solutions to working with 1% of that organization. Only 1% of the entire organization, when actually our service can service the entire organization. So if we can get all of our enterprise clients to service just that 1%, our business could be even bigger. Over the last 4 years, we have grown this business by winning and expanding our customers. We see a massive opportunity ahead of us, and with our expanded portfolio, we believe that we've got all the right tools to maximize this huge opportunity in front of us. Thank you. I'm now gonna pass back to Gaëlle.
Thank you, Nick. So let's now move on to the LHH Recruitment Solutions business. As I mentioned earlier, over the last 18 months, we've made significant changes to our professional recruitment business, integrating seven brands to create a global leader with over 3,000 colleagues. Recruitment Solutions has a very comprehensive portfolio with coverage of multiple practice areas. Every day, we're placing CHROs, accountants, marketing VPs, attorneys, logistics managers, just to name a few. Earlier this year, we've appointed a new leader, Nicolas Buisson. He brings 30 years of experience in global leadership roles in the professional recruitment industry. Since taking over as president of our Global Recruitment Solutions business, he has focused on three priorities: driving consistent performance management and restructuring low-performing areas, leading to about 10% staff reduction, standardizing operational processes, and accelerating on digital and data.
Strategically, Recruitment Solutions has also split its markets into three categories, which enable management to better prioritize investments based on the gross potential of each market. Each category has its specific financial goals that serves as triggers for investment to ensure the right balance between growth and profitability. In terms of performance, Recruitment Solutions has been challenged in the recent quarters. This is mainly due to the market downturn in professional recruitment but also reflects the underperformance in the U.S. operations following the rebrand and introduction of new IT systems. In the U.S., in addition to addressing these issues, management has put in place a clear focus on performance management and taken a series of operational actions to improve service levels and productivity. As a result, we're now delivering top-line performance in line with competition and improving our operational KPIs.
I want to highlight here a few of our operational actions. We've reduced our days to fill by more than 20% by optimizing our delivery processes, and this is key in an industry where speed matters to win the business. We've reduced the time to bill for new hires with revamped onboarding and training programs. We've automated recruiter processes, thanks to digital tools, to increase client and candidate facing time. In addition, having now moved to a single brand, we have considerably increased our ability to sell multiple practice areas to our clients. While we're taking these actions, we do need to recognize that the market headwinds continue. Like our competitors in all countries, we're seeing delays of non-critical project work, extended client hiring cycles, and more reluctance from candidates to change jobs.
But we are confident that the measures we are taking to improve operational execution and to protect capacity will position us to accelerate in the next market cycle and deliver strong margins. I've explained how our priorities cut across all our main business lines, but I'd like now to zoom in on the two priorities that are amplified by our new integrated model: portfolio selling and simplification. Let's start with portfolio selling, a key strategic priority for LHH. As I mentioned before, this means growing our revenue with our current clients by selling them other services from our portfolio, so it doesn't require new acquisition costs. We work with 15,000 clients annually, and there is a potential for growth in all of these accounts. But large accounts are especially critical for the portfolio selling strategy to succeed due to their complex talent needs and the scale of the opportunities.
LHH already works with 90% of the S&P 500, 70% of the FTSE 100, and 75% of the Euronext 100. So among these clients, we've identified 124 strategic accounts for their profitable growth potential. This year, we've considerably strengthened our sales organization to deliver on our portfolio selling objectives. Firstly, LHH has invested in a team of global account directors who work across the entire LHH solutions portfolio, especially serving these strategic accounts and supported by a network of local solution specialists. This new strategic account structure also enables us to cross-sell more effectively with Adecco and Akkodis, because many of our strategic accounts are common. In addition to our new strategic account structure, we've improved sales operations capabilities, providing our sales teams with better visibility on the existing client penetration and potential white spaces.
To encourage more collaboration across business lines, we've put in place a new referral process. Our focus on portfolio selling is already driving incremental growth. On the strategic accounts, there has been +35% increase in clients that buy across more than one product family, and double-digit growth in our strategic accounts year-on-year. Now, moving to our fourth and last priority, simplification. As you see here, we have secured, put in flight or identified more than 90% of LHH target savings, which contribute to the group's global G&A savings target. We have restructured and optimized some low-performing activities in different areas of the business, but the operating model of the new combined LHH also produces operational efficiencies, particularly through shared support services and management synergies at country level. We have streamlined the organization, delayering and optimizing span of control.
Lastly, we're benefiting from the integration of back-office functions with the group. So now looking forward, the execution of our strategy positions us to deliver an EBITDA margin at the higher end of the target corridor. From a cost standpoint, the key levers I outlined on the previous slide have started to flow through and are expected to grow in impact over time. From a revenue perspective, we believe our ambitious strategy can deliver 6%-9% growth year-on-year. We're playing on a large, structurally dynamic market, and we have clear growth drivers... market share expansion supported by digital innovation, clear market prioritization and execution focus, accelerated portfolio selling and growth, especially in strategic accounts, but also across the rest of our client base. And as the professional recruitment market recovers, we also see material upside in this area.
While in outplacement, we don't anticipate the market to drop again so strongly in the next cycle as it did in the immediate post-COVID period. Our investment strategy is focused on the higher growth areas of the business, and as you've seen, we're accelerating our tech and data capabilities. The benefits of our integrated One LHH strategy are already very tangible. We've delivered an 8% EBITDA in Q3 this year, our fourth quarter of sequential EBITDA margin improvement. And LHH has also delivered a 100% cash conversion ratio year to date, supported by working capital discipline. In conclusion, we have built the new LHH into a powerful talent solutions player, uniquely positioned to deliver profitable growth and capture the market opportunities. The newly integrated portfolio of top-tier solutions meets the complex needs of the professional talent space.
It positions LHH as a full-service partner for all professional talent-related challenges. By investing in digital innovation, LHH is growing its market leadership. Management has a clear plan to drive sustainable, profitable growth in recruitment solution when the market recovers. The team is maximizing LHH's impact with a focus on portfolio selling across our solutions to a large client base, particularly with strategic accounts. Last, with our strategy and cost management discipline, we expect to consistently deliver EBITDA margins within the 7%-10% corridor, with a clear path to the higher end of the corridor in the midterm. This is the ambitious progress we have made in building the new LHH. Our group story doesn't end with LHH. We're also significantly strengthening our Adecco business. Now, let me pass it on to Christophe for the Adecco GBU.
Good afternoon. I'm really pleased to be in front of you today, and firstly, let me introduce myself. I'm Christophe Catoir. I've been joining our company 28 years ago, and I'm leading the Adecco Global Business Unit since January 2021. It's my pleasure today to share with you an update about our Adecco GBU, where we stand, how we got there, and why, with all the Adecco leadership team, we feel confident in our ability to continue to improve our performance. But let me come back to our previous Capital Markets Day, 18 months ago. Remember, I did 2 commitments in the name of the Adecco leadership team. The first one was to gain, again, market share. The second one was to collect a strong return on the important investment we did 2 years ago.
I'm really pleased to share with you that we have improved consistently our performance, gaining market share quarter after quarter in a more and more profitable way. But I want to share with you also that we did that in a structural way. We have changed partly our way to operate, reason why this outperformance is for mainly of our geographies. Let me tell you more about Adecco today, 18 months after our previous Capital Markets Day. First, executing on our strategic agenda, we are a more diversified company, which means more resilient, especially in a world of uncertainty. More exposed to integrated solutions. We have grown in perm, outplacement, outsourcing, and upskilling twice faster than in the temp activities. We have also grown faster in APAC and LATAM, more than in the other geography.
We have put in place our omni-channel strategy with more and more revenue coming from our digital end-to-end channel, QAPA, but also from our Adecco Career Center to play more and more global. We are much more diversified. On top of that, we have continuously increased our outperformance versus the competition, gaining market share in a consistent way, quarter after quarter. I'm really pleased to mention that in Q3 this year, recently, we have even enlarged the gap to the competition. Good to mention also that in the, at the same time, we have slightly improved our profitability. Our gross margin is even higher than it was in 2021. We have also started to increase our productivity in Q1, productivity in gross profit by selling FTE, and each quarter we increase our productivity here also in a consistent way.
In August and in September, we have also outperformed not only 2022, where we have put in place our investment plan, but also 2021. At least we have activated a new lever, contributing evenly to the G&A savings plan from our group. As you know, in the staffing industry, cost competitiveness, it's very instrumental in order to gain market share. Today, we have still secured 85% of our G&A savings plan, and 15% has been identified and will be activated in the coming next months. Let me say to you that we feel confident in our ability to reach our target in terms of cost competitiveness, G&A savings. On top of that, it was also a good opportunity to simplify our organization as a global business unit. Less layers, less region, less geographical clusters, less functions.
It means that today, we are more lean in terms of organization and more focused toward our clients and candidates than before. It's an important asset, especially in a growth plan. To summarize, since our last capital market day, we have grown consistently our market share. We have recovered our investment with a strong gross profit by selling FTE increase. We have activated our G&A savings and more to come. More to come, as a leadership team, we feel confident in our ability to continue to outperform the market and to improve our performance. It's based on three topics. The first one, we continue to learn. We continue to learn from the market to start. We have experienced very important changes in the industry mix of the market. You know, tech companies were like a very consistent industry of the future some few quarters ago.
