Welcome to our analyst conference of Interroll of the results of 2023. Thanks for being physically here in this room. I just wanted to let you know we are also online, so we have also participants joining us online. Therefore, I would like to remind you, when we go into the Q&A sessions, Julia Weinert will be so kind to hand out the microphone so that also the participants online can join the discussions that we're having. Okay, let's immediately dive into that. We are here present today as Heinz Hössli, our CFO, Maurizio Catino, the CSO for sales officer, and myself, Ingo Steinkrüger, the COO, currently also in personal union as the COO and the CTO. We will provide you with a welcome and the group overview. We will then dig into, with Mr. Hössli, into the results.
Then we will have an overview into the customers and our focus industries. I will then go into the innovation, digitalization, and service, and I will also wrap up and finish with the outlook. What a year 2023 was for us. I just got feedback that last year our outlook was a little bit hesitant. But last year we said at the beginning of the year, after having received a high order intake in January with major orders, especially also out of the U.S., we were very confident that this year will start good. And it did in January, but we saw then in the next couple of months the order intake deteriorating into the wrong direction. We finally ended up with the figures that I'm gonna present to you in a minute.
But the takeaway was that basically, we saw that our customers, especially on the product business side, were in the so-called destocking phase. So we had our most important big customers did not place any orders with us in the beginning of the year because they had a lot of material still on stock. And I did a lot of visits with customers and customers and also small customers. And even on small customer side, they were crowded with rollers and RollerDrives out of our product portfolio. And in the second half of the year, this situation improved. So we saw order intakes on the product side coming back in, especially from the bigger ones, but not on a level that we have experienced before the year before. So the economic downturn also hit us there. So what was our strategy to cope with that situation?
The best strategy to deal with the situation is basically the strategy that is our long-term strategy. So we were able to react on this. The first one is the topic of cost fitness. So we will see that, and Mr. Hössli will also give us an outlook into that. We were really looking into how can we mitigate our fixed cost? How can we make sure that the cost level that we are having on with our facilities is going to be on a low level and to defend the profitability of our company? This was a strong measurement that we put in place in the last year. Second one was the pricing strategy.
So instead of lowering the price to gain market, we took the decision, and I took the decision to keep the price as it is right now because we saw that we were in an economic downturn, and we made the decision to keep the price level on that level to wait until the market is coming up. And this paid off into our profitability as well. And with that strategy, and this is the more, the most important topic, is we were able to gain back customers. What does that mean? In 2021, 2022, we lost customers in the big peak of order intake because our delivery times went from two days into three, four, five months, plus the situation that we were challenged by the missing semiconductor situation. And this also extended our lead times, and we lost customers that went to our competition.
In the last year, we were able to gain back these customers, to win back these customers, even with the high price level that we had in place. The good news is we even engaged and onboarded new customers that we have not done business yet before with. This is a very strong signal into the market. The last bit is the scalability. It paid off that with the long-term strategy that we put in place, we can downgrade and we can upgrade afterwards. This is the strong foundation of this company when we look into the future. In numbers, this is the order intake, CHF 519.7 million. We generated a turnover in sales of CHF 556.3 million and an EBIT of CHF 89.3 million. This distributes in order intake numbers, 10% in pallet handling.
This is a very strong business for us, still potential for growth, 40.7% in conveyors and sorters, 18.2% in rollers, and 31.1% in driven rollers, we call them drives. Second topic I'd like to place today is this slide. And I show this slide, and my predecessor has showed this slide also in every analyst conference. Why? We, we could get bored of this slide. No, we, we are not because this shows our long-term strategy. So we're coming out of the situation of restructuring, repositioning, and divestments and acquisitions, went into the platform concept, global footprint, and end-user approach. And we are now in the third decade. And this is for us the, a very important one because all what has been done here is the foundation for our third decade.
This is where we are really looking into and strengthen our modularity to generate scalability, strengthen our digitalization approach. I will come to that in my second part. We are looking into industry solutions because we are not just selling our products and our solution. We wanna come more into the application and fulfill customer requirements immediately and Business Excellence . So making sure that our production processes are on a global level, high standards that is in the material flow industry. Highlights of our growth strategy. You know that our growth strategy is based on three major pillars: products, projects, and service since 2021, yeah, since we've generated or initiated our service initiative within Interroll. If we look into the structure, I told you about the increased customer base. Mr. Catino will give you details about that, what that exactly means.
But we also started in 2023 our customer experience team with the D.I. to set up the digital, the digital strategy to make sure that we create even more customer orientation within our company. I'll tell you, in my second part what we exactly mean with that. Three weeks ago, almost three weeks ago, two weeks and five days, we launched our S/4HANA system. And this was for us a very major, important milestone. It took us the last two years to prepare that launch. And I can tell you, I've been in my life through a couple of launches, when it came to ERP systems. I've never seen such a smooth launch than that we had in Interroll. So we were sitting together Sunday night at 6:00 P.M., and I gave the okay for Monday morning, and we launched it, and there's no customer being affected.
We had some issues that we coped with, but there was no customer affected with the S/4 launch. And this is a great achievement of the team. On top of that, on the structural side, we also strengthened the position of Mr. Catino, the Chief Sales Officer. And we have now separated our sales team in two sales teams. One is responsible for product. The other sales team is responsible for project to focus and sharpen our know-how and to get a better customer understanding and get closer to the customer. And we also put the service underneath the responsibility of sales of Mr. Catino because I strongly believe that service and sales are a strong weapon to understand what the customer requirements are. On innovations, last year, I told you about the High Performance Conveyor Platform that we launched at the LogiMAT, which we did.
And I can tell you this was very attractive session at the LogiMAT. There was a lot of attention on our MultiBelt Switch , and I'll come to that in my second part to give you some details on that. I repeated. I said that this morning in the press conference as well. There was a very important customer of us, who is doing business with us on a global basis, and he was standing in front of our MultiBelt Switch . And he told me, like, "This is the first real innovation that I see at the LogiMAT this year." And there were robots moving around and artificial intelligence. And I'll give you the details why he said this, in my second part. Modernization of production facilities.
We launched in our plant in Wermelskirchen where we manufacture rollers and roller drives, a piece of equipment, a machine that manufactures 3.5 million rollers per year without tool-changing time. So it can produce whatever kind of roller we have in our portfolio. And this is a diverse portfolio of 60,000 different rollers. And this machine manufactures these rollers without tool-changing time. Impressive. Europe service business running. We established that in 2021, if you remember that. In 2022, in 2023, we ramped up the service business in Europe. And this is now well established. We deliver spare parts within 48 hours to every location in Europe, which is quite a good achievement. We also started in 2023 with a ramp-up of the service business in the U.S. And I can tell you, this is a success. So we have created a team.
