Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Oerlikon's Capital Market Day. My name is Sara Vermeulen. I'm the Head of Group Communications. I'm here today with our Chairman, Michael Süss, our CEO, Roland Fischer, our CFO, Philipp Müller, and our Head of Investor Relations, Stephan Gick. We have a full agenda for you today, with three separate sessions, and each session will have its own Q&A where you can ask questions. Our Chairman will kick off the first session with an overview of Oerlikon. Roland will continue with an update on our group strategy and sustainability, and Philipp will conclude the first session with a presentation on the financials and our outlook. During the Q&A, at the end of each session, you will have the opportunity to ask questions about the session we have just covered.
After the break, Georg Stausberg, CEO of Polymer Processing Solutions, will provide you with an update on the division's strategy and growth drivers, followed again by a Q&A where you can ask questions about the Polymer Processing division. In the third session of our Capital Markets Day, Markus Tacke, CEO of Surface Solutions, will present the strategy and business update for the Surface Solutions, followed by a Q&A. With that, I will hand over to our chairman to start the first session. Michael, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Sara. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It's a pleasure to have you here all physically. I think for almost all of us, it's a new situation again. Back to something normal, that we discuss stuff together, and we have a chance to interact and to exchange our thoughts and our views. There is not a single day without Oerlikon. I liked the phrase very much when I was realizing from our team under which label this Capital Market Day should run. If you look on the picture, doesn't matter if you drive with your car, if you wear a belt, if you do something on e-mobility, for the ones who have kids or grandkids, if you're running, if you're flying.
There is, in all applications, essential technology from Oerlikon which makes these products either working or even better. To be aware about that, by the way, by that underlying, for all of that, you need a huge tooling industry, where we have an outstanding position. That's why we have not dedicated showing it here. It's underlying for all of those applications, our strengths in tooling, but Markus will come to that in his session to show how strong we are in that area. If we look at our Oerlikon of today, we will realize that it's not the Oerlikon as we had in 2015 or 2016 when I had the pleasure to start with the company. Can I get the next slide, please? We have sold off almost 12,000 people in drives and pumps.
We have sharpened the company, but Roland will touch that deeper. We have sharpened the company from a conglomerate to a two-pillar structure. We are global, truly global, with our sites in 38 countries, but we have to be aware as well that there are countries which counts more and countries which counts less, and that's why we operate in these countries different. One of the reasons we will touch that is why we have decided, especially for OSS, to choose here a more regional setup. We're working across in seven major industries. From the two industries where the polymer division, filament and non-filament is mainly in. We have the tooling, the automotive, the chemical industry, the energy industry, and our aviation and space industry.
In all of the areas, we are following a strategy and a business model where we can contribute a lot out of a really superior technology position with high technical entry levels. In line that the value we're contributing to the overall value of the product is a very small one. That gives you a pretty good earning position because you count a lot, but your cost position for the whole story is pretty small. To do that on a number one or number two position, this is more or less the mantra, how we following our activities and how we have, let's say the last five to six years, defined the strategy for the company, where we want to be in and where we are not in.
That's why we divested pumps and why we divested drives. That's why we moved, accelerated through COVID. Advocating for that move in OSS towards this regional strategy and heading towards a situation where we want to drive more and more decision power to the front line, to the people who are really acting on day-to-day business and not doing it Swiss or Liechtenstein-centric from here for the whole world. That was doable maybe in the past, and it will be not the role model for the future. To deepen this understanding, that's one of the main purposes for this Capital Market Day. What are we doing? Why we are doing that?
Where we come from, where we are today, and where we want to head to. To make a better awareness or to create a better awareness about who are the people behind, because in all day-to-day situations, it's about the people who are doing things. If you have a better understanding in who is running the show on all different layers which are decisive for the company, and what are these people then on a short midterm on one hand, but as well in a strategic perspective on the other hand, are finally doing. Why it would be good to be invested in Oerlikon? Can I get the next slide, please? I touched it already, and I will reiterate it a little bit from four to two divisions means not conglomerate. For us means, a clear positioning on two pillars.
There's sometimes the question, why you have OPP and OSS? Why not to stand alone? We had discussions on this business in 2016, 2017, and we figured out for us it makes a lot of sense. At that time, we hadn't sold drives yet. It made a lot of sense that these two divisions stayed together because they have a similar DNA in the way of engineering and understanding technology and understanding processes and find solutions for these processes. They have a good complementary situation on capital intensity. They fit on one hand, and they show a robust business model, which we have as well presented in the COVID period. A good resilience towards market situations and market changes.
On the other hand, there is a strategic and management culture which is enhancing this development where we need the right people. I mentioned it already. To have people which are really carrying the same spirit and the same approach on business, who have a culture to think it from a customer end on one hand, and being fully aware about the capabilities, what we are capable as a company for on the other hand. It's a very decisive point. For a tech company, it's not always the easiest one. We are sometimes doing things because we are capable to do so, and we have to ask more and more, we can do that, but for whom we are doing that and who is ready to pay for?
This is a cultural move where we are working since some years on, and we will work a while longer. If you look back the last six years and what we have given you as a guidance, it shows you that we are really convinced that we are walking the talk, that we are executing that what we are saying, and that we are very reliant on that. You will ask about the shareholder value development. The shareholder development, or the shareholder value development actually is pretty poor, because with a market cap of seven Swiss francs plus minus a little bit, we are definitely, as a company, not where we should be. There are reasons for that. There are mainly three reasons.