It suffers now, and probably it will come back to a better context in the coming next quarters. Automotive is a transformation, and clearly today, it's a booming industry for us. Probably, we have to transform ourselves to continue to leverage Automotive in the future. We have learned also from our client, and here we see a huge opportunity for us. Facing more and more talent scarcity, contrary to the past, more and more centralized global client, especially this segment of market, has required more than before an ability to be more predictable, to play talent solution in a more strategic way and in a less transactional way. It's a big change. It's a big opportunity. We have learned also from our candidates. On top of the traditional expectation, we see a strong appetite for employability.
The need to make sure those candidates will be supported by organizations like Adecco in order to build their employability for the long term, not only for today. We have learned also from the competition. We have learned that it's better to play omni-channel when you have a full end-to-end digital channel than to be a pure player. It's consistent with the omni-channel strategy we want to play. On top of those learnings, we have also simplified not only our organization, but also our strategy, putting a clear accountability inside our global business unit. On top of that, we have also simplified our performance management, and I will come back on this topic later in my presentation. My message: we feel confident in our ability to continue to improve our performance. Let's deep dive in the simplified strategy. Not completely new, but nevertheless, lots of changes in sight.
2 strategic pillar. 1 is what we call the run the business. Here, we are talking a clear accountability at a local level, at a country level, with an empowerment of our country leaders, leveraging the frame put in place 18 months ago, the one I have presented to you. As you will see, some learnings, some changes, and some enablement by the digital and the data. 2nd change. The change agenda is supported by the evolution of the market, and here we have clearly identified we want to place the opportunity of playing in a more strategic way with some large, centralized multinational. We see a big opportunity to grow fast and to grow in a profitable way. Let me deep dive in the run agenda. The run agenda to start is a question of country-led approach, empowerment about our country leader.
Playing a different game due to the level of maturity of Adecco in those countries, to the economic context, which is different from one country to another one, but also due to the competitive landscape. Here we apply our mixed diversification. Fair to say, and I will explain that in a more tangible way, that we have leveraged a lot of changes in terms of innovation, in terms of way to operate, in order to also duplicate what we have learnt in one country to duplicate in another one. We have adjusted slightly our picture, as mentioned both by Denis before and by Gaëlle, putting MSP as one of the key lever of our run the business strategic pillar.
We see clearly an important dynamic around the MSP solution, based on the fact that more and more company would like to simplify the talent acquisition, having a good orchestration of this one, as it's the most important bottleneck for the growth today. U.S. turnaround is still one of the key piece of our run the business, and we will have the pleasure to invite Geno, our President for North America, to join me later in order to give you an update, to explain why we are pleased with the first achievement we have done in terms of improvement, and what are the next step to play the most important market in the world for the staffing industry. If I want to make it even more tangible, have a look on this picture.
Here you understand that country-led approach means we adapt it to the context and the maturity of the markets. I will explain Europe, APAC, and Geno will explain North America in a more tangible way later. Just let me explain in a simple way, LATAM, EMEA. In those countries, good dynamism in terms of market, important ability for us to gain market share in staffing and outsourcing, we nurture the growth. And I'm pleased to see that during the first three quarters of this year, we have grown by 15% our revenue in APAC and by 20% in LATAM. If I go to the first box, here, Europe diversify. Italy is probably the best example of our diversification. In Europe, we have consistent market share, and we have a good brand reputation also.
We saw an opportunity on top of a good execution of our strategic roadmap to diversify for new solution and new channel. Italy has demonstrated it's a powerful game. 9% growth each year since four years on average, and with a very strong gain of market share and a profitability above 7% EBITDA. It means we can grow, improving our market share, our profitability. Here, two changes which has been put in place on top of the very disciplined execution of our plan. The first one, we have put a lot of focus on perm and outsourcing, and we have grown three times and four times faster in those areas than in the temp activity. A creative solution and space to grow fast. Second, we had an agenda in terms of innovation, leveraging AI locally.
We have played this semi not only in the traditional way, but we have created an initiative which called Xplore, in order to combine the beauty of two channels, an acquisition of our client, especially the very small one, with digital marketing campaign and the transformation of those opportunities with our Adecco Career Center. It has been instrumental to support the growth of small and medium. If I jump in the growth agenda for APAC, and probably Australia is one of the best example to explain this strategy. APAC, a good dynamism of the market, clearly a profitable market, but at the same time, a market share we can improve. Australia is a good example. That's the fifth market in the world in terms of potential. Our market share is below 1%. We have put a lot of focus to grow.
We have invested in a selective way in this country, especially in the large segment. I'm pleased to see that we have released in Q3 a growth of 85% of our revenue in this market. Behind that, there is a game we have played also with our colleagues from Akkodis. One of the big win has been with the Defence Force , where they were looking for a company able to staff all the typology of position. Akkodis has been instrumental to lead the project and to empower the project with technology. Having the opportunity to staff at scale with Adecco has created the momentum. We won this contract. We are talking about a multi-year contract, and the total contract spent is more than EUR 1.2 billion. It's one of the example we have for this growth strategy with APAC.
Third strategy is the one we apply for North America. As you know, we are in the middle of the turnaround plan we have for North America. We have registered some very promising improvement and more to come. But to explain the case of North America, I would like to welcome Geno Cutolo, who is the President for North America, to explain this update, those achievement, and the next step. Please join me on stage.
Christophe, thank you for that wonderful introduction. It's great to be here today. This week is actually my one-year anniversary with Adecco, so it's a great time for me to reflect on the past year, share some of our accomplishments, as well as what lies ahead for the U.S. team. I'll start with sharing a little bit about my background. I spent the last two decades in North American staffing industry, and I actually started my career at Adia in 1996, and that was before Adia merged with Ecco to form Adecco. After that, I went on to hold several leadership roles, where I lived and led through several economic cycles and led several successful turnarounds. Now, most recently, I served as the U.S. CEO for a global competitor.
During my tenure, we doubled the size of that business to almost EUR 2 billion, and that was through organic growth and strategic M&A. ... Year after year, the organization produced record EBITDA performance. Then last November, I came back home to Adecco. I was eager to uncover the cracks in our foundation. I wanted to understand what caused Adecco's great legacy to falter. And so I look forward to sharing our own diagnosis of the US business, which brings me to our agenda for today. Christophe spoke earlier about the global run and change strategy, and he's right. But we're making systematic progress in our turnaround, and so that we can move into that full run mode. Now, before we could run, we had to reset our foundation.
So today, I'll share the actions that we've taken to address the fundamentals over the past year and the metrics that prove that we're on the right track. Now, we know it's not an overnight journey, so we'll map out the key levers and the benchmarks that will support our incremental and our sustained growth in the coming years. Now, our ambition is to recover and regain market leadership in the U.S. in the staffing industry. So let's dive in. First, I came to Adecco with no assumptions. I spent several months listening and learning. I spent time with colleagues in every part of the U.S. and across the globe. And in the U.S., there was three fundamentals for us to address so that we could move into run mode. First, our organization structure was overly complex and unclear, too many layers.
Second, our ways of working lacked customer focus, customer centricity, and our culture was suffering from severe change fatigue and instability. So our first order of business in resetting the foundation was a new and simple organization structure. In April, we reorganized our business, instantly removing layers and reinforcing accountability at the market level. Now, previously, we were set up around industry verticals. Now, we preserved vertical expertise, but only where it was proven successful, like in national sales and in niche divisions like Medical & Science . Now, meanwhile, we divided our footprint into three geographic regions: East, Central, and West. The strongest leaders were appointed at the helm of each of those three regions, and underneath them, also into area leadership roles. This is a mix of proven internal performers and top external talent with fresh perspectives.
Today, these leaders are fully empowered and laser-focused on growth and profit in their geographies. Now, we preserved vertical sales expertise in sales so as not to lose industry focus, but we had to fix the operations and get closer to our customers. Now, this shift achieved a lower cost to serve, and it majorly contributed to our total savings this year. More on that later. Now, key to our recovery was not just addressing our structure, but it was in clarifying and improving our ways of working. So first, we reinvigorated our branch network, reigniting our local sales engine, ensuring alignment between sales and delivery, and this is underpinned by new recruiter and branch manager compensation plans. We incentivized the behaviors that will move the needle in our business. Now, why the branch focus? Branches are a critical lever in our channel mix.
They allow us to capture small and medium business, higher margin opportunities. Now, this is especially important in commercial staffing, where grassroots of development of clients and associates happens in the communities that we serve. It also makes us less affected by market downturns. Now, simultaneously, we're bolstering our other channels like perm, onsites, and digital. We're expanding into more areas of existing customers, and we're breaking into recession-proof and countercyclical business, like discount retailers and on-demand delivery services. We're also targeting fast-moving, high-growth industries. Now, you can see some recent wins over the past 12 months. This is one area where we are building resilience through diversification.
