At Bossard, we have the privilege to work with the finest companies from around the world. Our customers are building the fastest and modern high-speed trains to meet the increasing demand for mass transportation. Our customers are assembling electric vehicles to support sustainable mobility. In renewable energy, our customers are building technology that replaces fossil fuels and reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Our customers are designing the next generation of industrial automation and robots that will revolutionize the future of manufacturing. In the medical industry, our customers are pioneering the most advanced medical technology to improve the quality of healthcare and saving lives. Although the products our customers built are very different, but they share a shared passion for excellence. They constantly think about how to learn their assembly process, continuously looking for ways to improve product quality and reliability while reducing time to market.
In short, to achieve higher productivity and stay ahead of the competition. This is where our mission begins. From statistics, 60%-70% of a product's life cycle costs are incurred during design development. This is why the Bossard assembly experts work with our customers' product designers, providing technical advice on selecting the most optimal fastening design and solution. The fourth industrial revolution is unfolding the age of smart manufacturing. Bossard Smart Factory Assembly enable the digitization of the assembly process and automatic data collection. It provides analytics and insight for process improvement and traceability. In today's VUCA world, supply chain complexity is at an all-time high. Any supply chain disruption and component shortages are causing constraints to production output. Using cloud-based technology and artificial intelligence, Bossard Smart Factory Logistics provides advanced supply chain predictability and ensures efficient material flow in the production line.
As an industrial partner, we have the expertise, technology, and experience to help surface the hidden potential in fastening process, leading to a lower total cost of ownership. At Bossard, we call this Proven Productivity. That's not all. We firmly believe the increase in productivity should not come at the expense of the environment. Productivity and sustainability belong together. Therefore, every solution we provide aims to keep the balance so that no one has to bear the deficits, neither you nor me, nor our future generations. Since our founding in 1831, we are committed to helping our customers to achieve higher productivity and sustainability. This is because we are committed to the next generation. We as a company. We as humans.
Welcome everyone to the Bossard Capital Markets Day. We are extremely excited to see you and to have you all here together. I know this is quite exciting to have so many people in the room, and we are looking forward to spending half a day together for you to get to know us a little bit better, but also for us to talk and mingle and have a conversation. My name is Susan Salzbrenner, and I will be guiding you through this program today. When I'm not moderating events, my role is that I'm the newly joined Head of People and Organization at Bossard. J ust very quickly for the agenda before we get going. What you can expect from this afternoon is that we're gonna start with a presentation on the equity story, which will be held by our CEO, Dr. Daniel Bossard, and our CFO, Stephan Zehnder, who will be joining us here on stage in a moment.
After that, we actually would like for you to get a real-life feeling of what it is like to be part of a smart factory, to see some of the solutions that you'll be presented with in action. At around 3:00 P.M., or 15:00, Central European Time, we will have a break where you can ask questions. You can also stay at the stations to talk a bit more and to just get your questions answered. After that, we'll then have a deep dive into our strategy, which we will have through a panel conversations with different colleagues from Bossard. We will allow for multiple times for you to have your questions answered. I will make sure that we have time for that.
Practically speaking, there are toilets outside, just outside these doors, and there are some more at the entrance where you received your badges. If there's any need, please also ask if you can't find your way back. One last practicality is I would also like to point out, Michelle, can you just wave? Hi. He is a graphic recorder, meaning that he will visually draw a summary of the whole event today. If you are interested during the break, feel free to go by. We will, in the end, of course, show you the full picture, and you will be able to look at it and see it as a summary later on for you to take away the highlights. That is all for me for now.
You will see me back from time and time again, but I would love to give it over to you, Daniel, to kick us off with the equity story.
I'm excited to welcome you to our first Capital Markets Day at the Bossard Group since 190 years. My name is Daniel Bossard. I've known Bossard for 51 years. I have been working for Bossard for 21 years, and I've had the honor to lead the group since 2.5 years. Together with me today is the group executive board. I have to say one member is not here, and that's Robert Ang from Asia Pacific. Due to COVID reasons, he couldn't travel or just with a lot of quarantine involved. But we do have the members that you see here. We have Stephan Zehnder, our CFO. We have Rolf Ritter, our Chief Strategy Officer and Head of M&A. We have Beat Grob, our CEO for Central Europe. We're all somewhere mingled in the crowd.
We try to hide and, you know, ask you some sneaky questions back. David Jones, our CEO of the America somewhere. Over there. Yes. We have Frank Hilgers, CEO of Northern & Eastern Europe. We also have name tags, so maybe just look around. If you have questions during the breaks, or any time, please feel free to reach out to the different regions as well. If you wanna talk about Asia, you can talk to anyone. I think we share on a frequent basis. Bossard has a long legacy, 190 years, and we're currently operating in about 30 locations. Today, we operate with 2,600 employees. That's just new since the last acquisition. But back in 2020, we did CHF 800+ million sales in Swiss francs.
You probably know the numbers were distributed across Europe, America, and Asia Pacific. Still, Europe being the biggest part of sales today. We're not an expensive supplier of C-parts to customers, to industries. We consider ourselves to be a leading strategic partner for OEM industrial customers globally for anything around fastening and assembly technology. One thing that has made us resilient over the crisis, particularly, is the diversification in industries. Now, let's talk about electronics, for example. Here we serve customers like ABB, like Dell. Also, maybe you know the company ASML in the Netherlands, which is a key customer of ours, producing machines for computer chip production, which is growing pretty rapidly. Machinery, pumps, Grundfos, for example, elevators, all kinds of machinery. Another segment which has been growing quite nicely in the last years is transportation.
That mainly includes electric vehicles. Now, electric vehicles is not only cars, but it's also scooters, it's buses, it's trucks, it's e-bikes, and we also add to that an ecosystem of batteries and charging station producers. This is the whole sector of EV. Railway, another important sector, which is also driven by government infrastructure spending all over the world these days, where we serve customers like Alstom, now connected to Bombardier, Stadler, and for example, China North Railways as well. This is a fast-growing segment, EV, in average growing 30% as we expected over the next four years in this whole ecosystem. Whether EV is gonna be the future or not, I guess nobody knows in this room, but it is strongly incentivized by the governments. A bit into metal.
Healthcare, another growing segment. Here, an example is Roche Diagnostics in Rotkreuz, which we also benefited from. During the pandemic, they produced these COVID testing machines, quite large machines, and they clearly accelerated their demand last year. Now it's flattening a bit, but we also have GE HealthCare. As you know, healthcare is becoming more and more important. People get older. People want to be diagnosed, even using diagnostic devices at home. There is a lot of companies in that arena which we can serve, and it's growing, and then other customers. It shows that we're broadly diversified. We're not dependent on a single industry. Adding to that is the fact that we're also broadly diversified when it comes to geography. We are diversified or we are present in different regions.