The one is the actual situation and the perceived structure of our shareholder situation, where I have to reiterate that there is an indirect participation via our trust of 18% of Viktor Vekselberg, who is a sanctioned person. Very often, Oerlikon is mentioned as a Vekselberg company. I have to be clear on that. It's not a Vekselberg company and not me, not my board of directors, not my management would work in a company which belongs to one person and he guides you. This is ridiculous. I have simply to tell you here it's a little bit necessary to differentiate between perception and between reality. Why we have chosen this model of an executive chair? There's a simple reason, because the CEO doesn't want to work any longer. There's a second reason. We asked ourselves, sorry.
You have driven that in 2016 when you told me five years, maybe one or two years longer, and then we have to find a successor. Then we've been sitting together and saying, "Who could be the successor? What is the profile?" With a strong division CEO, Markus Tacke, which we got in 2020. In 2019, still Roland was in person, division, and segment. Division and group. Now we have a division CEO. We have sold a lot of stuff. We have restructured. We have cleaned up. We have, with Georg Stausberg, another very experienced division CEO. We have a regional structure for our OSS, where we want to be much closer with the decisions into the regions. Why?
Because in COVID, we have seen that our Chinese management in China is doing the right stuff. They don't need advice from Switzerland or from Liechtenstein what they have to do. They need to be empowered to utilize the full capability of our markets. In all that environment, the simple question was, what could be the profile for a group CEO? Don't forget, on the other hand, you have a very active board with a very active chairman, close to the business, following the business, pushing the business, helping sometimes and sometimes challenging. In such a situation, there is no real room for a group CEO. That's why we decided to choose an empowered division CEO-ship with a strong position from our CFO, not to forget about that. An active Chairman in role of an executive Chairman.
This model is not for a year or two, it's for three or four or five years. If we discover that in five years or whenever it is, there's a better model, then we will adopt again. Because organizations have always to follow requirements and situations where we are in. Saying that, I will touch the level of execution. As I said, walk the talk. I think it's clear that we walked the talk the last six years. We did what we said. We moved the company very, very strong through COVID. We have taken cost outs in a significant way. Sometimes, for sure, it was not a pleasure. If you have to cut 1,200 jobs, this is 1,200 existences, 1,200 families.
If you're on the way to get CHF 200 million- CHF 300 million up from 2019, and then you have to realize that you get CHF 400 million down, you have to adopt costs. We did that in a way and in a speed which shows as well that there's a very good link between the company and the workforce and the unions and workforce representatives. Because a lot of that happened outside Switzerland. Switzerland was touched, I think if I remember, by 80 people. It was necessary. Costs, because I got the question very often. Cost is a mantra for us to be good in costs. Can we always be a cost leader sitting in Switzerland, sitting in high-tech areas, sitting in high-cost areas?
Maybe not, but we have to be as close as possible to be a cost leader. Even more important is that we utilize our markets, that we're utilizing the strengths of our innovation pipeline, which we have. You have the chance outside to see some of our activities we are doing. Unfortunately, you have not the chance to see some of our activities which we have in the pipeline, either because our customers don't like that, or we are not ready yet to show it. You can be absolutely assured that with an R&D rate as we are running it, and with a CapEx rate as we are running it, that there is a lot of innovation for the next years to come.
Because this is the lifeblood and the oxygen for us, that we have enough innovation power to maintain a high-tech business in a high-tech and highly challenging environment where we are in. Again, from a clear number one and number two position. We are not a me too, and we are not running for growth only. We're running for growth strongly, but for growth under our conditions. For growth which is profitable and which is fulfilling our requirements. In that context, I have to, and maybe Philipp, you will touch that again, but I have to say, even if I don't like it. In the last six years, we've been not always very good on our capital return. We have a much stronger focus on that. Last year we've been 18%, but in four other years, we've been not.
Different reasons. Interesting technologies which we followed, which we haven't materialized. One example was hard chrome. Yeah. Nobody expected that hard chrome will stay, but it stays because the industry is very resilient. Having a technology replacing that was not good and was money we invested was not a fruitful investment. Some of that we had. On the other hand, we've been not cautious enough, and this is something which we have the last two years much stronger on our radar screen. This is the second of the two reasons perceived as Vekselberg and Russian company, which is not good for our shareholder value. This situation that the return on capital was not always good.
Maybe the third one, that we have a high position of investors which are clear that the mid and long-term investment is good what we are doing, but we're not a speculative investment. We're not good for someone who wants to make on a quarterly or half-year base his money getting in and getting out, because we are mid and long-term interest investors. For an investor, this sometimes takes a while to see how these results will come. Nevertheless, we have given you an outlook, first time for a long while. We give you an outlook about our growth expectations, our revenue targets, and I have to. I said that at the table. If in 2026 it's CHF 3.5 billion or CHF 3.4 billion or CHF 3.6 billion, I don't know.
We give you an outlook that this is the area and the range we run for, and this is as well a commitment where we commit to. This is why the company, represented by its management and represented by its board through me, is confident that they can achieve that. With this outlook, I would love to hand over to Roland Fischer, who gives you a deeper insight on the strategy and on what we are doing. It's Roland's last Capital Market Day. It's our common first one because the last Capital Market Day was in 2014. Roland, the last one could be the best one.