I'll come to that in a minute. And we are doing a lot of good businesses, and also go into new areas of business with the service. It's very good for us. And we also finished the expansion of our location in Brazil last year. Looking into a little bit into Asia-Pacific and what's going on this year, Mr. Catino will give you an overview of what are our ideas when it comes to increase the sales presence in Asia-Pacific. We have started now after initiating service in Europe and also in the U.S. This year, Asia is in focus. So the team started in the second week of January for a tour into the APAC region. And we are now setting up the team and have also started with the education of the people out of Asia to make sure that we are on the same know-how level.
This year, we will also move into a bigger location after the good business we had in the recent years in Australia. This will happen by mid to end of this year, depending on the progress of the building. In October last year, we announced that we will go into a transformation and will split the position of our Executive Vice President for Product and Technology to focus more. Why do we wanna do this for us? One of our customer promises or the customer promise is quality, speed, and simplicity. And we see how powerful that is, what kind of benefit and value add this gives to our customer. And we would like to strengthen this. So we would like to further strengthen our customer promises. How are we gonna do this? By putting a clear focus on production, product, and customers.
This needs to have like a little bit of transformation, also a little bit of different structures. This is why I announced to create the position of a Chief Technology Officer, and also to create the position of a Chief Operations Officer so that we have a clear understanding what is the best production that we have to have for our global facilities. Second is what kind of additional products we can implement into the platform in the future because we see that there's also a lot of development in the intralogistics industry. And we would like to keep up with that moving forward. And as said before, we also strengthen the position of the Chief Sales Officer with Mr. Catino by also putting together the sales organization with himself and also the marketing information so that we have that all summed together under one responsibility.
This was it from my side. As a starting point, we will now dig deeper into the numbers. This is where I would like to hand over to Heinz. Thank you.
Thank you, Ingo. Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome also from my side. I have the pleasure to present you the financials 2023. I will start with the order intake. As we already published in January, we suffered a decline in the order intake of 9.2% compared to 2022. We had also a strong foreign currency effect. In local currency, it's a -3.9%. When we look at the four product groups, there is one with a positive sign. It's pallet handling. Pallet handling per se is very cyclical. It's also this year very cyclical. It is positive on the order intake. It's negative, heavily negative on the sales side.
This is always going up and down. But also the conveyor and sorters, which has been really the strong element of growth in the last couple of years, is with -8.6 despite what Ingo mentioned at the beginning, that we had a very good start with several big orders from the U.S. when we went into 2023. The market in the first six months was really destocking in Europe. It was very heavy. Then in the second half year, it turned completely around, destocking with the big integrators over, but the general low demand, as the general economy went down. Looking at sales, the picture is the same. And I think this is not really surprising, sales of CHF 556.3 million. Considering that we also had a very low backlog where we went into the year, I think this number is still quite a good number.
You can see this also on the book-to-bill ratio, which is the second time below one. So this is really not a good sign, but we have now an even lower backlog going into 2024. But on the other hand side, we are now in a very long downturn already. And as the outlook stated already what we published this morning, it's the probability that we go even lower without any significant external event is quite low today. So I think this is also some good news. When we look at the region, very diverse picture. Europe, strongest suffering region. It's also the biggest region for us. But clearly here, we had the biggest impact with negative - 24.3%, Americas - 13.3%, and Asia-Pacific + 24.3%. But the + 24.3%, I would like to make this very clear now. We had a project which we announced in December 2021.
We received this in South Korea, about EUR 14 million. This project was invoiced and realized in sales in February 2023. This boosted the entire APAC region's result when we look at sales. When we look at the distribution, the share EMEA is now back to 52%. This is exactly the same value where EMEA was in 2021. America's gained another 2%- 35%. Asia-Pacific gained back 4%, but also consider the Korea effect is also in here. Nevertheless, we went again a step into the right direction. What we always said, the midterm plan is to have 50% out of EMEA, the most mature market, and the other 50% from the other two regions, this remains in effect. This is still the target. This chart basically says, everything.
I don't have to comment too much, but I would like to really highlight it because we always get compared to other industrial companies in the same segments. The differences we report in Swiss franc, the other ones report in euro. What we did is we have taken the local exchange rates 2019. We have frozen them and continued to 2023. So you can see this is four years. The FX impact only over these four years is roughly CHF 100 million. So it's a very significant amount. Nevertheless, Interroll will continue to report in Swiss franc. So there's no reason to change the policy. I'm coming now to the profitability. The profitability in absolute term clearly suffered also from the lower top line. We have now CHF 83.9 million EBIT, which is a decrease of 20.2%.
In relative terms, the margin decreased by seven basis points from 15.8%- 15.1%, so -0.7%. When we look at the EBITDA, this looks a little bit better. The EBITDA is CHF 106.3 million, -17.8%. There were three reasons why we could manage to keep a strong profitability margin despite this huge drop on the sales. I would like to mention them one by one, and then I'll go a little bit into detail. The three are really pricing on the market. It is purchasing. And the second one is cost discipline. When we talk about pricing, this is what Ingo already mentioned.
We were quite strong and did not make a lot of concessions on the pricing because we are clearly convinced strategically to lower the price level at the customers in a downturn with low volume would be good for the first year because you could secure higher sales, but it would be very bad for the continuous years because you will not bring this margin up with the same customers. This will take you years if you are in the position to get this up. So you can in other terms, you can also say we sacrificed maybe some of the top line. We sacrificed some of the sales, but we kept the margin and our real prices in the market on a high level. And this is an ideal position together with gaining smaller new customers to be in the position during a rebound to really leverage our profitability.
This is where it's all about. Maybe negative impact on the short term, but clearly positive impact on the long term. The second one is the purchasing side. Also there, it was very clear in the second half year, we benefited from better purchasing conditions where it was still in the first six months more a seller's market. You had to accept what they offered. This general economic downturn was clearly visible also on the purchasing side. So raw material purchases, the negotiation room was much bigger, and we benefited from this. The last one is the cost discipline. I think this, you know all, this is the strengths of Interroll. This is in our DNA, and this is very really strong. We could adjust to these changes to the lower volume. We manage fixed costs.
We verbalize fixed costs, but we manage them in a very effective way. We are very agile in adjusting to new circumstances. I think this is important in a downturn, but this is also important when it comes to a rebound. We are ready for a rebound. We are ready for both scenarios, and we have always been ready for both scenarios. This is clearly our strength that we can react fast. So if we get sometimes questioned, "Yeah, what happens if the market returns with a growth of 20%+?" There, we are ready for it. We can scale up our capabilities. We will hire new temps in the manufacturing side, but we can do this in a quite short notice. This is important.