When China goes bad, we can still serve customers in Europe and U.S. and, you know, vice versa. We saw that during the pandemic when China was down, we still delivered in Europe and in the United States. Of course, then it hit the whole world, but it helps us also to diversify in terms of geographic spread. Not only on the sales side, but also on the supply side. How did we manage to secure the supply over this time? We basically operate in a way that for key parts, we always have two or three suppliers from different regions. In that way, we're doing some kind of dual or triple sourcing globally, and we have central storage locations across the globe, where we usually have stock between 8-10 months.
We had that as well in the crisis, and that's also why we never really had supply issues. Of course, it was difficult to get new parts in, to get the, you know, backfill, the warehouses. But so far, we haven't had major problems. Of course, it's accentuated, it's accelerated. We have a lot of discussions about getting parts in. But so far, we have been doing quite well also relative to competition. Another thing is, that we're quite proud of is that, we have a kind of successful history also in terms of, profitability, and obviously we would like to continue that. In order to show a bit how we want to approach this, I'd like to go through a few points, today together with Stephan. One is talk a bit about the business opportunity.
What opportunities do we see out there? Which are customers—Who are customers who actually we served, and we could prove that, the business opportunity can be put into realization. What is our business model and offering and, you know, what does it mean to have services and develop services into the future? What growth potential do we see and where? Then Strategy 200, and I can comfort you, it's not a 200-year strategy, so we're not thinking that long term. The reason is that we said we have an ambition towards 2031, and the reason is that, this is when Bossard turns 200 years old. That's why we called it Strategy 200. Stephan Zehnder will then elaborate a bit on our financial targets and f inally, maybe we can give you some ideas why it could be worthwhile to invest in Bossard since you're here.
Great. Starting with the business opportunity. I guess every one of you has a car, maybe more EV right now. What happens usually, whether it's a car or a machine, there's a lot of small parts involved. A lot of C-parts, fasteners, fastener-related parts, which have to be managed. It is complexity. Any car producer, they have to define and specify which parts do I need, which supplier can deliver the parts. Then once I defined it, I have to order those parts on a regular and frequent basis. Those are process costs.
I have to put them to stock, I have to take them from stock to assembly, assemble them, and then finally, maybe I also have to do repair and maintenance. Those are all additional costs, which we like to depict in an iceberg model. Now, since we also have a 3D printer, we thought we could just print one. It's not that cold, so it's still here. Yeah, it's not a live one. In our model, what we say is that if a customer looks for an assembly solution, only 15% of the costs are actually visible. So this is the hardware. That's the screw. That's the actual hardware that we see and sell. But inside or below the surface, there's a lot of invisible cost, and that is namely, somebody has to design the fasteners. Somebody has to select the suppliers for this fastener.
Somebody has to then order. Ordering, that's a lot of efforts. This is because usually there's thousands of parts that they have to order, so there's a lot of parts that needs to be ordered. Somebody has to put it on stock. Somebody has to take it from stock. Somebody has to put it to assembly, and then maybe assemble, and then also somebody has to repair, and those are all process costs. Using our services, you can actually eliminate at least half of those costs. By applying the Bossard services, we optimize the lower part of the iceberg. That is exactly where we see the added value which we can contribute to our customers.
Now, I'd like to give you a few examples of customers who have been benefiting from those. Sorry, I hope I didn't hit anyone. You all have shoes on. It's not like home office, eh, you have to wear trousers again. Roche Diagnostics. Here it's also a long-standing customer, where we were able to install thousands of vendor-managed inventory systems in Industry 4.0 systems. By doing that and streamlining the assortment, we could reduce process costs by 39%. That's a real-life example customer which we have been serving long time. Second example is Alstom or Bombardier Transport. Here also a customer which we have been serving for decades, almost, in Europe, but also South Africa, Asia, et cetera.
We were re-engineering the assortment, streamlining the assortment, and together with the logistics systems, we were able to reduce complexity by 58%. Another exciting example, I like it particularly because it's, of course, fits into these times, is a Taiwanese producer of e-scooter, smart scooter. What's particularly exciting, I think, is this battery exchange system. What happens in Taiwan, in many locations, Gogoro put these exchange batteries in place, and then you drive by, you just pull out your empty battery, you exchange it with a full one, and then you continue. This customer had a boost in sales last year because a lot of customers, they switched from public transportation to private transportation and hence used electric scooters.
We were part of the development of this scooter from the beginning many years back, and also here, we were able to optimize assembly time by 38%. You will see an example outside when we talk about engineering later. You can actually put your hands on the screws and get a bit of a feeling of this customer as well. Those are real-life examples. What is now our business model around this? It relates a bit to the James Bond gun barrel, but at Bossard, we're not shooting people, but we're shooting at Proven Productivity. We wanna make our customers more productive. We do that through three elements, basically. One is through a whole range of product solutions, which is about a million parts. Second is assembly technology solutions.
engineering, we try to co-design, simultaneously engineer products with our customers, and through that, avoid costs. Thirdly, smart factory, where we already invested in new software, even in its fifth release since 25 years. All this together adds to customers' productivity. Now briefly on each of those elements, product solutions. It's basically, and I guess many of you have seen it, but those are standard parts which you can find in a catalog, which make about still 50% of our sales today. We see branded products, brands from well-known branded manufacturers which have a high value, which is also often demanded by high-tech industries. But we also do a lot of specialized parts, which means customers ask us to design a part, or they provide us a drawing, and then we would source those parts accordingly.
Fourth element here could be the kit sets. We kind of pre-pack parts for customers in bags, in boxes, and through that, make assembly easier. That's about products. What I just said about assembly technology expert, it's really about avoiding costs, being part of a customer's design and development process. Give you an example, Thermoplan in Weggis, they produce all the coffee machines for Starbucks globally. We are their suppliers. We have been their supplier for many years, and we also create new products for them, new coffee machine modules on an ongoing basis through our engineering. We provide them design support. We also optimize. I mentioned the examples of Roche, where we look at the assortments, and we optimize the assortment. We do education, which means we do trainings on-site at customers.
We do trainings on particular topics. For railway, it could be anti-vibration solutions, for example, anti-corrosion solutions. We also do public seminars on a regular basis, for non-customers and customers to talk to the engineers, and also we use that as a great, marketing, platform. You will hear more about these services later, so I'm not gonna say too much, otherwise my colleagues have nothing to talk about. Smart Factory, that's something I'm always still super excited because we came up with a solution 25 years ago, which was basically a simple scale, a box, and some parts inside. At that time, we already tried to capture real-time data, and you remember back in the 1990s, you connected to the internet, and then there was a lot of noise, and it didn't happen, and it was slow and really bad. We continued.