Now, one great example is an Automotive company and a long-time client, but we've been selected for their electric vehicle expansion, and we've also become their national partner in staffing their retiree program, and we've engaged the Akkodis, and through our collaboration, differentiating ourselves again, future-proofing our customer's business and our own. Now, the estimated five-year value of just those new contracts, well over EUR 100 million. Now, looking across our channel mix, these changes to our ways of working are playing a huge role in our recovery and creating resilience. Now, it takes work every day, and with each decision we make, our goal is to remain like geese in a V formation. We're all flying in the same direction. We know the who, the what, and the why, and we all know exactly where we're going.
Now, there's no clearer diagnosis of our U.S. business than our need to realign on our DNA, to get back to who Adecco is. Now, it's no secret that there's been a number of leaders over the U.S. market over the past several years. With each leader came more change, pivot, and ultimately disruption for our people. So this year, the central message from our leadership team, and fully backed by Christophe at the global level, has been one of stability, trust, and a commitment to staying the course. Now, at the same time, we've said the path ahead will require a hunger, determination, hard work, and an undying desire to win together every day. We've asked colleagues to treat this year as a new day one at our organization, and we've challenged them to believe or leave, and overwhelmingly, they believe.
Now, I think this is best demonstrated by the success metrics we're seeing this year. As I shared earlier, our reorganization had a major contribution to a $30 million SG&A reduction, which we have delivered this year. Some other key improvements in productivity, year-over-year, we're seeing a 15% increase in gross profit per selling FTE. We're seeing a 30% boost in branch profitability and a 36% increase in order fulfillment. Now, we expect these metrics to continue to increase for the remainder of this year and beyond. Now, on culture, year-over-year, we've seen a 33% reduction in voluntary turnover, and our colleague engagement scores are outpacing global benchmarks with a strong 8.5 out of 10 rating.
Now, our most recent people scorecard show that colleague well-being is on the rise, and they, they say our strengths are in management support, peer relationships, and meaningful work. Now, meaningful work is a big one for me personally. I always say that staffing, at its core, is very simple. When we provide people work, we enable them to meet their most basic of human necessities that we all have on this planet. And most importantly, we never forget that our work has the ability to positively impact people's lives and that of their families. And this is deeply rooted in our DNA. It's our legacy at Adecco. When we keep this at the heart of our work, we'll be the employer of choice to the best talent and the partner of choice to the best companies.
Now, this drives very high levels of engagement, and of course, that translates into higher levels of performance and productivity. Now, those are some of our internal metrics. Let's bring the picture into full view against the backdrop of the external market. Now, at the start of this year, and for the first time in 20 quarters, we beat the competitive market in performance, and we've done that now for 3 consecutive quarters. Now, you can see the average of our public competitors has been trending downwards, while Adecco has been on an upward trajectory. Now, we're very proud of this, but we're equally realistic. It will take time to complete our turnaround and regain market leadership. We have a simple organization structure, we have clear ways of working, and our colleagues are bought in and becoming a winning team.
We're ready to run fast and execute on a few strategic levers better than ever. Now, we've talked about the rebalancing of our channel mix, our branch network, and continued growth in higher-margin, small, and medium accounts. We're also accelerating on-site and perm. We're expanding our reach with existing customers, pursuing and closing countercyclical and recession-proof projects. We've got strong momentum in fast-moving, high-growth industries. Now, this same thinking applies to MSP. It's another area that we're accelerating. Now, I appreciate MSP because it's a large space. It's almost blue sky. We are targeting the most profitable sectors for our growth. Now, the global MSP market is over $200 billion, with 55% of that in the U.S. alone, and that's projected to continue to grow rapidly. So in the U.S., we'll capture market share from 3 angles. First, directly driving managed services with Adecco....
We're accelerating our collaboration with Pontoon, and we're rapidly expanding into the external MSP marketplace. Now, I also want to touch on our digital. This is critical to our channel mix and our future. Now, in the months and years ahead, we will scale our digital solutions, and one project in flight is our on-demand gig platform. Now, earlier this year, we sunset Adia, which was our former gig platform in the US, but we see great potential in QAPA technology. It's an Adecco product in France that has seen exponential growth this year, and we're collaborating with the French team to test the product, and we're designing our first iteration of the technology in the US. Now, what's really exciting is that a few of our customers have agreed to test the product with us.
So when we come out, we'll know our offering is scalable, more competitive, and designed to meet the real needs of the market because we're co-building it with our customers and our associates. Now, last, of course, is G&A savings. We will always prioritize, in line with the Adecco Group, a competitive cost to serve, and we will continue to optimize our cost structure. We'll make responsible investments that only drive our business forward. Now, like I said earlier, this is not an overnight journey. It takes time to turn around a business of this size and magnitude. But we'll know it's working by showing improvement quarter-over-quarter across these key metrics. Now, the first four metrics are perfectly aligned with what Christophe is driving across the globe.
For us, in the U.S., we're also watching closely the number of lives that we impact and the number of customers that we're supporting. We're tracking those each week, each month, each quarter, each year, and you can see where we are today as we recover and stabilize. Now, I'm also happy to report that we made a profit in Q3. Now, our ambition is to sit securely in the market leader position. For us, this is practical and attainable, and we'll focus on incremental progress quarter-over-quarter, and of course, delivering sustainable profit and growth. Now, in closing, I stand here today on behalf of our U.S. team, fully committed to staying this course. With a strong and resilient foundation, we'll be relentless in getting better every day and executing the fundamentals right every time.
Now, this was a first step for us to get back to growth. We'll continue to make incremental progress until we're securely planted at the top of our industry. Now, we know this is only the beginning of our story, and we have a journey ahead of us, but our colleagues are energized. We believe in Adecco's legacy. Our hearts beat Adecco red, and we're hungry to become a winning team again. I'm grateful to have a front row seat to witness and to lead our turnaround and the limitless possibilities ahead of us in the years to come. Strap in! It's gonna be a great ride. Thank you. I'm happy to take questions during our Q&A, and I'll pass the floor back to Christophe.
Thank you, Geno, and I think what you have explained, the update about the U.S., is a clear demonstration of an agenda owned at the country level, facing the situation of the country in order to lead the game and to be part of the leader in each of our country. Let me close this session. The run, the business, is a very exciting journey for all of our country leader. They own, they are empowered, and they feel accountable about this responsibility to drive the performance. And believe me, there's no luck to see the improvement of the performance those last quarters, and we are here to make it continue. But I would like also to speak about our another exciting journey, which is the change part.
I was mentioning previously in this presentation that we see some big opportunities coming from our customers, and one is not completely new. We have learned since some few years, creating a new way to operate with some few but targeted client. How to play another game, how to operate differently for client who are global, centralized, and who would like to play talent solution as a strategic asset and not as a commodity. We have created, with some of them, what we call a bespoke end-to-end talent supply chain, and it has been fully empowered by all the ingredients we could put in terms of technology enablement. They have been instrumental in order to create a differentiator on the market. Let me tell you the first of the source client, where we have learned so much.
In 2019, just before the COVID period, this logistic player, one of the most important in the world, has been asking to us: "Could you provide us 60,000 associates?"... in a timing of six months, what has been explained by Jean-Christophe before. Believe me, it was a complex challenge because our industry used to be decentralized, with a federation of countries, a federation of numerous on-site and branches, more than 4,000 for Adecco. But we have accepted the deal. Believe me, it has been a demanding journey, but a fruitful one. We have learned so much. We have learned so much because at the end of the day, on top of the 6,000 associates to recruit, we were talking about 12 countries, 150 sites.
After this journey, we have been able to not only to improve our delivery efficiency, which is probably the most important driver of competitiveness today when the candidate are scarce. As you can see, we have registered more than 95% fill rate in a scarce market, but we did that with an entire satisfaction from the client, more than 50+ NPS. What did we learned? We learned first to know how to have a very pragmatic approach, client by client, talking about large multinational with more than EUR 500 million spent per year. It was not a conceptual view of the client, it was just a clear stickiness to the expectation. Here you have an example of the process we have drafted with a client.
It's not rocket science, it's pretty pragmatic, but what is behind is also lots of pieces of technology at every place, playing a hybrid model with human and technology. Let me develop some few things. First, we have managed data at scale. It means for us to play in a strategic way, means to anticipate the needs, but also the bottleneck built by the scarcity. To understand how we can predict our ability to deliver the service, where we can source, and where we need to build the competencies. Second, we have created also an engine to communicate in the name of the client, to create an appetite for some jobs where the reputation is not so appealing for the candidate. And the reality is the journey can be okay, provided you explain what is behind.
We have created a chatbot, an internal technology, and now with this chatbot, we have more than 2 million conversations in a, in a month. We are collecting such a lot of data, and on top of that, it enabled to have a matching tool, which is not only based on the resume, but much more on the information we can collect. Some new organizational footprint and implementation of info as our front office tool to homogenize our support in terms of tech, but also some new things. We have created with this client an onboarding tool, and I will come back later on this one, because, you know, in the staffing industry, the weight of the administrative task could be very heavy. Because you have the contract, you have the payroll, you have the invoice. It's a lot of stuff to do.