On the result, I don't have to say too much because basically what you have seen as an effect in the EBIT, it goes down to the bottom line. There is really not much to say. We had generated more financial income from our cash. But on the other hand, we also had more foreign exchange losses, which basically almost netted. And the tax rate also is basically unchanged. We are now 20.9%, last year 21%. So effects between EBITDA and result basically zero. Then I come to the highlight. In my view, the absolute highlight is the operating cash flow with CHF 113.2 million, a plus of 58.5%. And this was only possible because we optimized the net working capital. The two biggest drivers is a reduction of inventories where we also pushed like others in the industry to really bring inventories down.
We did this with the CHF 25.5 million effect on the cash flow. We also reduced accounts receivable, but our accounts receivable is more related to the lower top line. So lower sales, lower accounts receivable. Nevertheless, the operating cash flow together with the lower investments with CHF 25.1 million resulted in an absolute record free cash flow of CHF 91.1 million. This is the highest value Interroll has ever achieved. Looking at the value creation, I would only like to highlight the last two years. You can see that both lines, return on equity as well as the sorry, the return on net assets is going down compared to last year. Two very different reasons. The return on equity is very simple. We have now more than 75% of total assets is equity. So equity ratio is very high.
The second one, return on asset is clearly coming from the lower sales. If sales rebound, this will go up because the investments we made already thank you, Ingo.
Yeah, welcome.
We are the investments we made for a capacity to come. So we have the capacity is installed, and we are ready for future without any bigger investments. So the return on net asset will rebound as the top line goes up. Now I come to the dividend proposal. The Board of Interroll has or will propose to the general assembly on May 3rd to keep the dividend stable at CHF 32 per share, which means that this is an increase of the payout ratio to 41.2%. So this is a change in the policy. In the past, it was always more or less one third is paid out to the shareholder, two thirds reinvested into the company.
On the fact that we have such a solid balance sheet with a very high cash position, this is underlined to go forward also with this. We keep it stable. I think it's a good sign also to the outside. It's a sign of strength. And this will be proposed to the AGM. Looking at the dividend development over 20 years, I don't have to say too much. It is now stable on the top. But without there are 2-3 years in, which is not exactly the case. But in general, this is a reflection of the profitability of Interroll, how the profitability has developed over the 20 years. Dividend is coming from CHF 2.50 to CHF 3.20. And I think this is a considerable increase over 20 years. Now we will have a few slides to the sustainability. It's the second year that we publish a sustainability report.
The first one last year was a baseline report. Now we did a progress report according to the same standard. We use GRI as the core standard, but we integrated also now the new Swiss law, the article 964 from the Swiss Code of Obligations. And we also continue with the UN SDGs and the Global Compact. On the material topics, we did not make too many changes. We changed one. We reduced from 12- 11 topics. We eliminated information security, not because it's not important, but we added the information security topics under corporate compliance. We believe that this makes sense. And we reduced to one to 11 now. And we also said clearly we will have three focus topics in the future in the coming years. And these are climate protection, environmental protection, and occupational health and safety.
What is totally new in the sustainability report 2023 is the CO2 emissions. For the first time, we calculated the CO2 emissions with external support for the financial year 2022 and financial year 2023. On the left on the right side on the chart, you can see now Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. The two Scope 1 and Scope 2 together is 2.2%. Scope 3, which is not directly influenced by ourselves, 97.8%. So it's a very clear picture where the emissions are. And if you look at the categories, there are two dominant categories. Category number one is the lifetime of our equipment at the end users, so not even at our customers, at the end users. And the category number two is coming from purchasing where resource materials and components. This is the last slide from my side.
I think this is really something we are proud of. We started with EcoVadis. First few years back, we got from customers requested to participate at EcoVadis assessments, what we did. Then we learned this tool and this platform, and then we decided to use it also for ourselves and also push it through our supply chain. Our facilities participated at the assessment, some for the first year, some for the second year now in 2023. What is really outstanding is that all entities score above average sector. This is really a good achievement because we have a lot of small subsidiaries. So there is not a huge manpower focusing on this. And this is a very good score. We have three, which came in with platinum, Australia, Brazil, and our polymer factory in Ticino. We have 10 gold medals, four silver, one bronze.
Also the group scored as an entire unity scored a silver medal. This is really a remarkable achievement. With this, I conclude and I hand over to Maurizio Catino.
Thank you, Heinz. Good morning, everybody. I'm here now presenting a little bit what happened in 2023. Ingo started with what a year. Being in sales, I can only confirm what a year. We have taken some actions, strategic action. I will give you an overview on what kind of action, why we have taken these actions, what are the expectations for 2024 and going on. I will start from this. Heinz has already explained the share. This is obviously pretty clear when you compare from 2022 what happened.
Basically, EMEA, our main region, has been the region which has been impacted the most in this critical situation and the past situation that I will show you, going from 58%-52% of our share. Basically, US has kept the share. We started and kept a good project business during the entire 2023. While APAC, let's say, entire APAC is showing a growth. Heinz explained why, basically because of one of big projects. Nevertheless, I mean, Korea and Australia did perform pretty well while the Chinese area is not really following the same trend that the others did. But why? This is a graph which we pretty much use in sales. It's an ABC analysis. It shows you the big, medium, and small customer development in terms of sales.
On top of this, I always measure the new and the recovered customers that during the year this is a rolling, let's say, 12 months here we acquire. Yeah? Why? The focus for 2023 has been clearly on customers because the customers that we have lost during the crisis of raw material has been substantial, both, let's say, lost because they went to competition, but mainly lost because they overstocked our product. What happened in a nutshell? And you see that the main drive is the big customer, the A customers. The A customer were facing a 2022 with a very strong order entry. And remember that these guys are working in projects, so 12-18 months of delivery. Due to this situation, they were highly fearing that they had no material to complete the projects, so to invoice their projects.
So they basically bought the entire amount of product that they need for 18 months. And this was sitting in their stock. And we have tried to deliver this amount of product that they are asking for. And you know, I mean, protecting our top customer is obviously always a priority in sales. So this was producing a double effect. First of all, we were struggling and struggling more to deliver this amount, huge amount of product. And on the other hand, we were lowering our, let's say, normal delivery time because, I mean, we require more and more time to fill this capacity. And this is pretty clear in this graph. This is 100% clear. You can see the black line is our number of customers. And the yellow line is our sales for products. So what happened? Customers started to go up in 2021.