The scale was very expensive. By now, the cost of the scale came down dramatically. Now we don't use cables anymore, so this is the latest revolution we have, SmartBin Cloud, as it's called. We released it a few months ago. It's fully flexible and can be placed anywhere in a production, and it is also equipped with a label. So the label is here to always show the workers what's inside, how many pieces are inside, and if they need to do ad hoc extra ordering, which they shouldn't because we use weight technology, they could even press the button. The middle area is more showing a bit our last mile management system. Because imagine most customers, they have a central storage location in their production, but then they also have a number of assembly stations in the factory.
Somehow, those parts from the central stock have to be distributed to the assembly stations. To do that, they usually use so-called milk runners, or it's called milk runs. People who collect products at the central storage and deliver it to the assembly line. Now, we developed a navigation system for this. Basically, the assembly line workers can press the button, "I need parts," and then the data is collected, and in a certain frequency, the milk runner here will go pick the parts in one trolley and then deliver the needed parts at the assembly line in a predefined sequence, so we optimize the way, and it can be done in an efficient way. The whole thing is supported by a software which is available on an app in different on different operating systems.
You can track your inventory, you can do your inventory take by pressing the button. You can scan a QR code of a product, and it will tell you where the part is, how many parts are still available, et cetera. That's smart factory logistics. On top of that, now we developed something called smart factory assembly. Still linked to the smart factory, but we found that more and more customers, particularly in the high-tech industry, they demand secure assembly. Now take the example of IKEA. I guess most of you have tried that maybe in earlier times, not anymore. Then you get this beautiful instruction, you put together your cupboard, and then once it's finished, guess what. You have a few screws left. But the cupboard is still there, and it works, and no problem.
In that case, maybe you don't need secure assembly. It's a bit similar here, just that we don't want any screws left. If there is something to be assembled, the worker at the assembly line gets a digital instruction which indicates step by step what has to be done. Connected to that are boxes, we don't see it great here, but connected with a light. In the right sequence, and then you will see later outside, the light will blink, and so the workers know, "Okay, now it's step one. The light blinks, I take a part, I assemble it." The screwdriver is connected to the PC as well. We know who will use the screwdriver and which tightening torque will be applied to the application.
By doing that, we can document assembly, and customers can prove that something is assembled in the right way, so to avoid liability cases, et cetera. That's more and more in demand by high-tech customers. Like for example, ABB producing, I think it was, inverters for submarine or something. They just have to prove that it's assembled the right way. Now you could argue and say, "but, you know, they could use a robot. Why do you need people to still do that?" As a matter of fact, there's still a lot of medium-scale series production applications where it simply doesn't pay off to use a robot. There's a lot of medium-sized applications that man-machine is still the better solution.
What's also beautiful here, you can actually have people who have no clue about assembly, assemble things because they get instructed so well and detailed that you don't need that education. You're easily exchangeable, particularly in the COVID times when people suddenly drop out, you can put in anyone. The truck driver can suddenly connect some parts, and it is secure and securely assembled. That's an internal startup, led by Remo Gander over there. We will see him later. Today we have a number of about a dozen prototypes in Switzerland, in Europe, actually, and the plan is to roll it out next year globally. The demand is pretty vast, and we know that now is the time, now is the window of opportunity to do that.
Now, that leads me a bit to why do we actually offer services? Historically and traditionally, a wholesaler like Bossard was or still is to some extent would sell product solutions to purchasing. More often than not, this would end up in a price discussion. More often than not, they would come back and say, "I think you're too expensive." Which we're of course not, but could be. If we have a chance to talk about smart factory, smart factory logistics, then we have a chance to talk to production and logistics. Production and logistics, they have other KPIs. They're measured on lean, they're measured on time to market, on high quality production, and they're not so much interested in the product price. If we go one step further, if we offer assembly technology, then we get access and talk to designers and developers.
That means they want quality, they want safety, they want innovative products that work. That's why we think here it's again, a different level than talking to purchasing on price. If we combine all of that and we offer the whole package, then we try to access decision-makers, P&L owners, people who truly understand the total cost of ownership, who understand why there are ice cubes on the floor, and why it probably makes sense to apply those services. Now, if you look at our revenue generator, it is still products. The majority of our sales comes from products, so it's directly the product sales, the invoice that we send, the income is driven by products but i f you look at the value we generate and the stickiness and the loyalty for customers, it clearly comes from a combination of services.
This is why we keep on developing services. We wanna stay ahead of the pack. We want to further develop services for the market in order to create that customer loyalty and to create customer stickiness, as we call it. All right. Now with that, we have the services. We think we have an ample growth potential in all over the world. Now we have reshaped or maybe narrowed down our market potential compared to the last presentations we had. Because why? Because we looked at the addressable market. We looked at customers who buy value. We looked at industries who are interesting for us, growth industries. For example, we're not going into the high volume automotive business like for example, BMW buying a nut from us in millions of pieces.
That's not our business, so we excluded this. The potential you see here is an addressable potential of $35 billion. Now in Americas, we see a potential of around $9 billion with a current market share of 3%. In Europe, we see a potential of $8 billion with a market share of 6%. And in Asia Pacific, we see a potential of $18 billion with a market share of quite low. Overall, Bossard has a market share of around 3%. If you calculate that together, it's about 3%. Now, what you see in dark blue here, this is the countries within the areas with the biggest potential. It's $7 billion in U.S., it's $2 billion in Germany, and it's $8 billion in China. Now, let me also add a few words to the competitive landscape.
The fastener industry is super fragmented, extremely fragmented. There is no one large global competitor who has a market share in a double digit, and it probably will not happen in the next decades. Because we see it in many European but also Asian countries, there's a lot of mom-and-pop shops even, manufacturers, local manufacturers, small ones, who supply even high-tech industries. I remember Caterpillar in Germany was served by a very local family business, just next door. The guy even came by bicycle, and they were happy, and they didn't wanna change. That still happens. Of course, with globalization, that may change. Again, so the competitive landscape is so that it will probably remain quite fragmented. Of course, there will be some consolidation, but not on a big scale. That's at least what we expect.
If we look at the different market shares, it looks different by country. In Switzerland, we're at about 34%, Denmark, 20%, Austria, 16%, and then it goes below 10%. Five to 10%, maybe Germany, Norway, France, and then it goes below 5% and even lower. It's Czech, Sweden, U.S., Italy, you see it here. It's quite spread. There is growth potential. That's the message here. And also we see growth potential in those industries that I already iterated. I'm not gonna repeat the names and what's all in it, but these are all areas where we truly see potential and where we also now organized ourselves to tap this potential in a more structured, focused way across the group. Talking a bit about M&A.