We have also leveraged some of our partnership, like with Planbition, to have the same scheduling tool also all over the world. It means, at the end, building a consistent end-to-end channel with the technology as a support, creating the possibility for our people to focus on clients and candidate more than on administrative task. Now, learning with one client 4 years ago, 18 months ago, we have decided to put in place a dedicated organization at a global level. It means at a GBU level. And we are focused on 6 additional client with a spend above EUR 500 million, and the goal was to do the same, to be able to collect more market share, creating a competitive advantage. We have decided recently to add 60 additional strategic client in the way.
It means we feel ready to scale up this change agenda, powered by lean process design and technology. What did we learn? What do we build and propose to our client as a competitive advantage today? First, for the first time, we own some few clients, targeted client at a global business unit level. It means we have a PNL by client, and we have a worldwide team working for the single point of contact of the client. This single point of contact is here not only for sales, which is pretty traditional in our industry, but also for the delivery. The decision maker to allocate resource at a country level is the one speaking to the client. We have built a capability in terms of process design and in terms of empowerment through digital, data, and more recently, GenAI and AI.
We are focusing also on global SLA. By the way, something we have learned from our colleagues from AKKA, managing project of scale, but also from our outsourcing activities inside Adecco. Building a competitive advantage is now a reality, and the goal is to scale it up as fast as possible. It's not the finish line, because we have continued to learn about how to play this delivery efficiency at scale with some new tech enabler. Let me just define some few one here. You have the line of the recruitment process on top of the slide. Below, you have some initiative, and I will explain. Adecco Analytics and Compass, we collect all the information about the employment market, which enable us to help and to support our client to identify how to play talent solution, talent acquisition, and talent upskilling.
It's something which is relevant also for companies who are trying to implement new warehouses, new factories, or new offices. Compass, as has been explained before by Denis, is also enable us to identify the best candidate joining our candidate database, pushing them towards the market without expecting any order management. It's a new way to operate. We have also created the CV Maker in France, our first AI initiative at scale. The goal of this initiative is to have an inclusive recruitment. What do I mean? Thanks to that, you can have a direct conversation with a candidate, and the resume will be built based on this conversation, but also built, and that's where AI is supportive, based on all the orders we have collected and the skills and features gathered.
It means you create a better matching, and you have a resume matching with the expectation of the market, not a traditional one. We have also created this onboarding app. I will come back on this one. BadgeBox has been built by our Italian colleagues. You know, middle office represent 10, 15% of the value we provide to the client. But it's a challenging process, and it's one in the Maslow pyramid, which is fundamental to have the right payslip and the right invoice. We have partnered in Italy with BadgeBox, a digital company, and due to the efficiency of the process built with BadgeBox, we have acquired this company, and now we have scaled up this company in six additional countries and 11, 11 to come next year.
It's a good way to make it more efficient and to make sure we have no plugging - we have not to plug the information, doing some mistakes. It's efficient, laser focus. We have also started to implement some digital training where we feel we need to invest. We have created the Forklift Digital Academy in order to get a certification as a forklift driver, one of the most important scarce qualification, in a digital way, complete digital way. Let me show you a short video about our onboarding tool we have built for the first client I've been spoken about before, and we have now expanded for additional client.
At Adecco, we guide you through a seamless digital onboarding process, so you're always prepared for your first day on the job. Once you apply for a role, we will send you an email that kickstarts your onboarding. You'll be able to see all the steps in the process and follow along as you complete each one. The first step is to set up your profile. Then, you will enter your personal and payment details, upload your ID and other important documents, and ultimately, digitally sign all the necessary paperwork before your start date. With Adecco's digital onboarding web app, you'll have full transparency into every step required to get you started your new role. The best part is, it's all done through the convenience of home. To learn more, reach out to your Adecco recruiter today.
Digital onboarding is a very simple application among many other digital applications. But to remind that talking about this logistics company, after 4 years, we have recruited 300,000 associates. For each of them, we have applied this process. The number of hours we have saved thanks to this application is instrumental, and the quality of the service we have provided to this logistics company is based on the fact that our people, instead of focusing on administrative tasks like here, they are focusing on the client expectation. They try to convince the candidate to join this client. It makes a big difference. Another engine of our digital agenda, of our change strategy is QAPA. As you know, we have acquired QAPA in 2021, and it's both a channel and a very strong enabler for our digital journey.
It's an important channel because it's part of the omni-channel strategy. As you can see, we have grown our revenue by more than 86%, 80% since 2 years, 7 times faster than the one, the growth we have registered for our physical network. On top of that, we have also created a competitive advantage for some segments of market, like retail, hotel catering, where you need to go fast. 70% of the orders are fulfilled in less than 3 hours. On top of that, it's a strong engine to acquire new candidate. Based on the efficiency of the platform and the reward bring by the platform, we have today 3 times less cost to acquire candidates through this digital interface. That's the reason why we have decided to scale it up now.
Close to breakeven, growing fast, it was important for us to use this foundation in order to provide our U.S. colleague with this opportunity to continue to play on each channel in a market where digital maturity is pretty high, where the scale is there. Replacing Adia is a good way to scale up the same technology with one development to address the two most important market of our Adecco GBU. More to come, but a very promising channel for our US colleague. QAPA is also a strong enabler. We have put in place a lot of experimentations there because it's agile, it's small, Adecco is big.
So it enables us to put part, piece of our recipe in terms of digital and data, to learn fast like we are doing today in terms of matching tool with AI, in order to learn fast and after to scale up outside of our digital channel. So if I summarize, simplified strategy. Run the business has been instrumental to deliver the performance of the last quarters. An exciting journey owned by our country leader. Change the business has started to build a competitive advantage for large, centralized client and more to come. The aim of this strategy is to continue to grow fast and faster than our market and competitors. Starting with a revenue of EUR 18.4 billion, we have four levers to continue to grow.
To continue to invest in a very selective way, where the industries and the geographies are dynamic and promising for the future. APAC, LATAM, but also healthcare. So some piece where we can clearly collect growth. Pricing is also instrumental as we price the scarcity, we can grow on top of the volume, the value of our revenue. Solution mix is a big enabler also. We are not so far to reach EUR 2 billion with our outsourcing activity. It's a new space where we grow faster than in the temp staffing one, and in a more profitable way. And as said before, global client is a huge opportunity to continue to grow our market share with some very selective, targeted, centralized multinational. We want to do that in a profitable way. 3.6 EBITDA during the 12 previous months.
It's not a finish line, it's a starting point. We have four levers here also to continue to improve our profitability. What we have started to demonstrate in Q3. First, the mix. We have a mix in terms of solution, where we want to continue in our solution, which are more accretive, and not only for Adecco, but also for LHH, for Akkodis, because we partner there. We have the same client, especially for the large one. Pricing is a component of the value, for sure. Selling productivity is also a big driver. When I was talking about talent supply chain management for the largest country and powered by digital, the goal is to make it in a cost competitive way. And G&A savings is the last lever in order to continue to improve our lean approach of the market and to lower our cost.
In a supportive environment, our GBU aim at reaching more than 5% EBITDA. Geno has mentioned the simplification of the performance management. Let me share that with you before closing our session. We have 7 KPIs worldwide. 2 are local, because linked to the operation: fill rate, time to fill. 5 are global. The first one, we want to grow faster than our competitors and our market. You can see the last figures of the Q3 result in the middle of this chart. Second, EBITDA, we are running the business to go above 5% EBITDA in a supportive environment. Third, we want to continue to increase our productivity in terms of gross profit by selling FTE. 2-3% growth in a supportive market, and as you can see, good traction in Q3. G&A savings, based on our plan, we want to come back to the pre-COVID situation.
More lean, more cost competitive is instrumental gaining market share in staffing, especially for the large client. At least, we want to continue to deliver our agenda in terms of omni solutions with accretive solution. 30% is the ambition. We were 15% three years ago. We are on track here also to empower our solution mix. As a conclusion, some few message I would like to share with you. First, as said, we have improved consistently our performance during the last quarters, but I want to mention that we have focused on structural changes to make it consistent for the mid and long term. Second, we continue to invest selectively based on the geography and the industry, which are promising today and tomorrow. Third, we are on track with our turnaround plan for the U.S., as presented by Geno before.
Fourth, we have a big lever for profitable growth with this large centralized client and this change agenda empowered by digital. And at least, we aim at being a profitable company above 5% in a supportive environment. Thank you for your attention, and I think now it's time to join a coffee break. Thank you. And we come back here for the next session, and Coram will lead this session. Thank you.
Welcome back from the break, and good afternoon, everyone. As we've evidenced throughout today's event, over the last 12 months, the group has delivered strong top-line execution. As the left-hand chart shows, the group has taken market share for 5 consecutive quarters versus its key competitors. In Q3, the group's relative revenue growth was 830 basis points ahead, a robust result. These gains have been supported by the introduction of growth-orientated incentives and measures taken to empower decision-making closest to customers. Crucially, the group is taking share, and as the right-hand graph shows, we haven't taken that share by giving away pricing. The group's gross margin for the last 12 months was 20.9%, compared to a 15-year average of 18.8%.