I think there's a good chance, right?
Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome from my side as well. Thanks a lot, Michael. I will spend some time to talk about us, to talk about Oerlikon. If you talk about Oerlikon as a company and compare the company with the situation in 2014, 2015, 2016, and the reference was made to the last Capital Market Day, it's a different company. A lot has changed, not everything. Today we have stability. Today we have growth. We have a solid financial operational performance. What remained is the ambition to be a clear number one in the market segments we are in, or at least to have a strong number two position and an idea to do more. As a consequence of that, yes, we divested pumps, we divested drive business.
By doing so, we were shrinking. On the other hand side, the two remaining divisions have been able to grow over the course of the last five, six years by almost CHF 1 billion. In OPP, we have been able to open the man-made, traditional old man-made business up to OPP today, polymer processing. Because we don't have only. Don't get me wrong, it's a great business, but today we have an additional business, a nonwovens, a polycondensation business, and Georg will come to that. This is a growth platform. In a similar, different way, but a similar direction, we have been able to grow the Surface Solutions, the Surface Solutions business. Just the last step to implement the regional organization by first of January this year is of essence because the world has changed.
We are deeply convinced that by empowering the regions and the people being active, running the show in the region is a great move and will bring us a lot of benefits. We did some acquisitions, string of pearls, smaller ones, mid-sized one, just the recent ones, Coeurdor and INglass. Great acquisitions, great businesses, and we opened up and tapped new market segments, and this is an important part of our growth trajectory. Last but not least, I think Michael was referring to it, there was a lot of stuff we did internally. Cost is of essence, and processes, internal improvements here. I will come to that. On the next page, today, we are a clear number one in service solution business.
There is no other company being in a position offering a similar or being close to offer a similar portfolio of solutions. In the filament business, again, the market leader with our Japanese friends. Michael touched it. It's not only the total volume, the revenue, it's the business model. We call it internally sweet spots. We are, in many cases, in applications where our solutions, and in many cases it's not a solution, it's the solution which makes a difference at the customer side, but carrying only a very small part of the total cost of the product. This is the area to be, and these are the areas where we are able to generate our profitability. We are serving 30,000 customers, almost 40 countries, 38 countries, 12,000 people.
I think that is really a strong picture of our Oerlikon company. In terms of diversification in the center part of the chart, I mentioned it already as a non-filament part. Equally attractive, even more attractive in terms of profitability. We talked about nonwovens applications, and I will not go into detail because that's the story of Georg. Today we have a very balanced portfolio, which I consider as a strong, very strong element of our company, especially in this difficult days where markets are a little bit up and down here and there. On the right-hand side, the financial dimension. We delivered in 2021 17% EBITDA. We paid a stable dividend over years.
Yes, referring to the low share price, you know, the capital payback actually is an outstanding one with 5%, right? Our balance sheet is in a very good shape. From that perspective, this is really a confirmation how strong the company is. On the next slide, the question, just touching it a little bit, where does Oerlikon coming from and where is our foundation? It's the technology. We are a technology leader since decades. In case of service solutions, since 80 years, we are shaping the standards of this industry. In OPP, it's even more impressive. I think earlier this year in Remscheid, they celebrated the 100th anniversary of Barmag. I think this is really something what tells a lot. It's sustainable. It's a long-lasting business. It's not a short-term optimization story.
We do have the long-term success of the company in mind. We are investing on a constant basis around 5% more than 5% of our yearly revenue into R&D. In good days and in less good days, we did it in 2020 when we had our challenges in the service solution business. We didn't cut our R&D spendings, because R&D spendings of today is the foundation for the success of the company of tomorrow. On the next slide, please. Of course, we are not only working on innovation and technology. We worked a lot on our culture, on our processes, on our organization as a company. The regional set up in the OSS division has been indicated, has been touched. We are permanently working on internal improvements, processes, systems.
We do have a clear plan to become a digital company, and now don't ask me what exactly it does mean. For us, it's clear we are moving in that direction and we are achieving, at least the last two to three years, great progress here. Yes, sometimes it's a little bit painful. You don't get paperwork anymore. Everything is online, you have workflows and all that stuff. People have to get used to it, including myself, and you sense already something. This is the future. This is a part of the game, and we have to continue really to work on that and to make it a great success.
I think two years ago, we established and created our six success statements, giving guidance to the organization, to ourselves, to the management, how we want the people, the leadership team to act, how we want them to behave, how we want to run our business, how consequent, how fast, how in terms of consequence and in terms of ownership. We really want to take the responsibility here for the company. We have the topic of diversity. For me here, the discussion which is ongoing in terms of gender is by far too short. When I'm talking about diversity, I'm thinking more about regional diversity. Here we are in great shape. Just take our board. We have industrial experts from China in our board.
We have a guy Paul from the U.S. representing our key markets in the board. That is the real diversity. Don't get me wrong, gender is important as well. We are having internal targets to push the share of females in our organization and our leadership team. In total, it's more. We talk about top talent people, something what we didn't have five years ago. Today, we have a stable process. We go through our organization identifying the new ones, the young ones, carrying a lot of potential and the willingness to make you know a certain career step here, and we are helping these people. Everybody here on the table, we have mentees. We all take care for the next generation, for the younger people. ROCE, I think Michael was very vocal on that.