We have been quite active in M&A in the last nine years. We had 16 acquisitions in the last nine years, and the focus for acquisition was always to either get a bigger market share in a market where we think we see a white spot and for us it makes sense to invest, or we want to buy knowledge, so we want to become better. We want to become better in terms of closing or closing white spots, but also becoming better in buying technology such as, for example, multi-material welding, which is a technology you will see outside as well, which is a technology doing ultrasonic welding for lightweight materials. You will see the examples. This has always been our strategy, and overall we have been growing about one-third through acquisitions.
We will do so, and the plan is to do so also in the future. Now, just two days ago, we were happy to announce the latest acquisition, which is the company Jeveka in Almere. Jeveka was founded 1937. They have now 117 employees doing a turnover of EUR 27 million, placed close to Amsterdam. I understood from Edwin told me that they're actually under water, so Almere is actually below, so we were kind of standing in the water somehow. A beautiful company. We have been working with them for many years actually, because they also sold SmartBin already. They were a partner of ours, but they were independent family-based company. We're happy for this acquisition.
Now with that, I would say I'd like to elaborate a bit on our strategy forward to say, okay, what's going on and how are we gonna develop ourselves forward? We looked at the traditional S-curve, and probably you know the S-curve where companies, they start and then they grow and then they mature and then whatever happens, diversify, die or whatever. We thought, hey, with 190 years of legacy, we must be somehow mature. I mean, can't be you're not mature with 190 years. I thought should be somewhere here. We looked at our market share, 3%. We said, "Okay, 97% we don't have." On top of that, we have a business model which works, which is proven, which customers appreciate.
We said, "Okay, so we have potential to grow." Focus on scale became our motto for the new strategy. Not only that, we said we wanna grow profitably. Growing profitably means also that we have to be more efficient. Efficient also in terms of people, and that means not to burn out people, but rather to collaborate much better, to really collaborate across regions and functions and hierarchies. Of course, everybody says that, say, "Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, everybody says that." We said, "Okay, we have to do something on the together side," and I'll come back to that in a minute. Derived from this notion, we defined a winning aspiration. The winning aspiration is together we bring Proven Productivity and sustainability to every assembly operation in the world.
That's possible because we know whenever we visit an assembly operation, they're not entirely efficient, and there's always some ice cubes that we can pinpoint to and look at. We then defined seven strategic initiatives to do that. We said, "How do we do that?" We have seven initiatives which we defined. Now, I'm not gonna go through all of them. There is actually one more. It's called anti-bureaucracy. We didn't put it on here to save space. It's less bureaucratic to do that, and I would like to elaborate on four of them, but we will have a chance to discuss about it at the panel later. The first one being Together We Create. Together We Create, as I just mentioned, is important because we wanna do more with less, basically. How do we do that in a positive way?
It is that we create a human-centric environment where it is fun to work and where we can unleash the potential of all our employees. This is something we said we wanna do. We also exercise that in the strategy process in that we engaged 200 change agents in the development of our strategy. We called out and said, "Hey, guys, we need 100 people to join us." In the end, it was a bit more. We did some virtual hackathon sprints. We educated them in virtual boot camps to explain what is a sprint, what is a sprint master's role, and everybody was kind of overwhelmed and so were we, but we tried that. We worked cross-functionally, cross-hierarchy, cross-regionally already in the strategy development process.
We also defined guiding principles, and we said those should be the guiding stars for us to further develop. First one being, we collaborate. As I just said, obviously we wanna work better across functions, regions and hierarchies. We also try to live up to that with the strategy process. We experiment. Experiment means that it's okay to try things out, and if it's not entirely to the existing processes, as in the past, that's okay. We try it out, we learn, and hopefully sometimes fail, but then also learn from it. We empower. Power means trust. We need to trust people that they want to do their best. It's not okay to check in your brain at the reception. We said, "If you come to work, you have to manage your private life. We want you to also bring in your wholeness.
We want to bring everything of you to work, and we will empower you to do things." We talk real. Now, talking real. Thank you. It is about putting the fish on the table. It is about talking about things as they occur. Talk about things when you think you should talk about it and not wait. Let's not have the soup boil until it's exploding. By doing that, it also means, by the way, listening. It means that we wanna solve problems quickly on the spot and make sure we encounter each other with respect. Monica, I'll try to. Oops, sorry. Yeah. Finally. Still alive? No. Finally, we deliver value. This is. It also sounds quite obvious, but internally. For example, if we look at meetings, do we need this meeting?
Do we need so many people at the meeting? You know, is it really right what we were talking about here? What is the decision and all these things. I think every one of us has to take care and make sure that we do that. Externally, obviously, it means does it make sense for a customer? Does it add value for a customer? If no, okay, maybe we should reconsider it. This is the guiding principles where we have a number of things and activities going around. Second one is sales engine. Again, here it is about thinking about how can we increase efficiency in customer acquisition. Here I would like to allude to the fact that traditionally we had a lot of outside salespeople.
They go out and knock doors at the customers, talk to customer personas and try to sell our services and say, "Hey, would you be interested? Can we do this? Can we do that?" More often than not, okay, maybe not, and difficult. We said the new generation thinks much differently. Like the students today, remember maybe in your study time, I don't know, okay, no offense, I don't know how old you are. When you had to do a diploma work or something, you went to the library, you copy the book page, and then you yellowed it, and then you summarize. That's all over. It's all online, and the new engineers, they will look for solutions online.
We said, "Hey, we should post content, really cool content, which people want to read." If an engineer at Honda looks for an anti-vibration solution, they will Google, and they will hopefully find us. In order to do that, you need to do search engine optimization, because if you don't do it, somebody else will be on top. I'm not gonna mention any names. We said we wanna boldly invest in digital content. That means we also wanna boldly invest into digital marketeers. That means also we may have less people working on the outside sales, but the work will shift. By that, we truly believe we can follow a more of a pull model instead of pushing our services out.
We want to harmonize the way we approach our customers and close deals, and that also means, of course, there are still people involved. And those people, we would like to harmonize the way we can close deals after all. That's the second one. The third one, again, efficiency in our operations. We looked at 2031 and we said, "What technologies could we use, looking forward?" We talk about artificial intelligence, we talk about cloud architecture, infrastructure, and we had some workshops around what could an architecture 2031 look like.
We said, "Okay, let's now calculate back and say, what would we need in order to build something like that?" Of course, we have legacy, we have an old ERP system, and we're now building a new Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform where we want the whole group to be on, to be quicker in getting customer data, to be more transparent, and finally support all we do in supply chain, in sales, to be more efficient. We streamline our operations. We also look again at our warehouse setup. Is it the most efficient way we could actually do it? We reduce bureaucracy. We have this initiative. People are truly asked to ring the bell and say, "Guys, sorry, this is bureaucratic. We don't need that." Usually, the finance people don't like that, but sometimes it's needed.