The group's business mix shift, and moreover, this commercial approach to pricing focused on value add, has driven an over 200 basis point expansion. Furthermore, as the graph shows, all service lines have achieved healthy gross margins over the past 12 months relative to the 15-year high-low margin outcomes. Let's turn now to slide 2, where we look at how the group's systematic approach to sales and pricing is enabling capture of those top-line opportunities. Firstly, on sales discipline. The group manages its capacity with agility, adding or depleting resources according to the growth opportunity. For example, in Q3, the Adecco business made reductions to selling headcount in the UK, given market headwinds. At the same time, it held its recent headcount investments in APAC, where growth remains meaningful and continued to invest in Italy. The teams further orientate on the ground towards sector and local opportunities.
For example, of late, the U.S. has focused on expansion into resilient sectors such as consumer goods. In addition, the group continues to manage performance with rigor. In the Adecco GBU, sales intensity, which measures the number of client meetings per recruiter on a weekly basis, has improved 20% per year. Visits to client prospects have risen 35% year-on-year, while visits to existing clients have held steady. More than 60,000 visits per week are now being conducted in Adecco. Secondly, on pricing, the group continues to capture wage inflation in its pay rates and to ensure pass-through of new rates to clients in a structured way. Moreover, the group's dynamic pricing strategy, which captures the value of talent scarcity and rare skill sets using a data-driven approach, continues to drive improved spreads.
As the right-hand side of the chart shows, the impact of pricing initiatives has been consistently additive in Adecco. Let's turn to slide 3. In addition to the group's systematic approach to sales and pricing, all of the GBUs drive productivity. Adecco aims to bring productivity in terms of gross profit per selling FTE to higher levels of efficiency than before. As the left-hand chart shows, it's steadily progressing with Q3's productivity at full-year 2021 levels. For Akkodis, with its significant consultant network, utilization is crucial. The middle chart shows utilization rates in Akkodis' major consulting markets, France and Germany. In both of those markets, utilization has improved by 3% year-on-year to very healthy levels. At LHH, productivity and Recruitment Solutions, measured in terms of gross profit per billing FTE, has been impacted by a market downturn since Q3 last year.
Following some right sizing, management is now focused on protecting capacity to capture the market rebound and improving operational discipline. The GBU can balance the cost of protecting capacity because of the upturn in outplacement activity that we've seen since Q4 2022, which has materially improved the gross profit per FTE in the Career Transition business, as you can see on the right-hand chart. Let's turn to slide 4. If you combine all of these elements, a relative growth focus, a value-add commercial approach to contract terms, strong sales and pricing discipline, and a focus on productivity, the group is driving an increasingly resilient and well-diversified gross profit base. The left-hand chart shows a material change in the group's gross profit mix over the last five years. In 2018, Adecco's flexible placement services contributed 68% to the group's gross profit.
Today, they contribute around 45%, while a more significant 55% of the group's gross profit is oriented to higher growth and higher margin markets. Consequently, there is strong potential for higher returns from the group's current portfolio. Moving to slide 5. Alongside productivity, the group is reducing overheads and improving its operating leverage. The group's SG&A expenses come from four key areas, illustrated in the left-hand chart. Firstly, depreciation of approximately EUR 140 million per annum. Second, IT and digital investments, which run at around 2% of revenues per annum. Third, sales investments to drive growth, which constitute the majority of SG&A expenses and which are flexed according to market conditions and opportunities. And fourth, G&A expenses, which the group has committed to cutting by 15%, and after that, to sustain below 3.5% of revenues per annum.
The 15% cut is equivalent to a reduction in G&A costs of around EUR 150 million on a net basis. Approximately 55% of the savings will come from implementing a streamlined operating model. We're eliminating overcapacity and duplication, and we're reducing the number of organizational layers. Around 15% of the savings will come from consistently taking a highly frugal approach to expenses, including travel and entertainment costs, and by introducing tightened policies towards procurement, where the group has around EUR 2 billion per annum of spend. Finally, 30% of the savings will come from optimizing shared functions, including through offshoring. Let me add a little context here. The group has built several offshore facilities, including 3 major hubs worldwide that provide services 24/7 for finance. These centers improve quality and speed and enable process harmonization in a cost-effective way.
Building on learnings from the past couple of years, we're now accelerating the offshoring of finance and HR back-office functions across the group to extract G&A savings. Let's turn to slide six. You've heard from Denis and the GBU presidents about simplification, delayering, and G&A savings levers. Today, the group expects to deliver around EUR 90 million of G&A savings in run rate terms by year-end, and we're firmly on track to deliver the EUR 150 million run rate as initially targeted in mid-2024. The right-hand chart shows the P&L impact from G&A reductions across half-year periods. In the first half of 2023, the P&L benefit secured was EUR 20 million year-on-year, while in Q3, the group delivered a further EUR 24 million year-on-year reduction. In H2 2023, the group expects P&L savings of approximately EUR 30 million year-on-year, bringing the cumulative in-year savings to EUR 50 million.
We're going to continue to take actions in H1 2024 to reach the EUR 150 million run rate by mid-2024, which means EUR 150 million of actual benefit in the P&L in 2025. Turning to Slide 7, putting this all together, encouragingly, most of the group delivers robust financial results. The pie chart maps the group segments in three categories based on their contribution to top-line growth and margin performance. 70% of the group's revenues come from high-performing segments. These segments exhibit strong double-digit gross profit growth and EBITDA margin levels at the top end of their respective GBU corridors. On a weighted average basis and adjusted to include a fair share of corporate costs, the EBITDA margin for this 70% of the group is slightly above 5%.
Segments considered high performers include Adecco Southern Europe and EEMENA, Adecco APAC, Akkodis EMEA, Akkodis APAC, and LHH Career Transition. 20% of the group's revenues come from segments operating in challenging markets, including Akkodis Americas and LHH Recruitment Solutions. Margins average slightly below 3%, but we are confident that these businesses are positioned to swiftly rebound when markets recover. Finally, the group has 10% of group revenues, where the segments are either in turnaround or startup mode. Adecco US is included here, and as Geno outlined, the turnaround plan has traction. Ezra, as Nick outlined, a business with substantial potential, is also included. Critically, the gross margin levels in all segments in this category indicate that with scale, they will produce healthy EBITDA margins. So as you would expect, these segments provide a substantial value creation opportunity for the group.
Slide 8 shows how the group will move towards the 6% EBITDA margin ambition. We have several levers that we can control. First, we'll drive productivity in all of our units, lifting gross profit per selling FTE and maximizing consultant utilization ratios. Second, we will fully capture G&A cost savings according to our plan and the synergies from AKKA. As the long-term growth rates of both Akkodis and LHH are above the Adecco business, the group's mix will continue to shift towards higher margin activities. As the strategy updates from each GBU today have made clear, the group will continue to shift this mix towards those higher margin activities. The group will also sustain its disciplined and dynamic pricing strategy. Clearly, the group is not immune from the economic cycle.
Should we enter a downturn, we'll manage the business to a 50% recovery ratio, such that over a 12-month period, we deliver a 3% EBITDA margin minimum. In a supportive economic environment, the group will reach the 6% level. Let's turn to slide 9. As the left chart shows, the group has a proven track record of solid cash generation through the cycle, with a cash conversion ratio over since 2008, of over 90%. The group's cash flow is countercyclical. The group absorbs working capital as it drives growth, and it releases it quickly when growth slows. In particular, during 2022, cash levels were impacted by growth investment and one-off integration expenses. On a like-for-like basis, excluding these one-offs, cash flow from operating activities was around EUR 675 million.
The group takes a holistic approach to working capital and cash management. DSO targets are included in the group's incentive plans. Additional measures and targets are in place across the GBUs to capture other opportunities in payables and receivables. For example, the group is accelerating invoicing and collection of unbilled sales. It's holding system-driven rebates for clients with overdues and ensuring that all supplier rebates, particularly for IT, have been claimed. As part of the integration, the group is also progressing with the sale of AKKA's real estate, and we're focused on minimizing the level of one-offs incurred by the G&A savings plan. Furthermore, management is committed to substantially reducing the level of one-offs across the group upon successfully delivering the G&A savings plan. Let's turn our attention to the group's financing on slide 10. Importantly, our financing structure is very solid.
Leverage is not constraining the business's ability to invest it organically in growth and to pay dividends. The group's interest costs are very serviceable, with 79% of debt fixed at low rates, no covenants, and an undrawn EUR 750 million revolving credit facility. At the end of Q3, the net debt to EBITDA ratio, excluding one-offs, was 2.9 times, down from 3.2 times at the end of Q2. We expect to continue to deleverage during the fourth quarter, so that by year-end, the net debt to EBITDA ratio will be around 2.5 times. Looking further ahead, productivity improvements, G&A cost savings, and low one-offs will accelerate our deleveraging. Moving now to my final slide and capital allocation. The group's capital allocation policies are unchanged.