The demand was increasing. And then you see the sales; they were rocketing up. That was completely out of control. Unfortunately, when we reached the peak, we were started struggling. And one of the drivers of our product is the delivery time. So we have to be quick, fast. So the sales start to drop down. And as well, the number of customers because the medium small customers, during 2022, they were trying to find the material elsewhere. Everywhere they this was able to find them. And basically, we have started to work mid of last year, but very strongly also in 2023 on recovering this customer. You see the black line, mid 2022, going up. We are not yet at the peak in 2021, but we are basically reaching a good level now. This is why we are thinking we have reached the bottom.
You see now that the yellow line is more or less flat. With this customer base we have now, we are ready. When the market is catching up again, we are basically back to our performance. Our delivery time is back on track. Our performance is again great. Most of these customers coming back to us, they are telling us, "We are happy you are back. And the reason why we were buying from you in the past is the reason why we are coming back again in the future." A little overview on our ROI program. You, some of you know, some don't. This is a partnership program that we have with mid-size customer, mainly, around the globe. This is a partnership that enables this mid-size customer with our product for them to attack certain sites of project.
Otherwise, they would not be able to do that due to their sites. So these are very, very loyal customers. We are increasing this, let's say, community more and more. You see the 10% increase during 2022. But more important is the 44% increase of the annual spend. So 44 almost half of these customers, they have increased their spending in 2023. So just for you to understand how important are these customers for us. They give us a clear picture of what's going on in the market. They are very loyal. So they are really intro focused. And in some cases, they are also giving us direction on the future trends in the market. So even innovation is here by these customers. So we will keep working on them. You see that we have 11 new ROI partners in 2023.
And now we are close to 130 customers in total. So let's go a little bit in 2024, what we see is going on in the market. So most of you know these are the markets where we are basically in since ever. And you see, underlined in yellow, where we believe 2024 and on, there will be a strong focus for us. The first one is by far airport business. The airport business was basically stopped during the COVID time. No investments, of course, no travel. And now also driven by new technology coming up into the market. Most of you traveling have seen that in some airports, you are not requested anymore to take your laptop and your liquid out of the bag. This is a new technology. And we are together with this producer in this market delivering all the handling line.
So we see here a very big opportunity not only for 2024, but for the coming three, four years. So this will be a kind of retrofit of several airports in the world. So this will be one of the biggest drivers for our future growth. Whereas in distribution, I mean, this keeps going. It's a market which is now driven a lot by third-party logistics provider, so the 3PL company. I mean, more and more, 3PL is requested to take care of the logistics area of end users. So we see this growing. We see our demand there growing. And I would say the request for automation is also more and more. So we are confident that this will give us also good opportunity. Tire and automotive, specifically tire, I would say, it's boiling. The request, so tire is a very high energy demanding industry.
So they consume a lot of energy to produce tires. So they are absolutely very keen on power consumption. And they were in the past using a lot of, let's say, normal voltage technologies. When they have discovered now our 24-volt technology, so low voltage, low consumption, they are pretty much happy. They can use this technology and also report on how much energy they can save into their, I mean, annual reports. Last but not least, industrial manufacturing. This is a trend. And our new Top Loader interfacing AMR, so autonomous mobile robot to conveyors, is growing. More and more production is connected with logistics. This is pretty much the trend. There is a big driver for this trend. I mean, it's more and more complicated to find employees in production, yeah, and especially into the warehouse. There is a big shortage of people.
So the automation is really, really the focus for industrial manufacturing. And I think we have several products that fit perfectly to these needs. Last but not least, we see there are some white spots in the market where we want to tackle. I mean, we are basically going for 2024 on into South America, India, and part of Southeast Asia, most specifically Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. This is where a lot of the world population is. And you easily understand that our technology, so moving goods, is quite a lot connected on people needs and people purchasing. So we believe and we are planning to get stronger into this yellow region. That's all from my side. APAC, Steinkrüger .
Thank you. Maurizio, thank you very much. So I would like now to come into the closing part.
But before we go into the closing part, I'd like to give you a quick outlook into the innovation that we've introduced into the market last year. I told you about the high-performance platform, which, what you see here. If you know our product portfolio and you know our modular conveyor platform, the so-called MCP, you see a lot of similarities in our high-performance platform. So what is the high-performance platform being made for? This is for the courier express parcel business, high-speed transportation, high-speed sortation. So this is a consequent development and the extension of our platform for high-speed sorters. This comes with high-speed sorters. But there's one innovation in here, the one that I told you about, the end customer that was so keen about that innovation. This is also a sorter.
This sorter, if you look at this from a size perspective, if you look at it from an energy perspective, if you look at it from a speed perspective, this is not existing in the market yet. This is an innovation, a real innovation. Why? This bridges the gap between diverters, which can sort up to 3,000 goods to be conveyed per second, and the usual cross-belt sorters, which start at 10,000 goods to be conveyed per hour. This bridges the gap in between from 3,000- 10,000. This is creating a lot of interest into the market. We're in discussion with customers. We're in discussion with end users. We're in discussion with CEP business. This is quite interesting. This drives also this kind of product portfolio into the market. I can share that here as well.
We're just very close to win a major project in the Americas, in the northern part of the Americas with our HPP platform. We are very keen on this. This has not been finally signed. Here, another innovation. You see a mobile robot, autonomous mobile robot here. This is not our delivery content, to be clear. This is not our delivery content. This is, for example, shadowed out. I think it's an Omron. There's a lot of autonomous AMR manufacturers in the world. Two that are very prominent and very big. This is Omron and MiR. We went into a partnership with Omron and with MiR. Why? Because we see that we have a system boundary between a conveyor that is fixed installed and a conveyor that is flexible.
There's a lot of applications coming in this market due to the fact that there's a lot of workforce missing. There's new technology coming into how we sort, how we deliver, how we sequence goods. And therefore, there needs to be a connection. And if you look in the internet, there's a lot of solutions that have exactly this. But none of these solutions is based on a platform. So what does it mean? There's no programming effort anymore. We deliver this part. This adapts to the AMR. So there's two different parts for MiR and for AMR. And by the way, both companies have our Top Loader in their product portfolio and selling this, right? And this part here is the platform that goes into our light goods conveyor platform, also called LC platform, LCP platform, and interfaces with the conveyor. Three major topics.