Then, sustainability. Here, this is something that is not new. What is new that we said we need to collect data. Quite honestly, we haven't been good at collecting data, but I truly believe, for example, if you look at our smart bin systems, we already contributed to avoid extra shipments, because through the system in real-time, we can identify when an order is needed, and that means we don't need express deliveries, which again means less transport, which again means less CO2. We're in the process of collecting this data. We also have our head of Tabea Bürglerrre, over there, you will see her later. We will set realistic goals for 2022. Now, that's more the environmental side. If we look at the people side, we say. That's basically the leadership purpose, which we formulated.
We create an environment in which our people and the organization reach their full potential. It alludes a bit to what I said earlier. Actually, our role as leaders is more to stand behind people and not in front of people. That's in a nutshell what it is. Thereby strengthening the foundation of success for the next generation. We wanna be here in not only in 10 years, but maybe in another 190 years, but we need to take care and we need to build on these topics. Those were four examples, and that leads me to the summary of the strategy. Accelerated, profitable, and sustainable growth based on a proven business model. Again, we're not reinventing the wheel in that sense. We're still using the same business model. Of course, we further develop the services and we wanna be innovative, et cetera.
We wanna grow organically and through acquisitions. I already mentioned that, probably one-third, in average will be through acquisitions, but it's, again, not hardcore. It's a guideline. We wanna achieve relevant market shares in our key markets through our seven or eight strategic initiatives. With that, I'm happy to hand over to Stephan Zehnder, who will gladly elaborate a bit on the financial targets. Thank you.
Thank you, Daniel. With the Strategy 200 initiating seven strategic initiatives, the ambition to grow faster than in the past, we also have set ourselves some new midterm financial targets, as we have already been communicating this morning. However, to create the condition and the environment for further profitable growth, we have been triggering and we will be triggering further investments also as part of our strategic initiatives, which will lead to a higher cost base also in the coming years. Now, what are those investments we talking about? As already Daniel mentioned, we're gonna implement or replace our current ERP system, which we have 11 of them throughout the group, 11 different ones and w e're gonna plan to do that over the next six years.
With this new common platform, it helps us to transact the business in a much more effective and more efficient way. The common system or the common platform will also help us to take advantage of existing technologies, but also be much more agile to adjust to changing market conditions, which was a bit difficult with hard-coded system in the past. We're gonna invest in the future iTec technology of Bossard, also here, Daniel already mentioned. What do we mean with that? It's leveraging on current and future technologies to facilitate the business operation.
What we mean here distinctively is creating the system in a way that we can do much more with data analytics and also artificial intelligence, because we believe that having the right system, we have the capability to use it, that we also can create advantages vis-à-vis the competition. We're gonna further innovate and focus on digitalization of our business model. That means services and platform, as we recently did, also with real-time service manufacturing. One important part, which Daniel already elaborated on, is building One Bossard. Having focus on people and development, on diversity, on creating, showing people growth perspective, and looking at the whole well-being. In a nutshell, making Bossard even a better place to work at. One Bossard means also a brand, a global brand, meaning acting and behaving the same way we are globally.
Last but not least, ESG. ESG is being part of our seven strategic initiatives. We want to exploit even more the potential of Proven Productivity and sustainability, because we believe that these two topics go hand in hand. Let's come back to the midterm financial goals. Our ambition is to increase the organic sales growth midterm above the 5% growth rate. As we always strive for growth, but profitable growth, we have the ambition midterm to reach an EBIT margin in the target range of 12%-15%. Going forward, we will rely on a strong balance sheet as we have been in the past and targeting an equity ratio of at least 40%, which gives us enough water under the keel to maneuver diligently, also in challenging time as we have seen in the last two years.
All these investments and strategic initiatives should not go at the expense of the dividend. That's why we stay committed to a dividend payout ratio of 40% of the annual net income. Now, what you have heard or what you will be seeing or hearing this afternoon might trigger the question, why to invest in Bossard? Let me give you seven reasons why possibly to do so. Now, if you look at the different segments and the different end markets, there is a strong need for productivity gains, but also sustainable assembly operations. Bossard have always shaped and managed an entrepreneurial spirit for generations, and we want to continue to do even more to do so with the new guiding principles, but also empowering our people. Bossard has a scalable business model which has been proven for years.
We have a strong market position and also a strong global footprint and a broad diversification by end markets and segments. I think that has been also shown over the last two years, specifically in the COVID period. We have a certain resilience to our business. We will be focusing on future industries, growth industries like railway, automation, robotics, EV, which generates additional opportunities, growth opportunities for Bossard. We have a high level of recurring revenues due to the strong partnership with our customers. Again, here we can see that's proven also what we have seen in the last two years. Additionally we have further growth potential to additional M&A transactions. That's the seven reasons why possibly to invest. Okay?
Together We Create, that's what we believe in as an organization to continue the growth path also in the future. This means not only our people, this means the whole organization. That means our supplier, our customers, our stakeholders, and hopefully also you.
After now having seen what the Smart Factory looks like, what it feels like, maybe even had the chance to ask some questions, and obviously prove your knowledge in the Smart Factory system, we would like to invite you to a deep dive on our Strategy 200. You've already heard a little bit from Daniel about our strategy and how it came about, but we would like to provide a little bit more time to elaborate and also for you to ask questions if you have any in regards to our strategy of how we wanna move forward. For that, I would like to invite our panel members up on stage. I'm gonna sit down. Here we go.
On our tiny little stage here, I have with me Rolf Ritter, who is the Chief Strategy Officer, then Tabea Bürgler, who is our Head of Legal and Sustainability, and Tee Bin Ong, who is the Head of Sales and Marketing. Before I start asking these three fantastic colleagues some questions, I just wanted to remind all of you, if you know, didn't recognize that from Daniel's speech already, our strategy process was quite unique in the way we set it up. He already said we have a quite historic date coming up in 2031, where we are celebrating our 200-year anniversary, and we really thought hard about if we are true to our concept of Together We Create, what does that mean for our strategy process?
It cannot be that we, you know, take five clever people, sit them in a room together, and out comes a strategy process. If we truly believe that together we create, we need to involve our people, we need to have them actively participate. That was actually our thought process of opening up the strategy process to a much larger audience within Bossard, for them to actively shape the future together. We invited seven cross-functional hack teams that were globally dispersed from very different parts of the organization to define the strategy concept. Then we actually opened it up even further for people to volunteer to come together to execute on the strategy now.