We have been not all the time good here, but the last few years, we changed a lot here. ROCE is the key KPI for our long-term incentive for the management, and it's a key KPI for everything what is related to spending, whether it's an R&D project or whether it's equipment, a site or whatever. ROCE is key, and the results you see here. Last but not least, and this is a given, we are permanently working on our code of conduct. We are permanently working on our governance dimensions in many directions. With the ESG topic, I will come to it. I think we have made a huge step in the right direction. The topic of sustainability is not new. It was always our target to serve the customers to do more with less.
That means to help our customers to save energy, to save waste, to extend lifetime of products, reduce water consumption, and all that stuff. This is not new. This is, I think, deep in the DNA of our company and deep associated to the products we are offering to our customers. On the next slide, I think that's an important one. To make it obvious and clear to everybody. The people of the society started discussing about ESG the last few years. Our activities in this area is going back to the year 2009, when a management sitting in Remscheid made a conscious decision to go for energy saving with the new products. Having in mind those days, we talked about mainly purely filament equipment, and the main market was China.
In 2009, nobody in China was thinking about energy saving and sustainability. The management made this conscious decision. Today, we do have the products, I will come to it, saving about 30% of energy. This is a key element in being successful in these days. We had our HSE policy in 2016. We took 2019 as a basis for our ESG report. Last year, we issued our first report, and this year, the second one. I'm extremely happy that we get credit for that. The rating agencies are recognizing what we are doing and improved our ratings here. This is a great success. Again, it's not greenwashing. It's just. Maybe we should have done it.
I should have done it earlier, talking about it and bring it up because we had it. When I talk about that, it's not only about, on the next slide, the achievements till today. We have been quite brave and took ambitious targets for the year 2030. Different dimensions, energy management systems. Last year, we had 12% of our sites covered, now already 19%. But we have to keep in mind, we start with the right ones, the bigger ones. That means these 19% of our sites represent already more than 50% of our energy consumption. When we talk about renewable energy, Balzers, I think in Liechtenstein, is already since few years climate neutral. Nobody talked about it. It's a matter of fact, yeah.
When we talk about disposed waste, a reduction from 41% now down to, I cannot read it, 31%, substantial improvements. Just to mention few of these criteria. Also in terms of diversity, we have a clear target to achieve a 20% share of female employees in our leadership teams. This is a long way to go because at the end, it's also about qualification. We have to find the right people being able to do a good job in any dimensions we are offering and to fulfill the gender targets here. Important for the long-term success of the company actually is on the next slide, our R&D activities. Already today, we spent 72% of our R&D spending related to ESG criteria. What does it mean?
ESG criteria means with any new development, we improve at least one criteria, whether it's energy consumption or CO₂ emission to be reduced or, lifetime without jeopardizing another one. The target is here to be by 2030 at 100%. That means we will not do innovation and developments anymore which are not supporting the ESG criteria. I think that is an important statement. It's tough. I was honestly spoken a little bit struggling with the 100% because it means perfect. We took it, and we are behind it. We stand for it. Now on the next slide, maybe to make it a little bit more tangible. You all know when we talk about ESG, we talk about energy consumption on the left-hand side of the chart, water consumption, social impact, waste, raw material, service time.
If we talk about the tooling business, an important part of our Oerlikon portfolio, volume-wise, profitability-wise, and also innovation-wise, and you will see why. If we take as an example, a simple drill, 8-millimeter diameter. Uncoated, traditional, drill, you can drill maybe 25-30 holes. If you compare, depending on the material you are working on, right? If you take a high-end coated drill as a comparison, you can do 160 times more holes. 160 times. That means a black-and-white comparison, huh? A certain amount of holes to be done, you do it with one coated one or with 160 uncoated one. This effect you can now calculate, translate into material saving CO₂ emissions. I think this is a good example for this sweet spot phenomena I was just referring to.
When we talk about aircraft, aero engines. Our coatings, thin film coating, erosion coating, combustion chamber coatings or turbine coatings, are enabling an aero engine to be 5% more fuel efficient. That means for the same distance, we are consuming 5% less fuel, and this easily can be translated into a number of 26 megatons of CO₂. What is equivalent to about 80% of the CO₂ emission of Switzerland. Just to give you an idea how much it really is. When we talk about cars, and now let's talk about e-mobility cars. Here, weight is key. Each time we can replace a metal material by a high-end polymer material based on our hot runner technology, we reduce weight. 10% weight reduction means 6% extension in range. Especially for an electrical car, it makes a difference.
The last 50 miles to the next loading station. It can be decisive, huh? When we talk about man-made fiber. Here as an example, we are less resource intensive, and we talk about a T-shirt for a guy like me, king size, 150 gram. The filament material required for this T-shirt consumes about eight liters of water. If we buy a cotton natural fiber-based T-shirt, it consumes about 1,300 liters of water. A huge difference. Maybe not so much of essence here in Central Europe and Switzerland, where we have plenty of water. In the bigger part of this nice blue planet, the situation is a different one.