One is exact positioning. Second, communication from here to there. The goods are being traced. Third, ergonomics. If I hit this E-stop, everything stops. If I hit the E-stop here, everything stops. This is safety and ergonomics also considered. This is a simple to integrate, faster integrate solution. This is what how we think. Now, coming back to the launch of S/4, you see that here. We've been strongly believing that you have to have digital processes in your company. This is why we invested in 2030 heavily in implementing R/3, SAP R/3, as a foundation of our ERP software. We have now moved into S/4, which gives us with that kind of tool, with that kind of application, the ability to go now into the digital transformation. We want to increase speed and simplicity with our customers. What does that mean?
Our generation less my generation is getting older. There will be other generations coming on. Their way of buying goods may be different compared to the past times. I remember that there were even times when you had to send a fax to place an order. There might be the need in the future that you communicate with Alexa or with the other computer voice of most of these devices here, which I don't want to name because then my one switches on. People are asking for who has the best product portfolio today and when is the delivery time. We need to be prepared to that situation. So what we're doing right now is we're setting up a digital foundation to be prepared for the unknown because we don't know how the future will look like in five, six, seven, eight years' time.
But we want to be in a position to not follow, yeah, to adapt to the needs that are coming up. This comes along with a seamless customer experience. So we want to have interconnected communication with our customer instead of getting the phone and discussing anywhere the order is right now. We would like to deliver that information on request and then take the time with the customer to understand his problems for the future and then generate more business with the customer. What is also a major key topic that we have now in focus is the value through our product so that we generate additional possibilities with intelligence and digital service with our products. This is what we are currently working on. On service, just quickly, European side, the U.S. side, we started two years ago with that one.
We have tremendously reduced our reaction time with the setup of the service team right now. This is all up and running. We're delivering now spare parts within 48 hours in entire places in Europe. We have more spare parts sold last year compared to the market. So the business in service is growing. And we outperform also with that part the current market. And we have now established a strong team not just in Europe because this team is also interfacing now with the American team. This is now under one leadership and in the responsibility of Mr. Catino. So we are setting up strong forces here. We have extended our portfolio now also into retrofit. We took like, "Okay, let's try this out." And we took our product, the Belt Curve, that is manufactured in the Center of Excellence in the US.
We do it also in Europe and also in Asia. But here, we got in Cañon City the Center of Excellence. And with that, we increased our but we overachieved our budget by 13% just because we went into the retrofit business. So there's potential for us in the future as well. Before I go to this, I would like to conclude. I would like to show you a quick video. This is just a part of a video. I can only invite you to go online on YouTube and watch the entire video because it's very interesting. Why I am showing you this video today, not to bridge time, it's more this is a customer, Arvato. This is a 3PL logistics company. And we see this customer, they have 100 facilities in 17 countries.
We see these kind of customers growing, yeah, because the big ones, they have their own third-party logistics in-house. But there's other companies growing. They're not investing into the logistics part. They are relying on the third-party logistics. This piece is growing. Arvato, for example, they have a clear understanding of their strategy. Their strategy is two things: flexibility because they need to be flexible in how to set up their facilities because one day, they're doing, say, third-party logistics for clothes, the other day for automotive parts, the third day for, let's say, tires, whatsoever, and scalability because they need to grow or close down and go up somewhere else. This is what they are looking for. They approached us. We went into discussion.
We invited one of our Rolling On Interroll partners, AuthenTEK, from out of the U.S., very good company. What we created is an installation based on a virtual programming in the cloud using our MultiControl card. So there's no interference in between Siemens or Mitsubishi or Allen-Bradley. This has all been programmed in the cloud and is steering our system and gives the flexibility and the scalability to the customer. And this is quite impressive because this is not a very tiny little installation. It's like this.
Arvato runs this spectacular distribution center. This smart solution uses distributed intelligence to manage the mere complexity and to reduce latency to the minimum. Autentek has designed this genius masterpiece using a cloud-based PLC and the Interroll MultiControl.
We fully embrace this distributed control and distributed power.
Now, the int elligence of the Interroll MultiControl is actually logically managing the throughput by arranging the conveyor functions.
This was like a big thing for us to give our customers the flexibility but also to be flexible for the future.
With that, I would like to conclude. So Interroll, we have a very strong focus on customer and market. This is in our DNA. This is what we have always had in our heart for 65 years, by the way. This year, we're going to celebrate 65 years of Interroll. We will keep that going. We have that established with strategic partnerships. We're looking for end customers. We are looking for system integrators that go into a closer relationship with us. We are working on this very hard.
We just established a sales team that is as a global key account for an end customer, the first time in history of Interroll because we like to understand where they are going, what kind of product portfolio they need so that we can develop our product portfolio further into that. The Rolling On Interroll program, Maurizio told you about that, we have now 130 people, 130 companies in that program from Chile to Australia. This is quite impressive. With Autentek that you just saw, we're developing our application further on. The digital sales platform that we established two and a half years ago, it's growing. We are pushing that forward because we see the need that other customers will onboard into that, the global Lifetime Service.
I just showed you that this is the plan this year to go into Asia and with the transformation, increasing and strengthening our customer promise, quality, speed, and simplicity. When we look into the innovation pipeline, we will issue this year an update of the MultiControl card, a hardware update of the MultiControl card, plus a firmware update of the MultiControl card. This has also been based out of the situation we went into when we went into the shortage of semiconductors in the crisis. We now have a broader possibility to source different semiconductors for certain applications. So this gives us more security and stability if that could come again. We will extend next week on the LogiMAT, our sorter family. We will introduce a Small Wheel Sorter, very, very, very interesting product because this supports the sorting idea for midsize sorting centers, so distribution centers.
This goes a little bit into the last-mile approach that we especially see on the e-commerce side that the big companies are going closer to the customers. And this is from an ergonomic perspective and from an output energy-saving perspective, a very good product. And we will also introduce the Sorter Destination Platform as the first company, as far as we know, that we have introduced the destinations also into our platform so that you configure and not redesign and re-engineer every time the destination for the sorter application. You can choose and pick out of our platform. And we will also enhance our food platform. On business excellence, no matter what, cost fitness, I think we showed this. This is evidence data this year. What we mean with that, it's not just a word.
This is a real DNA topic that we have in our heart, the breathing production facilities to go down but also with having the capacities in place also go up. We have the financial strengths. You just saw the cash flow numbers. We will foster our Interroll Production System. When we look into the platform, we will definitely be deepening our platform. So all the products that we get on board will have an extension of our platform thinking. We have now, with introducing into the sales organization the so-called Customer Project Management team, we will also accelerate our interaction with the customer in the project management in delivering our subsystems. We will not forget and we put this as a very major topic for us, sustainability and energy saving.