I remember the day I had a conversation on the phone with Daniel, before the announcement to ask for volunteers to join, and he said, "What if nobody signs up? What are we gonna do?" We had hoped for 100 people to come and join and actively contribute and find time to execute the strategy on these seven strategic initiatives. We had 400 people raising their hands to contribute and who are now part of this change agent community. With that process in mind, can you, Rolf, give us a bit of an overview of what the Strategy 200 is about?
Yeah, of course. Thanks, Susan. We started out, and what Daniel showed as well before, to try to understand where are we on the life cycle of a company. As I said, you know, we could have thought, you know, we are more in the mature space like we are, for example, in a market like Switzerland. But actually with the huge market potential we have ahead of and with just 3% market share, then actually we're not. We're on a growth trajectory. We have so much potential ahead of us. We said to those hack teams, we say, "Now think about all the different concepts, you know, what could be relevant for us. How should we do this?
You know, what should be part of our strategy as we go forward? W e have people, as Susan said, from all the business units, basically from all areas joining into the conversation. In a nutshell, the conclusion was that what we've been doing is actually really good. We bring a lot of value to our customers. We bring a lot of value into the market, and it's truly appreciated, what we are doing. We said we wanna focus on that, but we wanna bring it to all those markets today where they're not getting it yet. The core base idea behind this is to say we wanna focus and scale what we already do well and bring our success engine to every single relevant market.
With this, to go even deeper into our customers by providing them those value-added services. We, you've just seen before, in these three stages, those value-added services to everybody which creates stickiness. We call it stickiness, in the sense that it's so much value they get from us from so many different angles within their assembly process, it's really hard to get rid of us. We see this when we look at our customers which we've had for a long time. If you look at our top customers from 10 years ago and where they are today, we have basically not lost any of them over the period of time because it's really sticky. It's really hard to find somebody else to bring so much value to the table as we have.
Last but not least, I think the most important piece, and we call it together, and you've heard the word together already many times today. It's really to do this together to really leverage the whole company we have behind. The cultural process we are driving, and the processing itself is already part of that, and I think it's much more than what we're doing within the strategy.
Yeah. You mentioned focus and scale. What were the core themes that they defined in the strategy concept?
We had basically out of the concept of focus and scale, stickiness and together, we took eight strategic initiatives and we then grouped them if you like, into four core themes in there. One is the cultural transformation we've already talked about. One is the sales engine to really try to bring our value proposition to every customer in the world, and with this, to have a much stronger focus on how we get there, how can we grow. The sustainability to really try to build a company around us in the better world for the next generation to come. As a baseline, the underlying core competence of our operations in innovation, which is basically the delivery piece of the company.
We'll come back to some of those elements, but I would love to ask you, Tee Bin a question.
Yeah.
We said one of the core elements is to do it together. Which, you know, in itself is a cultural journey which you've been a part of from the beginning. Can you tell us a bit more of what we are focusing on in the cultural transformation?
Absolutely. Yeah, I couldn't help to say a little bit here. The whole journey has been amazing. We've never done this before, and this is absolutely helping us to shape really a very exciting future going forward. Now, what are we focusing on? Here's my take on what we are focusing on. When we talk about our cultural transformation, there are two things which are very important. That's about the five guiding principles, and the other one is how to live up to it. Now, having said that, the whole cultural transformation is basically we want to focus on how do we build a culture that enable a successful implementation of our strategy.
Having said that also, the whole cultural transformation builds on the long heritage of the Bossard family which reflected in our values. Those values that we believe in form the basis for us to create the five guiding principles. As the word says it, the guiding principles are going to guide us in our behavior and also it's going to set the path forward in ensuring that Bossard has an organization that is going to continue to be successful. This is very important. What are those five guiding principles that we talk about? I think Daniel has also mentioned it today. Because it is so important, I'd like to mention it again.
Sure.
The first one is we collaborate. The second one is we empower. The third one is we experiment. Fourth one is we talk real, which is one of the favorite where we throw the fishes now. The last one is we deliver value. Now those are the five guiding principles. Now the question is how do we now bring these five guiding principles to life? How do we live up to it? Therefore we created a movement which we call Together We Create.
Do you have an example of, like, how does that movement show up? I'm sure people have a question right now, like, what does that mean?
Yes, we have a lot of examples. You heard that we have 400 change agent just come up and say, "Hey, we want to be part of this movement. One of the examples that I could think of right now is the anti-bureaucracy. In the anti-bureaucracy, it's amazing. We reach out to our people and say, "Hey, we have a topic here, anti-bureaucracy. Who would like to jump in?" Boom, we have 40 more people jump in and they said, "Hey, we would like to talk about this topic and we would like to think about something how to do this." As we all know, excessive bureaucracy in a company can be very counterproductive.
At the same time it might cause losing even a business opportunity because the inability t o respond to market change. Having said that, the spring team actually came up with Bossard bureaucracy index. They came up with this in a spirit of we experiment and they created a tool that we are now experimenting, and it has been so far very successful because it is a bottom-up feedback to managers, to leaders. How much bureaucracy do I have in my units? Right? That really put the fish on the table. We talk real now.
That is one of the fantastic example that I can think of here.
Yeah. Thanks for sharing.
Yes.
What are the expectations in the future from this cultural transformation? What would you say?
Yeah. We have a lot of expectations. One more thing that I liked, and that we had a great experience as a result of this journey that we have. Earlier this year, I'll come back to the expectation. I promise you. Earlier this year, what happened was that we were contacted by a customer which is based out of U.K., and they are specialized in e-mobility. They have a huge startup projects that they would like to do, and it is about autonomous driving taxi out of U.K.
What happened was that they reached out to our business unit in Ireland, and our colleagues in Ireland, realizing that this is a great opportunity, but it's gonna require a lot of engineering resource in order to make sure that we win this contract. They reach out to several Bossard units around the world, and amazingly is that Bossard Poland jumps in, Bossard Denmark jumps in, and Bossard North America also jumps in to support Bossard Ireland. Bossard Poland offer engineering resources, Bossard Denmark offer coaching services. The best part also, Bossard North America, because of their vast experience in EV, so they flew in their engineers to support Bossard Ireland. What is really inspiring for us is that it is the whole collaboration was driven bottom up.
This is what we want to see from the culture transformation. Finally, we won this project. We got awarded now. The assembly technology service that you've seen just now, so that is the engineering service that we're gonna provide them to help them to design and eventually when they go to mass production.
This is, for me, as a sales and marketing, this is Together We Create, this is how we can win business.
Now back to the expectations.