Water is key, and here filament helps a lot to improve the world. Last but not least, when we talk about energy saving, I refer to the 2009 decision in Remscheid, deciding to develop winders, equipment for filament production consuming less energy. If we take the 30% energy reduction and the number of winders being in operation, this ends up with an energy volume which translates into 2.6 megatons of CO₂. That is the equivalent of the CO₂ emission of 500,000 cars, average about 15,000 kilometers a year. These few examples hopefully illustrate you that we are not talking about, you know, minor improvements and small incremental improvements.
Yes, these smaller ones do exist as well, but here we talk really about big pots and big topics which help a lot to make the world a little bit better and a little bit more sustainable. In total, on the next slide, and that's my last one actually, Oerlikon today is in good shape. We are a diversified industrial technology leader for material science in a wider sense and applications. We are providing the solution to plenty of our customer solutions, which makes a difference. In many cases, we are active in the premium segment. Yes, we are a Swiss-based company. Quality, reliability, that is key, and that is still something what values a lot for us. It's about serving our customers and about penetrating new markets, opening new markets, serving new customers, and our growth perspective actually is based on that.
We are well-positioned for a profitable growth supported by the megatrends. Because whatever we are doing, and actually I could have showed more slides, giving more examples, in which dimension Oerlikon as a company, as a solution provider, can help and is helping the world and many other many companies and many industries to make their products better. Having this said, thanks a lot for the last 25 minutes. We are a little bit slightly ahead of schedule, but nevertheless, that's why I would like to hand over to Phil to talk about the financials.
Thank you, Roland. I think I'll just stand here to mix it up a little bit. A warm welcome from my side as well. Excited to be here. You know, I mentioned it during lunch, for me, this is also the perfect timing for this Capital Markets Day. Why do I say that? I think there's three reasons. Number one, over the past couple of years as a company, we've really done our homework, and we talked quite a bit about that. Number two, we have a very, very strong outlook. Number three is, I think we collectively will do a better job explaining to you, especially the market dynamics and why we're convinced that we're gonna be able to drive profitable growth in the future.
I wanna pick up right where Roland left off with the first slide and really talk about profitable growth. We will spend the next couple of hours together with Georg and Markus describing the strategy, the advantages of our portfolio, and the detailed action plans of how we will capture that profitable growth. We will talk about it along two pillars, growing and diversifying the company and the two divisions, and further improving the profitability of the portfolio. You know, we will describe to you how the solutions and the products that we have are geared to outgrow their respective end markets.
We will describe to you how we will be able to capture the structural growth in those end markets, and very importantly, how from the technology leadership positions we have, we continue to have an ability to expand beyond those spaces to diversify our portfolio, whether that's organic or inorganic. Then we will talk more about the next level of profitability enhancements that we will drive. We've done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years. There's a next level to be achieved by that. This will also translate into results and improved capital returns. When it's all said and done, what we will talk about today is our detailed strategy and the detailed action plans to achieve 4%-6% annual organic sales growth with 17%-19% EBITDA margins. We have very detailed plans in place from us.
These are our midterm targets and our commitment as a management team. If I flip to the next page, I wanna start on the growth aspect of it. Surface Solutions. The growth of our sales in this division continues to be driven by an ever-increasing demand of our customers for more sustainable and more efficient solutions. We are a clear technology leader here, but we won't just rely on the market growth. We also have two very distinct upside potentials. The first one comes from a geographic expansion, specifically in North America and Asia. The second one comes as a derivative of the significant investment we're making into more sustainable new technologies. Markus Tacke will talk a lot more about how we're capturing that growth. This is not just a plan, the actions are already underway. Georg will talk about Polymer Processing Solutions.
The mega trend that we're following here is unchanged. GDP growth, more prosperity, specifically in emerging markets. In addition to that, we're diversifying the business beyond the filament position where we will continue to maintain our number one position. We're expecting both divisions to have an ability to grow at 4%-6% organically per year, and thereby also the group. If I move on to the focus on the profitability, I think there was a homework that I described that we clearly acknowledged at the end of 2019. We've taken some decisive actions on those, and I just wanna focus on that again to drive the fact that this is a very sustainable cost action that we've taken.
You look at the first part of this chart here, we've taken about CHF 60 million of G&A expenses out of the company. Actually, when you adjust for the effect of the acquisitions that we made last year, it's almost CHF 70 million. Ceteris paribus, basically same sales levels in the two years, 2019 and 2021. That in and of itself was a 250 basis point improvement. Now, those administration expenses were really structural in nature and will not return when the company continues to grow sales. This is when we're talking about operating leverage. This is really what we're talking about, maintaining this operating leverage as the company grows. This is directly translated into profitability growth, and both Michael and Roland have talked about this.
When you compare 2019 and 2021, there's a lot of different factors in there, that make the years difficult to compare, but the cost structure was significantly lower. We were able to achieve a significantly higher profitability level in 2021 despite basically equal sales levels. That despite the fact that our Surface Solutions business was obviously still significantly impacted by the COVID pandemic. Lastly, all of this needs to translate into strong capital returns. We have said that our clear goal is at least a double-digit return on capital employed. That's not the end-all, be-all target, but it is the minimum expectation that we have for us as a management team, that we know you have for us as shareholders, and our compensation is fully aligned to that target.