I just want to make sure that you're not say like, "Okay, now they have a sustainability report, and that's it." We have just received a bigger order from a major customer who wants to exchange his driven rollers to ours because of two reasons: noise level and energy consumption. And this is where we are very strong, ergonomics and energy saving. And this makes us quite proud. And this is also a good project for us. And last but not least, we deliver proven solutions. So based on the platform, based on the experience, proven solutions. To also give you an outlook, we and this is what you can read also in our statement, we think that the situation has bottomed out right now for us. Why do we think so? We've seen now repeat orders stabilizing.
Repeat orders are the orders for products coming in on a monthly basis. We see that stabilizing. We also see that in Europe, the product business is slightly increasing. We see that, take Germany out but take the rest of Europe, that the mood in that industry is also getting a little bit more positive. We don't see the business growing in the U.S. currently. Big projects out of the U.S. are missing. APAC is on a healthy level but on a bottom level. With that, putting on top that our opportunity pipeline is growing but not with big projects, warm with smaller and midsize projects, which is also good that we see that, plus the situation that we see the airport business is also growing currently. This is how we currently see the situation. We will watch the situation.
I think with the strategy, with the measurements we put in place, we are ready as soon as the industry is coming back. Thank you. We are now open to receive questions. First one. Are you—sorry, you need to wait for the microphone.
Thank you very much. Emrah Basic from Baader Helvea. I have a couple of them. Go one by one. Maybe the first one is a clarification one. The slide where you showed the market focus in 2024, are these also areas where you expect growth from in 2024? Or is this your focus in terms of investments in 2024 and the areas you'd like to push more?
Okay. So I think this is the previous one.
Yeah.
It's one you meant, right?
Exactly.
So these are the areas that we see basically a growth, yeah?
This is the area where, let's say, our sales team will focus their activities in a certain way, okay?
Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much. The second one also, rather quick one in terms of sales, very insightful slides with your ABC customers development. Could you maybe give us also some insight what these ABC means in terms of sales, percentage of sales?
Well, there is a rule who says that 20% of your customers are making 80% of your turnover, basically. So, I mean, we are basically following the rule, the Pareto rule. So this is 80%, 15%, and 5%, just to give you an.
And then you mentioned you feel that probably market has bottomed out for you.
Do you see, though, that this first half 2024 is maybe rather a prolonged one versus in the past, now excluding an extra outlier of last year maybe or the last two years? What I'm trying to figure out is just, is it maybe kind of like a bottom that is being a bit stretched out and not the sharp recovery that we usually have maybe in the cyclical business?
Can I answer the question? It's a good question, though. But it's really what we said, where is the outlook? We don't know when we will see a rebound. So what is clear now, and this has been mentioned, we miss some big orders in the U.S. And we see positive momentum, at least starting in EMEA. And APAC is flat. More, we cannot say to this, no?
Whenever a rebound takes place, it will probably not be at the same time in all the three regions. We expect Europe suffered the most. It will recover part of it. But we have to wait until we really see this in an order intake. And then we can also communicate. But today, the outlook is as stated in the ad hoc. There is no change to it.
Probably, I can also add something to it because we have also an online question. This collates a little bit. If you don't mind, I would like to read that out and respond to that as well. Usually, the leaders in an industry gain more market share than usual during difficult times like now. Do you see that happening as well right now? And if yes, what are the indicators telling you this?
I would like to also accelerate on what Heinz was saying. We are a company that sees developing in the market very soon, right? So if it goes down, we are the first ones seeing it compared to other that have long-term business like with project business. So if the market is going down, we see it first. And you saw that also in the numbers in the year before. But we are also the one that see when the market is coming up. We are also the first one that's seeing it. And we are there also compared to that question that we gain customers back, not on the volume that's there. That gives us the clear indication the market is probably not that ready. But once it comes back, we are there. I think this is the best answer we can give at this point.
Perfect.
I'm just trying to squeeze one more out in this regard. Looking year-over-year, first half 2023 versus 2024 in terms of orders, I mean, is this something where you believe you're reaching that target, reaching that number again? Or is this you stay to your previous?
I gave you all the hints. You need to calculate it for yourself, no? There were several big orders from the U.S. We have not seen them yet, no?
Thank you.
And one last one, very positive announcement with the payout ratio. So by lifting it to 40%, are you entering a phase where you have, relatively speaking, less reinvestment opportunities for growth?
No. No. Not at all. No.
So are you expecting to act the same way in the next downturn?
We're not planning downturns. We are just planning upturns, right?
So we don't want to usually don't go through a downturn. But we are a product company. So we are a production company. We have a global footprint. We want to grow. For growth, we need financial stability. We need the money, right? Therefore, I think we are doing good so. We're trying to keep everybody, let's say, balanced. This is what we're aiming for. But this company is made for growth.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. Herr Bamert? And there's another.
Walter Bamert from Zürcher Kantonalbank. You showed a nice global map with some yellow areas. Could we have more explanation which of these locations you will attack with sales organizations only or which are related to CapEx spending and that also leading a question to the CFO regarding the pushed-out CapEx project? What should we expect for the coming years?
On the guidance for the CapEx, maximum 5%, there is no change. Probably will be below the 5% also going forward. We have switched now from capacity. Really, we have built a lot of factories in the past. Last year, most of the investments did go into modernization of our production plants. When you talk about these yellow spots, this primarily is we want to penetrate sales. We are not planning to have production setups new in these white spots. Also in India? India is a totally different one. India, you have to exclude. If you go to India, you have to go to India and assemble in India because the import tax into India is so high that this makes no sense. If you really want to attack India, you need to go to India. But the other ones are more a localization.
Could you tell us more about India?
Not at the current time.
But you said assembly.
We said when we go into India, we go into India clearly with assembly. You have to do the value add in India. And you have to avoid import tariffs.
And that's a 2024 project?
It's not a 2024 project. We did not mention that this is a 2024. It was clearly stated by Maurizio Catino in the year 2024 and forward.
Thank you, Mr. Bamert.
U.S. e-commerce, it's not too late to get big orders still?
No.
Do you have any hints, any indications? You have discussions with those. You know where the big e-commerce companies are investing. Which discussion then led to those projects? Yeah. Good question.
So this is a good question. The answer is e-commerce is there to stay. I mean, we don't believe e-commerce is going to zero again.
This will grow. I mentioned a couple of times the 3PL, the third-party logistics. This is strictly connected with e-commerce because, I mean, when we talk about a big name, it makes sense for them to own the logistics. When we talk about mid-small sized, it makes no sense for them to compete against the giants to have, let's say, their own logistics. Therefore, the 3PL will play a massive game into the e-commerce, let's say, rollout in the future. And we are obviously taking care of this money.