We firmly believe through this culture transformation, we want to build a truly One Bossard global culture. We want to have an organization where each and everyone in Bossard team will be able to realize their individual potential. We also want to have an organization that is truly collaborative. We are really strong in collaboration and when we're talking about collaboration because through great collaborations, we are able to leverage on knowledge, collective wisdom globally and also talent within the whole Bossard organization. That is going to position Bossard well ahead of competition.
Last but not the least, which is really important, is that through this cultural transformation, we also want to build an organization that is agile and resilient, because that is going to help us to be able to adapt and change according to the market requirements. That's going to put us to stay ahead of the game and continue to grow.
Thank you. With that, transformation in mind, what impact do you see this having on the sales strategy? You talked about sales engine as one of the key themes.
Yes, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the B2B sales, like in most companies, we have more an approach traditionally what's more on the push side. Basically it means, you know, we have a target customer, we go out there, we push, we hassle them and until they tell what their pain is and then who is the one with the pain and we hassle the next one. It's this classical push. I'm over describing a bit. There's this classical push approach to try to find who is the right stakeholder with the right pain so we can sell our value proposition at all.
With this approach, we as well wanna bring much more value back to the customer even from the beginning of the sales process and start going into more a pull type of process over the customer finds us. We heard a little bit before in the presentation as well that Daniel talked about a little bit, so that we are out there. If somebody has a pain, that they find a solution with us and that our interactions from the beginning are much more value driven.
What are the expectations of this shift from push to pull?
We hope that every interaction we have with the customer is gonna be a truly valuable interaction for both sides. It's not so much that I go there and say I can do all those 100 great things and hopefully one sticks, but that from the beginning we understand already where can we help, where can we create value. This as a consequence will lead that our sales force, every interaction will be more valuable. Will have a higher chance of actually leading to business eventually, so that in the future we can sell more with the similar size sales force we have today.
Yeah. That is a transformation in itself as well, right? How do we go about that change?
Yeah, it's a huge transformation. I mean, we've been very successfull w ith our approaches we have today. We have maybe 40% of our people are somehow related directly or indirectly into the sales process. To move from the push concept to a pull concept changes a lot of things.
We set this up similarly as we did the strategy process that we started out with experiments. We call them experiments in that case. We have 11 experiments throughout different business units in the world where we test out different concepts of what does that actually mean. What does it mean to generate the leads digitally? What does it mean and what kind of quality do we get? How do I do the handshake between marketing and sales, and how do I drive it through the pipeline, et cetera? Then to better understand what's the best way for each single business unit and how to do it and then push this, roll it out, push it. Roll it out into the rest of the business units.
Do you maybe have an example as well?
I think there's one really nice. Last week, we were in Sweden for a progress meeting, and we had Denmark presenting one of their examples, and they set up a digital marketing campaign through LinkedIn addressing a couple of specific interesting topics, in that case, Industry 4.0, with their customers. They were able to get more than 200 new leads out of that in a market where we have a very high market position where everybody knows us. We believe we know everybody, and a lot of those we actually didn't know. A lot of contacts we actually didn't have before. It already generated now CHF 1 million in sales for a marketing investment which was somewhere in the CHF 25,000 area.
Nice. Thanks. We've heard about the cultural transformation, as how it's also impacting the sales transformation. I wanna give a bit of space for sustainability as well.
Perfect.
Right? It is part of our winning aspiration. We wanna bring Proven Productivity and sustainability. It takes a really central element in our strategy. Can you tell us a bit more of what that means?
Yes. Thanks, Susan. As we heard before, we really believe that productivity and sustainability belong together, and it is perfectly able that they can keep their balance and w e also think it goes hand in hand. We as company and we as humans want to contribute to that journey. What we've done is that we had a look at our entire value chain and defined four focus areas where we would like to concentrate on. We have one focus area, we call that future-proven solutions. That's kind of all the solutions you have seen and services. With these, we wanna bring sustainability to the assembly operation of our customers, and we obviously want to improve them on a continuous basis. We also have our focus area, that's the reduced footprint.
Here we are addressing topics like energy and emission management and, for example, packaging. We have the focus area, empowered people.
Here we wanna provide conditions to set up our colleagues and ourselves for success. Also our fourth focus area is the fair partnership. We wanna be perfectly in control of our supplier management and ensure compliance throughout the supply chain. These are maybe the four really important areas.
Nice. You mentioned energy and emission management, and I know the COP meeting is coming up in Scotland. It's a h uge topic. I think a lot of us are thinking about it. Maybe you can elaborate a bit more on what we mean by that.
Yes. Maybe for an example that we are continuously improving our facilities. Last year in Denmark, we inaugurated something around, I think it was 740 solar panels, so that now the entire electricity consumption for our colleagues in Denmark on a sunny day actually comes from solar power. But okay, we all know it's not always sunny in Denmark. We actually have the team now looking into solutions and how to figure out how we can actually store excess energy and then use it on a less sunny day instead of feeding it back to the electricity power grid. Right now, we're also installing in Bossard India additional solar panels so that we can proudly say that beginning of next year we will be completely self-sufficient in India and run entirely from solar energy.
Nice.
They're also now working on a project, and they just started to reduce their water consumption by more than 60%.
Yeah. We also gotta be honest that this is not completely new to us. I mean, just our warehouse across the street, already in 2011, we installed a heating pump system so that we, on an annual basis, we actually save 50,000 liters of heating oil, which pretty much sums up to, I think, 135 tons of CO2 reduction.
Nice. It's also building on something that w e've already been doing but maybe being more explicit about it.
Exactly.
Right. Could we go into something more concrete in terms of action steps? You mentioned those four core themes. What are you specifically doing right now?
What are you working on?
We did, within these focus areas, define seven initiatives.
Maybe just to pick out a few, I think the very crucial one also Daniel Bossard talked about is the transparency.
We're really currently collecting all the data and facts that is relevant with it, with regard to our focus area to then actually have a solid base and come up with realistic goals, where to improve, where to go. Another one, it's the code of conduct initiative, and I think this is also an extremely great example how we live actually our change agent movement. It has been a small group of change agent. It was five from the U.S., different countries in Europe, and they also kind of interacted with the colleagues from Asia, where they had a look at our current code of conduct and, well, they came to the conclusion, great document, but they want to be more precise, more specific. They want to emphasize more environment and social topics.
All by themselves, they started drafting, updating a new code of conduct, brought them up, bottom up, through the entire organization, and they're now at the stage of finalizing the new code of conduct. It has been completely supported by the Group management and will most likely be implemented already beginning of next year. Maybe one that's very close to my heart, that's the internal awareness.
Right now we're running a campaign to raise awareness internally so that all these sustainability consideration become the DNA of all of us, and that whatever action we're taking, whatever decision we're taking, we're actually taking all these sustainability consideration into account.