Moving on to the next page and talking a little bit more about how do we drive this on a day-to-day business. We've shown this chart on the left-hand side of the page a couple of times already on earnings calls. Basically everything that's to do with capital deployment inside of Oerlikon runs through this matrix. On the y-axis, you have capital returns, and on the x-axis, you have growth. Every investment we make, whether that's R&D, CapEx or M&A investments, need to be plotted against this chart. That doesn't mean that occasionally we won't make investments in the top left or in the bottom right. These will be much more specific, much more concrete investments to further enhance certain businesses.
We're strategically moving the capital that we allocate to the top right of the company, and in the short, medium, and long term, this will drive improved capital returns inside of Oerlikon. You can see the first fruits of this transition on the right-hand side of the chart. Again, this is not our ambition as a management team to be there. When you look at 2021 and you adjust for the first-year impact of M&A deals, which is always very negative because you get all the capital employed, but only some part of the earnings, we were at 9.7% return on capital employed. More to come on this, and I can just reiterate again, 90% of our long-term incentivization is also driven by this critical metric for shareholders.
If I flip the switch a little bit and go to our 2022 guidance before we go into what we're expecting from ourselves, for the medium term. We are confirming our 2022 guidance. We continue to expect about CHF 2.9 billion of sales and around 17.5% of EBITDA margins. There have been quite a few questions from the investor community about the targets and the sustainability of the targets for this year, given everything that's going on in the world. What we have said is that we obviously see the fact that there is a lot of movement inside the world, but we remain very confident in this guidance.
It might be that we will be a little bit towards the lower end of the guidance range in Surface Solutions, but based on the strength of the backlog and the excellent execution that we have in Polymer Processing Solutions, we might be a little bit towards the higher end there. Overall, from the company standpoint, CHF 2.9 billion in sales with 17.5% EBITDA margin is absolutely attainable. If I move on to the next page, this is really what we wanted to boil it all down to. I'm giving you the summary expression from a financial statement. Then Markus and Georg will really describe you all the details behind how we're going to get there.
When we add it all together, we're expecting the group to be at about CHF 3.5 billion of sales by 2026. We're expecting the group to be between 17%-19% operational EBITDA margin. We're expecting both divisions to grow between 4% and 6%. Surface Solutions with a margin of between 20% and 22%, and Polymer Processing Solutions between 16% and 17%. Included in this guidance are some of the smaller, very small acquisitions that we tend to make along the way, also some of the divestments on much smaller scale. Not included in this guidance is the big optionality we still have on M&A. The big optionality we have on M&A is obviously upside potential toward this.
The other thing I will say is that we've obviously tried to base this organic sales growth on sort of a normalized inflationary environment. Clearly, our sales expectation moves up if inflation continues to be higher, but that was not our base assumption for the next five years. Let me summarize for you why we think we're so well-positioned for the profitable growth. We are coming from a very strong background, leadership positions in both divisions, huge economic moat around the technology and the customer relationships that we have in both of those product companies. We have proven in the past five years that we can grow the company organically and inorganically. We have a very resilient business model with leading customers and a really global platform.
On that basis, and from that leadership position, from the strength that we have as a company, we're expecting 4%-6% annual organic growth, leading to about CHF 3.5 billion of sales in 2026. We target 17%-19% operational EBITDA margins. You can see from the guidance that we're issuing for the current year that this is very much attainable for us. The strength and focus on capital returns, where you're seeing the first fruits of that focus in the current year already, will continue to lead us to higher return on capital employed, the key metric for us, and for you. With that, we are indeed still a little bit ahead of time, but that means we have a little bit more time for Q&A.
We will obviously have more time for Q&A also later when Markus and Georg are up here. Stephan, you're gonna lead us through Q&A?
Yeah. Great. Thank you, Michael, Roland, and Philipp for the presentation. Now it is time for Q&A. For investors participating via phone, please dial the number shown in the webcast and press star and one. We now start with questions in the room. Please first introduce yourself and the institute you're representing.
Hi. Andy Schnyder , z Capital. I know we'll hear more from the divisions later, but probably you can tell us how you came up with the guidance in terms of process you had internally. That would be interesting.
I think. Yeah,+ are all the mics hot? I think we'll talk a little bit more about what it's really built up and all the different details of it. It's really an in-depth analysis of the markets, not just at the big market level, but really specifically what it means for every product company, what products we're selling into that product company. Then really the technology we're developing for that and our share of wallet for each one of those segments. We went down to the level of how much can we achieve for an individual aircraft engine? What's gonna be required? How many aircraft engines will there be? The same thing on the polymer processing side. What's the capacity? What is gonna go through the system and so on.
Really adding on top what we know we can achieve with, for example, sales initiatives like the geographic expansion.
Christian Obst, Baader Bank. I have two questions which are a little bit related to each other. First of all, you have this regional change towards regional structure in Surface Solutions. Does it mean that you now have three sub-segment leaders for APAC, North America, and Europe? And do you have some kind of a matrix structure underneath that then with tooling automotive? Or can you describe please the new structure a little bit more?
That's right.
Have you lost some important managers or know-how by this change of structure? Do you still have these companies which are formerly the brand names before? Do you have still these brand names there in place? This is the first question. The second one is related to this. You said several times that Return on Capital Employed is the most important trigger or driver for the company going forward, but you haven't talked much about the capital employed and down to the segments. Can you give us an idea about the capital employed included in Surface Solutions and in Polymer Processing? How you allocate the capital within these two segments? Thank you.