And there's so what does your answer mean? You're very pessimistic regarding the very big ones that you resort to the midsized ones?
No. I mean, in the DNA of Interroll, I mean, the midsized companies are always very, very strong. And we take care of them. And the small as well.
Nevertheless, I'm not saying that we're not taking care of the big one. And, I mean, under the line, you said something about that already, yeah?
And there's something you need to also consider. Even though the big ones are not investing into big distribution centers, you know that the highest costs are created in the last mile. This is 60% of the delivery costs are in the last mile. So this is also opportunities to get out of the big distribution center into smaller ones. And this is where our product portfolio is very strong, as I just told you, small sorters, medium-sized sorters, big sorters. So we have the product portfolio to serve the market wherever the market is going. And this is the great topic.
Last question regarding the airplane system. You were successful with the launch. Is that regional launch?
Or is that really that we have seen most of the implementations done? And what's the recurring cost out of it? Or will we have additional CapEx? So where do you stand with this modernization of the ERP system?
The ERP system was a global rollout. So almost every entity is now on S/4. The ones that are not on S/4 are still not even in ERP because they are very, very little, tiny. But we now have a plan to onboard them as well. But this is a very, very small topic. The total amount of the integration of the S/4 topic was achieved by not using the entire budget that we were looking for. So we're very happy about that.
Thank you. Maybe I can add here, no? I think we can disclose it. It's roughly about CHF 10 million invested into this project. It's a modernization.
It was a big bang. It was a successful big bang. We have also a question from Sebastian Vogel here. Assuming system integrators would see order momentum picking up, how quickly could we see it at your end on the order side? This really depends on the size of a project. If it's a huge project, it can take months until we would see this as an order intake. If these are smaller projects, it's much faster. So there is no golden rule.
Yeah. Koller.
Alexander Koller, Stifel. You had several management changes in the last half year, which is quite unusual for Interroll. Could you please provide us with some background and where do you stand with your new COO and CTO position? And what will be the main task there?
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I would like to understand several management changes.
If I look at your concept consent line too, I see that two members are now out, which is quite unusual. They were in the company since a long time, Jens Karolyi since 2007, if this is correct.
Yeah. Okay. Good. Got the question. Good. Thanks for detailing this down. Jens Karolyi is still with us. He's not left the company. He is now under the leadership of Mr. Catino. And I told you I wanted to bring service, marketing, and sales closer together. And Jens Karolyi has not left the company. He's still with us. With Jens Strüwing, we had a discussion in October, beginning of October, when we introduced, "Okay. This is the way we're going to go." And he is now looking for something different because we split his responsibility out of the EVP from product and technology. And this is why he left the company. Yeah.
The new task of the future CTO and COO?
So you asked also, what is the situation? We have now found a COO, yeah? This has now been done. I cannot disclose any information yet because he's still talking to his actual employer to make sure when we will have him on board. As soon as I've got that date, I can start distributing that. On the CTO side, we are in interviews. We are finding a couple of good candidates. This is also making very positive progress. Stephanie.
Stephanie Scholz, EC Global. I have actually a question, several questions, but the first one for Maurizio. You showed us that slide with your number of customers. Can you maybe give us an average number? What would be, in a normal environment, your average number of customers? I see back then, it was close to 18,000.
Now, we are at 17,500. So there's still a gap of 500 customers you could win back. You're tending to win them back, or?
First of all, the rule on customers is the more they are, the better it is, okay, just to be clear on that, yeah? I never stop acquiring new customers even because we are increasing our market possibilities. We have new product. We are attacking now with the Top Loader, a completely different market, which is industrial logistics. Therefore, I would say that, of course, the first target is to reach the peak. But basically, it's to go over the peak.
Can I add something? Because in 2021 and 2022, we also figured out that part of our lost customers were really lost customers. So they went into bankruptcy.
There was also a part of customers that we will never, ever see again, right, unfortunately. Yeah.
That was the next question. And also those customers which went into bankruptcy, the others, where did they go to? To another competitor? Or where did they end up?
Yeah. I mean, it depends, obviously. When they bankrupt, they have left open space for their competitor to take over this amount. And in this case, when this competition are within Interroll, we have seen, to be honest, some of our customers even growing in that situation, yeah? So this is basically splitted into the market. So giving you a precise allocation of where the business is going, it's complicated, no? What is clear and this is I'm really, really focusing on that.
My team is focusing daily on that is that we are having an average return on customer which is exceeding the market in this span of time because, again, the market situation is not yet, let's say, bullish. It's not going up. This is steadily going up. This is a remarkable result, again, because I've been asked strategically. Ingo said this. One of the biggest, the most complicated performance in sales, increase the market share, so increase the customer, but don't touch the profit. Keep the price high as possible. We did it. This is remarkable, no? This shows the leadership of Interroll in the market because despite the market downturn and the pressure on price because all competitors were going down with prices, there was a strategy out of there, no? We want to get more business. We said, "No." We kept the price.
We even risked to lose some of them. But with the performance back, without delivery time, we still believe that we are unbeatable on the market.
How much higher are your prices compared to your competitors?
Oh, you're asking the wrong person.
I mean, it depends on the competitor. I mean, of course, if you ask me how much is the difference with a Chinese competitor, I can even tell you 50%, yeah? But basically, I mean, this can, I would say, in the range of 15%-20%. It's basically what we hear in the market normally, yeah?
Okay. Thank you. And then maybe a question on gross margin. I mean, they were quite strong this year. Is this something we can expect to continue to be as high in 2024, or?
This is part of the strategy, no? We did not do any price increase going into 2023.
But obviously, we have higher fixed costs, no? Labor costs went up. General G&A expense went up. And this was clearly the strategy, not reducing in 2022 the prices, not increasing in 2023. This has played out well. And it needs to be on this level, no? When we say the fixed cost on the personal side is going up, you need to compensate it by the raw material side. So otherwise, you don't get to the gross margin. The target is clearly keep the gross margin where it is. So this will continue. We need to if labor is getting more expensive and you cannot gain everything out of efficiency increase, then you need to compensate it with materials.
This is why this is also so important to have that focus on products on the first-hand side and also on the project business because we have to have that 50/50 share to protect the gross margin. We need to support that with the service activities that we're putting now into the market.
Maybe it's a good one to go to this next question.
Sebastian Vogel again. Can you remind me of the share of revenues that relate to your service business? Heinz, would you like to answer this one?