We are firmly committed to deleveraging while maintaining the progressive dividend policy, distributing a dividend per share, at least in line with the prior year. If we have surplus cash, we will consider either M&A or returning excess cash to shareholders. Should there be M&A, we will not do any large deals, only bolt-on transactions, and acquisitions will only occur if, firstly, they accelerate the realization of our strategy. Second, we're clear that we're a better owner. In other words, they deliver good cost and revenue synergies. Third, we can achieve positive EVA within three years. And fourth, we have management capacity for integration. And to be clear, acquisitions are not a priority for the group at present. And with that, let me hand the floor back to Denis. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Coram. And, we're reaching the moment of exchange with you. We've tried so far to make the most of today's event so that you can better understand our group. As you can see, we've unveiled quite a lot of information because I believe that transparency is due to you, our investors and our analysts, so that you can better assess the true potential of our group, which we all believe at the Adecco Group is immense. We are firmly dedicated to improving financial performance, as we have demonstrated over the last few quarters, and we'll continue to do so. Now, let me ask Coram, Christophe, Gaëlle, and Jan to join me on stage as we begin our Q&A session. And of course, you can also ask questions to the other colleagues that you've seen on stage so far.
I think there are mics in the, in the room, and so very happy to answer your questions. If I may ask you to introduce yourself before you ask your question, that will be appreciated. All right. We have until, for those who have time constraints, we have until 3:30 P.M. for this Q&A session.
Yes. Thank you. Hans Pluijgers, Kepler Cheuvreux. Let's. I'll start with two questions. Maybe I can do some follow-up after, but first question for Christophe on the U.S. A few years ago, over the last few years, I've quite seen some change in management, and I know also a few years ago, also with the capital market data, we're also quite positive on the turnaround in the U.S. Well, it took some time. So what went wrong? To put it maybe quite bluntly, and what has now really changed, and why you're now really positive? Because last time you were also quite positive on the turnaround. What's clearly different? And second question for Coram on the savings.
On page five, you indicated, let's say, where, let's say, the breakdown of where the savings coming from, from amongst others, the shared service centers. On page six, you give, let's say, a breakdown also for the future. That a big part still has to come from the corporate side, but you give maybe some breakdown where, let's say, the savings coming from, from the operations, the shared service centers, where still the opportunities are there to reduce, to reach the EUR 150 million in savings.
So, Christophe?
Thank you for the question. I will start with the question about the U.S., and Geno could complete for this one. First, what went wrong? So, to answer in a very transparent way to your question, the first one, you can apply a strategy with shifting industry mix, allocating more resource for branches if you have a good foundation. And clearly, the foundation should be improved in terms of cultural alignment, in terms of creating a proximity between the client and our people, between the people and their leaders, and having people with an expertise of the industry is helping a lot also to understand and to leverage the market expertise.
I need to say what has been presented by Geno is mainly driven by the foundation, making sure it's stable enough before having the opportunity to grow faster and to implement a strategy to, I would say, regain market share. So that's the first one. The second one, on the contrary, we maintain the fact that industry mix will be crucial for the future, allocating more resource when we start the growth agenda to allocate for some new industries we consider as more dynamic for the long term. And we believe also in the fact that we need to have this diversification. Perm is doing well, but in the future, diversification could come on top. But the foundation, what Geno has explained today, is really the piece of business which was important in order to stabilize before ramping up with another agenda.
If I may complement what you said, Christophe, it's also a question of leadership. We had several leaders who were not Americans, and particularly during the difficult times of COVID, we had a non-American leader for the U.S. who was not even in the U.S. at that time for many reasons, right? We now have an American leader who knows the industry, who knows how to motivate, who knows how to manage, who knows the clients to get us back on track. And it's also a question of leadership at the top, and as Christophe mentioned, you know, also as close to the clients and the teams as possible.
On the savings, so as I mentioned during my script, we've got a run rate of EUR 90 million by year end. We are very much on track for the EUR 150 million by the middle of 2024. I think you could see from all of my colleagues that there's a level of confidence about us extracting those savings. In terms of where they come from, I tried to give you a sense. It's a little bit more than half that comes from delayering, simplifying, and streamlining the way that the businesses operate, and the lion's share of that will actually sit within the operational PNLs. A little less than half comes from sharing functions, driving the shared service centers, and also a sort of an increased frugality in the way that we manage expenses.
The reason that you're seeing the corporate savings come through first is because in a lot of cases, we're building on foundations that had already been laid. So for example, in finance, in HR, we'd already laid the foundations for those shared service centers, and therefore, we can get the savings faster, and they mainly relate to the functions. But you will see all of it come through by the middle of 2024.
Kean, yeah.
Thank you. Sir, Kean Marden from Jefferies. Can I start first of all with incentives? So I think you mentioned some incentive changes in the organization, and we've touched on this over the last 12 months as well. I suspect those are a reasonably senior management layer. If I'm a sales consultant at Adecco, yet what in practice has changed in my incentivization and maybe my KPI measurements over the last 12-18 months? And then a quick question regarding an MSP. I think you mentioned internal, you mentioned Pontoon, and you mentioned potentially external providers as well. I just wonder if you can expand on that. It wasn't entirely clear how that strategy was likely to evolve. Thank you.
I think both questions are for you, Christophe.
I think so. Incentive changes have been part of the plan. Aligning the motivation to grow market share and to have an offensive approach of the market should be driven by an incentive scheme, rebalancing growth and profitability. It has been explained also by Denis in the introduction. It's clearly one key topic, especially when you empower the local leaders. They should be driven also by these incentives. That's part of what we have done as a change. Needless to say, that when you incentivize the relative performance, it means you want to beat the market and the competition. So the first topic, yes, it has been a strong enabler, I would say, in order to grow our market share.
For the MSP, just to be a little bit more explicit, Pontoon is the company we have internally in order to to, I would say, meet the client and to provide an expertise in terms of managed services provider, plus the technology associated to that. But you can have a neutral position, or you can have a partnership with Adecco, Akkodis in order to play the game. Today, we have clearly created a go-to-market, which is common, in order to provide the value of the MSP, providing both the asset of Pontoon, plus the asset of Akkodis and Adecco in order to staff the MSP together. And playing this game, it enables also to capture a biggest share of wallet.
And that's why we have demonstrated with some few facts and figures, that focusing on this go-to-market as a priority, we have improved the allocation of orders from Pontoon to Adecco and Akkodis. But we have also improved our delivery efficiency in front to make sure we are reliable for the final client. So that's the way it has been changed today.
Yeah, it's a change of mindset, right? That we introduced a bit more than a year ago, because MSPs are there to last. I mean, they aggregate services; they have a value for the clients. And I think I would say more or less, internally, MSPs were seen as well, well, as somehow a competitors or so—but we have got, we've got to partner with MSPs. If we're efficient, of course, with Pontoon, our own MSP, but also with others, we better serve the clients. So it's a mindset change that we've created, and it's getting traction. And your last one on the incentive, to get a broader perspective, what we explained was last, as Christophe said, last year, same time, we changed the incentive scheme to with a proper balance between growth and profitability.
This year, we've kept, I mean, for 2024, we've kept the same global guidelines, reduced number of KPIs, and the right balance between growth in revenue and in profit, with, of course, a dimension in DSO. This is now being adapted. Those global guidelines are adapted to, you know, the relevant business unit because they are different models. So we keep these global guidelines, but implement them with the proper relevancy in the GBUs. Here? Oh, oh, sorry. And Andy, and then you, and then, yeah.
Hi, it's Andy Grobler from BNP Paribas Exane. Just a couple, if I may, on digital. So the first around digital platforms and QAPA and the expansion into the U.S. Could you give us a bit more about kind of how big it is at the moment and what your expectations are over the next year or two? And I guess putting in the context of one of your competitors, talking about doubling that at good margin in the near term would be the first. And then secondly, digital as a kind of enabler of margin, and what you can do in terms of either saving from a IT tech spend perspective or efficiency gains coming out of of AI over the next year or two. Thanks very much.
I suggest, Christophe, you answer the first one, and I think Coram and I will partner to answer the second one.
So for QAPA to, for QAPA to start, we have again chosen to go in the U.S. due to, first, the level of maturity in terms of digital channels there, and second, the challenge we have to penetrate some new markets, new segment of market. In the U.S., to be a little bit more explicit, we have started with one state before going to another one, to another one, because you need to adapt the tech stuff to the local, you know, legal frame on top of, just creating an integration with your client. The goal here, we have learned how to play with large client, with an omni-channel strategy, and with some mid-sized client to get profitability, where you need to get the speed of delivery, which is the competitive advantage. In the U.S., clearly, we play both.
We have started to play with some of our clients. We have created an MVP with some targeted client in order to learn with them how to create the value and to price the value on top of gaining also market share for the small and medium segment. So QAPA, MVP to start, expansions in one state to start next year, start of next year, and after we'll go state by state.
Maybe if I start on digital as an enabler of efficiency and savings. From my perspective, there are kind of two key areas, I think, where it helps. I think first, you know, when Christophe was presenting some of the products and some of the productivity drivers that we see in digital, I think it's a key part of continuing to drive the productivity improvements that we see in the business. So, you know, gross profit per selling FTE is back at 2021 levels. To drive it further, we see opportunities for that, but I think digital is a key part of that because of the time savings and because of the efficiency benefits that it gives us. I think the second area that it helps is around the back office.