Maybe I will start with the first part of your question and then over to Roland and Philipp. Because it was a strong interaction between the board and the management team, how we can utilize our markets more. To be simple, yes, it gets closer to a matrix, but there is no question mark about who is in the final lead, and it is the division head. Second, yes, there is this inside company feeling. Balzers, Metco, that is not there. Balzers and Metco are sales brands. They are brands in their industry. Balzers stands more for the PVD thin film stuff and Metco for the plasma spray, but these are brands which we are using, marketing brands. The structure is clear.
There's a head of Europe, a head of Asia, a head of U.S. and North America to take care and responsibility for that region and for the real penetration of the market based on the technology which we have, and that you will see in Markus' presentation later on five business lines. Or not business lines, product lines, which are providing the core technologies towards the regions. Roland, you can go more in-depth.
Yeah, I think you made already all essential statements. Maybe I would try it from a different angle. You know, when we consider Metco and Balzers as previous companies, they were growing. At a certain point of time, there is a limitation in running a global business, having or intending, targeting a strong market penetration in the U.S. and in Asia, and guiding it and directing it out of Liechtenstein or out of Wohlen. That simply doesn't work, and that is actually the reason why we went for this setup and Michael made it. Yes, there are regional heads. They do have the full P&L. They are in charge and responsible for the business development.
Yes, there is a kind of matrix behind because when we sell a coating, BALINIT, whatever, BALIQ, it has to be identical all over the world. What we do not want is to replace a structure showing some silo phenomena by another one. That's why you anticipated it in the right way. Yes.
COVID helped by this transition because it was not an easy transition in a company which was running over decades from a centric base. COVID has proven that the regional teams we have, like in China or in Japan or in Korea, where someone couldn't travel for one and a half or two years, that they made a decent, good job to penetrate the markets and use the customer intimacy there. I'm proud to say that Oerlikon was in 94 different nations in their company, that we have regional teams in China, completely Chinese, in Japan, completely Japanese. Korea, besides one Danish person, only Koreans. U.S.-based. So these are people who interact with the markets in a much closer way as we have done that in the past.
Yeah.
No.
And, and-
It's a clear no.
Christian, the second part of your question, I think the net operating assets, you can see the split of the net operating assets in our annual report between the two divisions. Think about the company level, it's about CHF 2 billion after the acquisitions last year. Think about three-quarters of that being in Surface Solutions and a quarter of that being in Polymer Processing, both based on the business model and the acquisitions.
Yep. Going to Surface Solutions again, is it right that the capital employed is linked to the regions, and these people have to work with the allocated capital employed? Or what is. How is that allocated to the sub-segments?
It's a good question, Christian. I would clearly say it's at the intersection of technology and market. Has to be, right? I think and we'll talk more about that in Markus' segment, but think about one of the greatest growth opportunities we have is thin film applications in the United States of America. That's where the capital's gonna go.
Working?
Yes. Michael Foeth, Bank Vontobel, you aluded to the strategic rationale of having the two pillar structure within Oerlikon. And my question will be from guidance standpoint 2026 or midterm. How much synergies both on the topline and on the margin are included in your guidance that will justify to continue having the dual pillars se t up of Oerlikon?
I'll start maybe the specific sales synergies that we are deriving from the portfolio right now are particularly from the INglass acquisition. That is really at the intersection between the hot runner systems and the thin film application for forming tools. That is where we're generating real sales synergies. In the grander scheme of things, that is not your biggest amount, right? But I think you also heard Michael specifically talk about the justification of the two dimensions inside the company is not just sales synergies. Right, Michael?
Absolutely. First, you have the cost synergies, which we do in a clear, consistent way. There's all the shared services which we're running across the globe. Either it's IT, it's accounting, it's legal setups, it's procurement, it's anything what's related with our cost base. This is a matter of fact that the two divisions in parallel are simply too small for real global activities. That's why they link together. That's a practical case. The other case is that when we thought about. We thought about in 2016, 2017, together with Georg Stausberg, should we spin off OPP, OMF in those days or not? What's the perspective?
The reason was why, because we said there's filament business that moves up to CHF 1 billion, and it goes down again and up again and down again. It's more cash cow as it was perceived. Additionally, negative perception, the cyclicality, which is not there. We are now in eight years, we are filling up 2024, and we're looking for further. I wonder sometimes which businesses have a longer cycle, because all business has certain cycles. The real chance is the way how we run it, the understanding of materials, either polymers or metals, the way how we engineer answers, the way how we're doing process solutions. We are selling a solution, so we're not selling you a coating, or we're selling you something. We're selling you a solution for requirement you have as a customer.
This we do very successfully in both fields. This is the common and combining DNA. Additionally, now with INglass, you have applications in automotive, in Markus' area, and you have the polymer understanding on Georg's area, where he does pumps and other stuff as well in the polymer world. There is synergies on the way, how they work together, but we don't press them together for the sense of to show one unit. If you take Switzerland, maybe that's a good example. You have German-Swiss, Italy-Swiss, French-Swiss. Outside, it's Switzerland. It's very successful model. Inside, it shows a certain diversity, and this is what we're doing. We have a certain diversity inside, even that Georg's organization is more functional and Markus' is more regional. Why? Georg will explain it to you.