Yeah. We always said we are on 10%. We have seen that we have gained market share. Ingo mentioned this already in the presentation. We are now roughly around 12%. We see further potential to increase.
Stephanie, another one.
Can I have a last one, if I may?
In this slide, in your phase three, you speak about scalability. What?
Scalability.
Scalability. Yeah. Yeah. What EBIT margin could you see in this phase three over the long term? A higher EBIT margin.
This is what we're aiming for. We want to increasingly, bit by bit, increase our margin depending on the market environment, right? This was not the case this year. But I think with a steadily ambition to grow this and with the scalability and leverage effects, there will be on this one, definitely.
And you asked this. Maurizio said it. It's we keep the price. We have a high premium on the market. We will not get it from the customers. So we need to gain it inside the company. But the target is clearly through leverage and efficiency gains to increase this incrementally, bit by bit.
Thank you.
Thank you , Stephanie. Mr. Possa. Marc.
Thank you very much, Marc Possa, VV AG. I would have three understanding questions, maybe to start with the easiest one. The increase in intangibles proportionally over the years, is that probably to continue due to more software content given by the digitalization and interfaces that you need to establish?
Sorry. What was the first part of the question? I didn't get it.
The increase in intangible, CapEx for intangibles. And then related to that, I assume you do not capitalize since you want to be conservative. Or can you describe how you deal with that?
I can describe this, yes. What we do not capitalize is R&D. R&D is always fully expensed. What we capitalize is systems, no? Like this S/4 project, this is capitalized. And we will see the amortization. We will amortize it over the next eight years. So it's really big coming up.
But then this is now done, no? We have no major, big project like this in the pipeline.
Okay. But sorry. But when we will do it in the same way. If we see additional investment that are required, we do it in the same way.
And then the maybe second easiest question concerning the market structure. I mean, the customer of the customer, they're becoming more bigger. They insource a certain amount of things. Is there any kind of change at the customer of the customer and at your customers, the system integrators, in terms of concentration, in terms of power?
Yeah. Very good question. This is a very good question. And yes, there is a kind of a trend or let's say maybe a future trend that we see, especially when we talk about mid-big size groups.
Well, there are some cases where the 3PL might become a 4PL, yeah, in the sense that they will take care of their own integrations, yeah? This could be the case. I mean, obviously, this is their strategic decision. What I can share with you is that we are having few connections in this sense. We have seen a couple of acquisitions in the market in the recent days where a 3PL was acquiring a system integrator. So yes, the future picture of a system integrator inside a logistic provider could be possible. And in this case, we are well-positioned to support, basically.
And I think I would like to elaborate on this. This makes it so important that we position ourselves quite strongly. So we are not a system integrator. And this makes it so important because the environment is changing.
And as long as we know where we are, we can serve the entire environment wherever the environment is going to. And this is so important, right?
Maybe the last question. I mean, coming back to the question of India as an example, I mean, how far would you go? It's not just assembly. It's probably I don't know whether you have to set up extrusion machines as well there or if only assembly would do it. Could you just give us a ballpark figure with the example of India, how much CapEx would that need or require? How fast would it have to be done just to get a feel for?
Okay. Let's take a country, any country. And how would we do this?
If we would go into a country, we would use this and start with one of our products where we have a lot of know-how, a lot of capacity, and there's a potential market for this. We would grow this. Based on the fact that our product is on a platform, it's easy for us to invest. Depending on the product, very small invest. But we can gain immediate market share with that small invest. Then if we see that is growing, we can go the next step and localize more of our platform products. This makes it so attractive, having a platform, being able to go into a country and the investment depending on which product you start with. But I can tell you, if you start with a roller, the investment is not as high as with a sorter.
This is definitely the case, right? The good thing is and this is what we're also focusing on now with the COO. We will look further into what kind of assembly manufacturing processes do we need for the individual markets? Does it need to be the full-blown 3.5-million roller manufacturing station for, let's give the country name for India? Obviously, not. But then we generate the processes of how to manufacture this and achieve the quality standards that Interroll is standing for, right? Then we can do this in a manual basis, semi-automatic, or full-automatic. This is what we're focusing on currently with the COO, yeah?
But with the example of China that had the chance to do no evolution but just greenfield and from the beginning on the right setup, that would be the case in India as well, no? They have nothing.
So they can only do the best or pick the best solutions probably because they have the chance to start at the very beginning.
Yeah. As I said, we scan the market first. We see what kind of potential do we have in the market, right? And let's take rollers. If there's a good potential for rollers, let's say India. He has set up a business intelligence department for two years right now. We know now exactly which player is in the market, right? What is the trend in the market? And then we decide, "Okay. This and this and this portion could be of interest. This equals a volume, manufacturing volume of X, Y, Z." And then we take a decision based on that volume, what step are we going to go? And this is, I think, possible because we have that platform set up.
We now allocate the individual processes, manufacturing processes to that platform. This is a strong tool for growth, yeah? Thank you for the question. We are a little bit over time. There's another question for Mr. Vogel. I would ask you to have this one as the final one. We can have another at least for the person that are in the room. We can have another question round over a cup of tea or cup of coffee outside. Unfortunately, not for the online ones. This is the last one here, the official one. Can you run a bit further through your main end markets like e-commerce and how you see all the momentum there at the moment?
Well, a little further depends on what it means. As I said already, I mean, the e-commerce is a market which is growing.
We see out of our business intelligence department that the growth is stable. Of course, this is a market that has peaked in 2022. I mean, the post-COVID was kind of poisoning this market. So they have seen, boom, an abnormal growth, yeah? So what we see now is that this abnormal growth is absorbed but gaining back momentum, okay? And out of the intelligence, I mean, we see that in the next 1.5-2 years, maybe, we will reach again the level of the peak, yeah? This is what we believe. And our, let's say, order momentum will, I mean, consequently take advantage.
And maybe just to add on, no? On this picture, you don't see e-commerce. And I touched this many times during the year also in investors' calls. We have not a section where we say this is an e-commerce.
E-commerce is in food and retail with Omnichannel. E-commerce is in fashion with Omnichannel, sorry. It's in food and retail. It's in warehousing and distribution. So it touches many of our end markets. And this is why we don't have e-commerce as a separate end market. This would be doubling up the volume, no? It plays in our focus end markets. These are the eights you see here on the slide.
Okay. Then we would like to come to an end. Would like to thank all the people that were joining us online. Thanks for participating. We also like to thank you being here physically, asking all these questions, very fruitful questions. And we hope we see you back next year. Thank you very much. Thank you. And have a good weekend. Thank you. Bye. Thank you very much.