So if I think about some of the moves that we're making right now in terms of accelerating the shared services rollout, scaling up in both HR and finance, those are areas where actually, the application of, you know, Gen AI, for example, can really help us accelerate the speed at which we get the savings. And Andy, you asked about sort of IT costs and whether they come down over a period of time. I think we'd expect IT costs to continue to run at about 2% of revenues, but potentially we would get further savings in the run component of that, which allows us to then invest more and faster to create a sort of virtuous circle in this area. So I hope that helps.
Yeah, and absolutely. And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, we have now a new CDIO, Caroline, who has joined us at the end of the summer, and who's very focused on creating this roadmap. And then she, she's very aligned with what you said about, you know, we can reduce our run cost, particularly through, you know, automation, also on the IT part, et cetera. Bringing also AI in terms on the way we operate our systems to really leave more space to the change piece. We absolutely and she's also very clear that the, I would say, the overall bucket of investment is the right one. Now, they has the right size. Now, the split is to be changed over time.
We will give you more, you know, as she comes up with her roadmap in, you know, with a lot of discussions with the business. She doesn't create, and it's... You remember when I joined, I said we had some problems in IT. That's why I changed the leadership. The tech was a bit disconnected from the business. Caroline spends, I think, most of her time with these three guys here, you know? With Gaëlle, Christophe, and Jan, to really connect, you know, and prioritize the initiatives that she puts in place to serve the business according to the business needs.
So we will communicate in the, you know, in the months to come on our new tech roadmap to, again, shed a bit of light on, on, you know, what, what outcome we expect from that. Yeah.
Hi, good afternoon. Suhasini from Goldman Sachs. Two from me, please. Just, and probably for Christophe. It was good to see the detail on the US turnaround. But within the Adecco GBU, you also have the DACH region, which has delivered good growth this year, but the margins are probably running at 2% or so levels on a nine-month basis. Can you maybe talk about your plans to turn around the business here, especially on the profitability side of things? And the second one is probably for Coram, just on the capital allocation and the leverage.
I appreciate you're probably in the deleveraging phase right now, but in the medium term, once you get to 1.5 or less than 1.5, is that- is it your intention to keep it at those levels, 1.5, and return the excess cash back to shareholders? Thank you.
I can start with DACH. In DACH, the most important country is, Germany, clearly, in terms of, potential size. DACH, the main challenge of DACH was, it's a bench model. So it means when the market is shifting, you need to assume, the fact that you have your people on your bench. This year, in terms of growth, it has been pretty okay because the, the DACH market has been supported by the Automotive sector. Automotive sector is still strong, and we are gaining market share in this sector. But the market has, slightly suffered more in some other segments of market when we had that capability. So what we did in DACH, first, G&A savings plan, it's part of the plan and started to be activated those last months.
And second, to continue to grow in the perm business, which is registering a double-digit growth those last months, and also in the small and medium, where we can continue to improve our track record there. To make it simple, that's the situation we have in DACH today. So gaining market share, but we can improve our profitability, and the level of G&A for short term will help a lot, and the fact we have the balance with small and medium will be the second topic where we have put our focus.
And maybe I can just add to that before picking up on the leverage point. I mean, DACH, because it has a bench model, tends to have slightly more volatile profitability through the quarters. In Q3, you saw it at 4%, and that was including the investment that we'd made to drive some of the areas in DACH where we continue to see very good growth. So reinforcing Christophe's point, I don't think we have a profitability problem in DACH. I actually think we're quite happy with where we've, where we've got the margin to. And as you heard from Christophe, there are plans to drive that further.
On the leverage point, I mean, to be clear, 1.5 times is our target, and our capital allocation policies say that when we get below that target, then we will consider returns to shareholders or we will consider M&A. And it depends what we get the best return from. So we're absolutely open to that. In the short term, we need to get to 1.5 times, and that is very much our priority to deleverage.
You'll see us get to around 2.5 by the end of the year, but we will be able to accelerate that pace of deleveraging, because as the productivity continues to come, as we drive more of the G&A savings, and as the one-off costs come down following the end of the G&A savings plan, it gives us more profitability and more cash flow, which is how we get to the 1.5 times.
Roy, maybe.
Good afternoon. It's Rory McKenzie from UBS. On that point on sales productivity, which is, of course, very important in weakening markets with net headcount reductions, could each GBU talk about how they think about productivity as it perhaps turns to adding capacity, and how you manage that growing business with improving productivity? Just thinking back to what we saw recently was very lumpy capacity additions that weighed on margins. What have you learned? What have you changed in the group to adapt to that? And then secondly, again, across all the GBUs, it sounds and it comes across that you've got a wide range of services and widening range of services, whether that's digital, skilling, enterprise clients, whatever you want to call it.
Denis, as you came in and looked at the structure, do you feel that Adecco currently scaled its offerings and best practice well enough within each area? Did you consider any broader reorganizations to get the most out of the things you're developing within each unit? Thank you.
So let's have maybe, Gaëlle, you will start about the question on, sales productivity, and then Christophe, and then Jan, and then I'm, I'm gonna wrap up with the second part of your question. Gaëlle?
Yep, thank you. So as I mentioned, sales productivity is an important part of all our businesses. If I focus on the Career Transition business, it has increased quite a bit in the last few quarters. Obviously, in areas like Recruitment Solutions, where the market there's more tension on the market, we're working on the sales productivity actively. It's one of the priorities that was set to the new head of Recruitment Solutions. And maybe a word on how we're managing also different types of countries, as I mentioned earlier, because obviously the large, scalable countries cannot be treated in the same way as the ones where we think that we have high potential.
So that's why we put in place the market categorization that I presented earlier, so that we would be sure that we were able to really truly measure productivity at the right level for each market and be ready for the level of uptick that we think we can take when the market cycle changes.
Christophe?
Perhaps three topics on this one. First, we have a clear focus on the sales intensity in terms of sales approach. We have been talking about 25% more... 24%... 20% more sales visits and 35% for the prospect. Why? Because when you play the large client, you need to make sure the SME business is going at the same scale because it's a question of profitability and balance.
Second, in terms of productivity for the salespeople, what we have learned so far, we use a lot the data and the transformation rate we have about the sales visit by industry to understand where we are able to have a very good dynamism in terms of delivery and where the dynamic of the, those, I would say, industries is pretty good, and it's pretty different from one country to another one, so it's a local base. For that, we have the same tech tool. Third, we are investigating, and that was the message about Italy, on the digital acquisition of client, especially for the smallest one, where the profitability should be driven by a lower cost of acquisition.
We have started to play more digitally this scale with what we call Xplore, and the goal is to expand that in some additional countries. That's the three topics, perhaps to answer your question.
Jan?
As I mentioned, sales increase and sales intensity is for the next step. For us, it's important that the distinction between the two service lines we have, the talent with the consultant, but also the commercial customers in different way. So we have our businesses, which we have in our businesses in branches. We have big global business, and we have industry-specific knowledge, which we need to have professional businesses. Do you have any advice for all these different channels and sharing visits, the interaction with the customer, the pipeline, and so on? I think it's very crucial for us that we have the experts we need in our sales entities. Otherwise, it's difficult for us to win, but we have the experts in consulting, and that's why we are also growing dramatically.
You'll see it in our results, for example, in U.S., where we grow our consulting business in sales tremendously, and our pipeline is around $200 million, more than $250 million, and we had more or less, not a lot before. So we are really focusing now on the next step in our Akkodis, on sales and on sales intensity.
Now, to your question, Rory, on the, you know, on scale. We have EUR 18 billion here, with two billion here and four billion there. We have scale. We have scale, and we have this really dynamic of organic growth, which is there, okay? Of course, adapted to the market trends. But, and, you know, let's be clear, organic growth is the cheapest way to grow, so we like it, right? And, and it's... You heard about how drive sales, productivity to just deliver organic growth. So, I think we have the right setup. The GBUs have strengthened their strategies to be really clear on their positioning and the complementarity of, you know, of their positioning, which really covers, as I said, all the client needs.
Now, what matters and what we are doing, you know, in a pretty efficient way is pass the ball, cross-sell. The leads from LHH to Adecco, the leads from Akkodis to LHH, et cetera. I, you know, I call it like a football team. You have a goalkeeper, you have a midfield, you have a striker. What matters is that one passes the ball to another because then you win, then you score, right? So that's what we are building. We also have a small team that leverages the expert and the sales team of each GBU when we need to come together to build really sort of an integrated solutions. But I'd say, let's be clear, not all clients want an absolute integrated solutions. This happens, and we need to answer that.
But what matters most is that we are able to really build, and you remember that slide with all the bricks that we have? What matters is that we come up with the right bricks, and we tailor those right bricks delivered by the relative expertise from the GBUs for the client. We have scale, we have very clear strategies and complementary positioning, and we believe in organic growth, gaining market share to grow. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Hello, this is Simona Sarli from Bank of America. A couple of questions from my side, please. Going back to SG&A savings, G&A savings. So historically, as G&A, as a percentage of revenue, was substantially below where it is today, and even if we take into consideration the incremental EUR 90 million savings that will be happening, it will still be above what it used to be historically. So is there any structural reason why it shouldn't go back there? Because you also have sales productivity and digital, which in theory should help you. That's the first point. Second point on the G&A savings, so far, roughly less than one-third have been coming from North America. So how much of the remaining EUR 90 million will be driven by North America? And assuming that revenues have stabilized in North America, how should we think about margins next year? Thank you.