Okay. Going from very concrete examples of what we're doing now, I would also love for you to dream a little. I mean, we said 2031. That's a few years until t hat are our ambitions? What would be your ambitions in terms of ESG goals i f you could dream?
Now that I'm entitled to dream big, I would love to see in 2031, personally, I would love to see that we are carbon neutral or maybe Bossard is actually net zero.
Being a little more realistic, I think, we all know in order to have an ambition and then to that we can realistically live up to, we need to have transparency.
I think like many other companies, we realized it's a challenge to gather all this kind of information, but one we just tackled, we're willing to take, we can achieve, and we will. As a first step, we will focus on scope one and two.
We definitely have the goal to work towards carbon neutrality and want to come up and present and communicate our goals and KPIs within the next year.
Another one I really think it's a very cool thing we're doing right now is we're collaborating very closely with the board of directors.
We are now having workshops going on. We call this the biggest worthwhile problem to solve.
We're diving into all kind of fields and problems and issues and options where we think that Bossard could actually have a huge impact and maybe taking a leading role. This is kind of the option we're currently exploring also next to this.
Nice. There's some dreaming going on.
Exactly. Dreaming. Also real actions.
The lawyer talking.
Exactly.
Maybe just to summarize quickly, but also to give you some time to digest and think about the questions that you might have. The winning aspiration that we have for our strategy is to bring Proven Productivity and sustainability to every assembly operation in the world. We said we would do that through focus and scale to create stickiness with our customers and to do it together. To go on a cultural journey and a cultural transformation that will impact everyone in the company. I would now like to invite our Chairman of the Board, Thomas Schmuckli, up on stage as well, because we would like to also give the chance for you to hear what is the perspective of the Board of Directors towards this Strategy 200. I'm actually gonna pull another chair up here. There you go. Hi, Thomas.
Hey.
Hi, Thomas.
Good to see you. As the Chairman of the Board, now you're listening to this, it's obviously not the first time you're hearing this, but what is your perspective towards this journey that we're taking?
First of all, I'd like to thank you. I must thank you for this fantastic afternoon, for this event, all to you folks. It's super, it's inspiring, it's clear. Thank you very much. For a chairman, it's kind of an easy moment, you know. The management comes and says, "Well, okay, we stick to our DNA. We stick to that what we have done. We're gonna do it differently. We're gonna do it better, faster. We're gonna gain market share. We're gonna enlarge profitability." The board says, "Well, okay. Guys, go ahead. We are behind you." Basically, we had a lot of discussions, thanks to you, ladies and gentlemen.
The board was heavily involved in the whole process, and I'm, you know, also looking back a little bit what happened the last 15 years at Bossard. I assessing what it was, I have the pleasure to say that David Dean and his management team, they really successfully implemented a robust, global, very profitable business model within the group. That's quite an achievement. You know, the beauty of this business model is we can run it with a lean balance sheet, and with a lean balance sheet, I like to say, "Well, okay, it's not capital intensive." Cool DNA, you know, distributing fasteners and engineered components, selling services, having a success, having a fantastic balance sheet, having a share price that goes into the right direction. Super.
Now, Daniel Bossard and his management, they're taking over, and they're sticking to this DNA. They have learned it, and that's what we're doing. However, they wanna do it a little bit slightly different, and that's, for the board, pretty cool. Why? They have to focus on our people. You know, they are taking all our people. What did you say, Donnie? 2,600. You know, they're gonna take them with us on the journey. You know, living Together We Create, and the result of this Together We Create, you have seen it this afternoon, and I must say, I'm pretty proud of that. The board is really very, very supportive. We believe in it.
If you then, you know, if you're going home and then start to calculate with all these figures we have seen, then you know, not too many figures make sense, but with those few figures you have seen, you will see it's an ambitious program, and we stick to that, and I'm looking forward to that. Thanks.
All right. Yeah, it pretty much relates to the segments that we had talked about in the presentation. It includes the panel discussion and the, like, you know, the sky is the limit. I like that one. Carbon zero, yes, we're going there. Global culture, yes, we wanna make that global. Let's make the Bossard a better world for the generations to come.
Sustainability and productivity need to be in balance, guiding principles. Yes. I see it's definitely a summary of what we have discussed today out of the presentations and what would I like you to stick with. I would say first one could be growth potential. There is a vast growth potential with Bossard. We talked about industries, we talked about markets, we talked about market share and potential to grow. Yes, I'm with you. We would like to grow faster, if possible. Yet there are realities around which we also need to take into consideration, and it's a journey. We have a business model which is actually a great base to tap that potential. The business model is in itself, in its combination and globality, it is unique.
What is unique is the services that we try to highlight, to say the services help us to create loyalty and stickiness. In a way, it is unique. The Strategy 200, including the organization, will help us to tap that potential with our business model. Collaboration, you know, I have to mention again, sorry for that, is absolutely the key for achieving accelerated, sustainable, profitable growth. I firmly believe in the part of Together We Create. Why? Because if we wanna grow profitably, with more or less the same amount of people, we need people to collaborate much better, and that will increase our efficiency and finally lead to financial targets or financial results of sales, organic sales beyond 5% over the next years.
Again, I'd like to highlight here, this is a long-term growth, so there will be cycles, and nobody knows when recessions kick in and what that will mean. For us, we're pretty safe to say 5% growth year-on-year on the long term, we will make it. EBIT margin, 12%-15% again here. We're quite comfortable to say we know the initiatives behind that. We're comfortable to announce that range for the years to come. Again here, it's a mid-long term and there may be swings. It could be a year if there's a vast recession, we're only at 7%. Nobody knows that. But if everything goes well, we should be at 12%-15% or even beyond. With that's basically what I would like to highlight again. Stephan mentioned 7 reasons to invest.
Maybe there is more. Maybe you have noted a few more. Happy for that. But with that, actually, I'd like to close today, and I would like to thank you very much for joining us here today. I think it's been really a pleasure to have you and to discuss and to have you immersed into the production and, you know, we had to wear some clothes. Some people said maybe, you know, they should wear helmets and goggles and shoes and all. I said, "No, no. Maybe that's too much." But I hope you had a chance to really dive into the Smart Factory arena. What will happen now is that we warmly invite you to join us for an apéro riche, which will be over there where you already had the break.
We're happy to stick around for another hour or two. However long you wanna stay, we're happy to share. Please mingle also with our Group Executive Board, Chief Strategy Officer, Head of Northern and Eastern Europe. We have Dave Jones from Americas. Maybe if you're curious what's going on in America, what happens to John Deere. Well, no, I'm not gonna raise questions now myself. To stick around. With that, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have you, and have a great journey back. Thank you.