So in terms of G&A, historically, we were somewhere between 3% and 3.5% as a percentage of revenues. That's where we were trending pre-COVID. You've heard very clearly that our perspective is we're on track to deliver EUR 150 million, and that from then on, we will be below 3.5%. So I think you can take it as read that we're aiming to get back to the most efficient periods that we've had in G&A. And obviously, if we can go further than that, either by driving productivity and therefore the top line, or by driving cost savings, then we will. But there is no structural reason to be higher, and we don't intend to be. Of the savings, as you heard, EUR 30 million from Geno.
Now, that's a mix of SG&A, so you cannot extrapolate the EUR 30 into the EUR 90. Because in the case of some of the businesses where the top line is coming down, you've also seen us adjust the sales capacity. So Geno is contributing his fair share of G&A savings, but not all of that EUR 30 is G&A. There's a chunk of it, and it helps to drive the EUR 150 million. In terms of the margin expectation, improved. We're not breaking it down by territory at this stage. I've given you a sense of where it comes from in terms of the types, and I think you've also seen, to add to my point on North America, you know, we're profitable in Q3.
We're aiming to make sure that that's sustainable, and Geno has a very clear plan for how you'd continue to build on the top-line momentum and drive efficiency and operating leverage. Longer term, we will get back to the market average, but at the moment, we're not putting a time frame on it.
Question, yeah.
Adrian Cattley from KBC Securities . Two questions on Akkodis and one on LHH, please. Just on Akkodis, I guess, you know, you, we talked earlier about the benefits that you see coming from AI. I wondered where you see the risks in terms of business that could be taken away by it. Secondly, just on the consulting side, kind of vaguely, where are we on book-to-bill at the moment, given that's an important metric that we see sort of in peer group businesses? And then on LHH and your Microsoft, sort of working with them, how do you try and manage what you do with them, that they then don't take it away and just make it a feature of their software rather than a product that you actually get paid for?
I'm sorry, I didn't get your second question-
Yeah
on Adecco, on Akkodis. So-
The book to-
Got the first one on the AI, benefits and risks. The second one was?
Just, the book-to-bill within the consulting business.
Book-to-bill. Okay.
Okay. So let me first answer the AI question, and of course, I expected that AI question. As we have showed you, AI will change also in the consulting space. But what I have showed you and what we have showed you, for us, as Akkodis, it's really an advantage. Really an advantage, because we have to scale up our business, like I mentioned, in the next couple of years. And with AI, we can scale up much faster our development outsourcing processes. We don't have millions or thousands of coders doing software programs. This is not our business model. We bring the competence of AI, IT, and mechanical engineering together. And it's we have seen that with the agents we presented. We use these agents and AI to accelerate our process, to scale up quicker. So for us as Akkodis, there's really no risk.
It's really a big advantage for us. So-
On the second question?
Book-to-bill, I can tell you that our, let me say, our pipeline is pretty big, when it comes specially to our industries I mentioned, especially in Automotive, in Life Sciences, and in Aerospace. We are growing fast. We are moving more to global deals, more and more, and, we are identified by our customers, and we have a really proper pipeline.
Gail?
Yeah, and on the second question, so on LHH, the work that we've done with Microsoft on the Career Canvas work, those are—it's our intellectual property. It's work that we've done with Microsoft, but it's not co-developed with Microsoft. I think what's maybe worth mentioning is the broader agreement that we have now with Microsoft at group level, which is a bit different.
Yeah, well, actually, Microsoft found, you know, this collaboration with us meaningful because on two things. First, we are aligned on this idea of if we put generative AI somewhere, it has to be in a absolute responsible way. So that's where we have common grounds. The other thing is, as there is a massive, possible massive disruption on the world of work, they were happy to partner with a company like ours, who really takes, you know, a comprehensive perspective on that, to accompany people so that as some jobs are created, we help people move to the jobs that are going to be created. So, and that's to-- so together, we really join forces. They help us in our development.
They help us accelerate with the power that they have, particularly with OpenAI. And it's not a question of exclusivity, it's just a question of being... You know, in our business, there is not much exclusivity to look for. It's just you just need to be ahead of the troops all the time. It's you trailblaze, and that's where you have to be. And, you know, Microsoft really helps us there, you know, to accelerate faster than the others. That's the name of the game. Yeah. And then...
Yes, Hans Pluijgers again, Kepler Cheuvreux. 3 questions from my side. First of all, on QAPA, what do you see the margin potential in the long term for that business? And more in general, let's say, on margin and efficiency and digitalization. Over the last 25-30 years, we have quite seen, let's say, some changes in delivery models and quite some efficiency programs at a lot of staffing companies. And in the meantime, the margin for the general staffing part has remained in good times between 4.5%-5%. If you look at, for example, in-house, it's the same as it was in the branch. Why should digitalization now drive an improvement in that margin going forward? What has changed compared to that last 25-30 years? And lastly, on cross-selling. You already on LHH referred to...
Yeah, schemes are in place to cross-sell, to incentivize the other, let's say, business units. Could you maybe give some detail on how that works in practice? So how they are incentivized, and maybe for the different business units. Probably it works differently, but maybe you can give some background on that.
So I'm gonna ask my colleagues to answer in a super efficient way, 'cause we have three minutes left, and I would like to take this, your last question. So please, go ahead.
I will start with QAPA. To make it short, QAPA, you can position to different segment of market. You can go for a, a three hours, contract assignment, and here you can go for a very high level of pricing. With Adia, we have learned that, for example, in, in Switzerland, it's a very profitable position. Or you can go for an omni-channel strategy, where you have this channel where the cost of delivery for a large supermarket is less important than, I would say, for a physical way to deliver the service. So you can drop here slightly your price, to do that. In the US, playing this game with QAPA, the goal is to be accredited for our country. Just we select this segment of market. For the margin, what has changed?
In the second party, the change is coming from it was before, the goal was to manage the efficiency of the transaction. But you can play the digital to be more strategic in your positioning with your client. It means when I was talking about the logistic player, the goal of this logistic player was to predict and to have a fulfillment rate, which nurtures their growth. It was a blocker, and that's the reason why it became like a strategic asset. Playing digital as an enabler to create a supply chain management, create a positioning, which is fine advance in terms of value generation and pricing at the same time.
I can say that we've significantly improved the margins in the example that Christophe gave earlier, as we were improving our performance. Gaëlle.
And maybe for LHH, quickly on cross-selling. So as we've integrated these businesses together, we felt the need to simplify the portfolio selling incentives that we were giving to people. But I think beyond that, it's also about communication and the enablers that we're putting in place to increase the portfolio selling. First of all, these people did not really know about the other services before 12 or 18 months ago. So now we work a lot to communicate and to explain what the other areas of the businesses do, so that they can actually provide it and pass the baton to the other people in the company.
And then the other thing that's very important, we're organizing common sales meetings with our clients, where we bring different people from the different areas of the business, because we have very high customer intimacy. So we know what their strategic HR challenges are, and so our people know who to bring along. So it's really a mix of different things that is helping us.
We're gonna take one last question. Of course, for those who are here, we'll have plenty of time with you to answer your questions during the cocktail.
Okay, last one. Marc Zwartsenburg, ING. This one, I think, is for Coram Williams. You mentioned an ICR of around 50%. Is that including cost savings, and how should we look to that number over the longer term? Would you aim still or expect to be still at that 50% level, which sounds quite ambitious? And can you give a bit of color on the different business lines, how that ICR works through with the different growth phases of your forecast there, how that comes together to the 50% again?
Are you... I struggle a bit-
Conversion ratio.
So conversion ratio. Thank you. So in terms, I mean, in terms of the conversion ratio, we still absolutely work towards the 50% when the business is growing. We don't need the cost savings to support that, so the cost savings comes on top of that. And, you know, it's very much been a feature of the business, both in the up and the down, that we manage both to the 50% conversion ratio and the 50% recovery ratio, and that still holds. If you step back and look at the conversion ratio of the business as a whole, from gross profit through to EBITDA, then we're running a little bit below 20%, but both Adecco and Akkodis are above.
LHH, because of the higher gross profit levels and because of the investment that we've made in digital, particularly businesses like Ezra, is slightly below, and we still see an opportunity to drive that further.
All right. Thank you very much.
So we're reaching the end of our Capital Markets Day. I want to thank all of you for having been here. I want to thank all of you who are watching us, and also all the ones that will watch the recording. Thanks for your questions. Thanks for the interaction. I hope you got a good idea of the ambition that we have, of the clarity of the positioning, and the relevancy of what we're the business we are building now. I hope you got a good impression of the passion, the energy, and the determination to execute on our strategy to deliver growth, performance, you know, financial performance, and good returns. That's why we came today to be with you and really share what we are going to build in the future.
We are very confident in the future of the Adecco Group. Thank you. Now, let's have some time around a glass of, I don't know what, but I think it's gonna be nice. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here.