He has 30, 40, 50 customers across the world, maybe with five, six countries, which matters for him. Markus is much more regional oriented. We follow here with our setups, we follow our opportunities, and we combine a very profitable business with a higher capital intensity, with a good profitable business and a much lower capital intensity. That fits perfect. That's why it stays together. That's why finally we came to the conclusion it's not a good idea to spin it and stay as Oerlikon only with OSS. By the way, COVID times have proven us there was not too much companies moved through COVID that resilient as we did.
Okay.
Dominik Felker from Neue Zürcher Zeitung. I'm afraid, but I have to ask the question about Poland. Are you afraid of being next on their list? And can you please point out how much of your revenue you have in Poland and how many people there on the ground? I believe you also have one of your two shared service centers there in Warsaw, if I'm right.
Yeah.
I take it or you?
You take it.
Yeah. Our exposure in Poland is a limited one. We do have a few coating centers. We talk about an order of magnitude of CHF 10 million revenue and maybe delivering of a few million value-wise material into Poland. That means a few hundred people. We do have the shared service center. To be crystal clear, answering your question, no, we don't expect something like that to come. The statements are clear and are obvious. It always goes back to the sheer fact that the dependency on the sanctioned shareholder is 18%, and that obviously is below the threshold of any.
Below any threshold. Again and again, even if nobody wants to stop it, sometimes it's annoying to think about since 2008 or 2010, Oerlikon and Vekselberg and Vekselberg and Oerlikon. There's a nice book, by the way, Viktor and Vekselberg. You should read it. That's the time until Vekselberg was investing and finally rescuing the company with CHF 1 billion spending and motivating the banks that this company, which today 12,000 jobs, is still alive. Otherwise, we wouldn't sit here. The second point is that Poland maybe overstretches a little bit their position with what they're moving, but it's not my way to comment it. There's European Union and there's our shell house structure. Here again, I said it at our table at lunch already.
If this is my most in-the-buff question I have for wonderful sleep. We have other questions. We have the question, where we buy our resources, either it's energy or it's raw materials in future, and how can we avoid that we buy it from countries which are not following the same values that we are doing. We can exchange Russia by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and we exchange a war country in Europe against a war country in Yemen. Maybe it's a matter of fact that 350,000 [fluid minutes] are there and nobody takes care about. Or we can go with our solar stuff to China and get it from forced labor out of Uyghur area. Simply we have to ask ourselves what do we want? How we get through that.
This is the real question, how we can steer a company our size with ambitious plans we have through an environment where it's clear we will not have open sky anymore in a global world as we maybe had five or six years ago. We will be global. We will be more, as we discussed it at the WEF in different areas and next week again, more region to the region. That will mean, and here our structure fits perfectly into that. That means that we are going in China for China's sake with a Swiss company. We are in the U.S. for U.S. sake in the U.S., in the U.S. area. We will be in the world as we've been, but we have to approach it different.
The resilience of supply chains, that will be a real question mark, and it will have a price tag. Things will maybe cost more than it was in the past. You will not get everything for free. The last question I have, really, Mr. Ferguson, we had a good discussion last week, I guess, is Viktor Vekselberg now with 15% or 18% or 17%, and now are the Polish moving here or there? Vekselberg made it on the sanctions list in the U.S. for whatever reasons. I am not in a position to comment that. In 2018, we've been never asked by OFAC, never affected by anybody, never in touch with anything which is sanctioned.
Not on OFAC, European Union, and somewhere else, simply because we have a shareholder who is Liwet Trust, far away from any levels to take influence, either by size or by whatever else. That's the reason why Oerlikon should get the credit as a real independent company in an independent market. For sure, whenever you are in touch with some Russians, today it's not good. Whatever it's Russian. Even myself get sometimes feeling, "Hey, what they are doing there? Why?" You know, out of 20, 30 years work, there are good and bad people in all countries, by the way, and it will be difficult to separate that. We have to separate that. There's a Russian government and there are a Swiss company, and please keep that aside.
Poland is very emotional on that, and everybody who is linked with Poland by whatever relation, by family or whatever, for sure has more emotions on that than others. Emotion is not a good guidance in such a difficult time. Here we will follow our rationale. Answer good enough or some more?
Thank you.
Good. Some more questions about our business and our future? Or still on emotions? We still have 11 minutes, so if you have no questions, we can either do the break earlier or we can do.
No, I would say.
Accelerate.
I would say now do a break, but maybe restart already at 2:45 P.M. Yeah, then we will restart with Polymer Processing Solutions. With that, let's start the break.
Good.
Yeah. Thanks.
Welcome back, everybody. I'd now like to come to the second session today, which is the polymer processing presentation. I would like to introduce Georg Stausberg, CEO of Polymer Processing Solutions. He has held this role since 2015 and has been with Oerlikon now over 16 years, and has in total 33 years of experience in the polymer processing industry. Georg, over to you.
Okay.
Thanks a lot, Sara. Yeah, let's get started talking about our division, Polymer Processing Solutions. What Michael Süss already mentioned to say there's not a single day without Oerlikon, and that is also true for our division. What are polymer parts about? Of course, it's about apparel, but it's also about diapers. It's about lightweight components in cars. It's about packaging. It's about bottles. Yeah, so if you just look around in that room here and would say, "Okay, if now no polymer inside, here would be no carpet. You would have no upholstery on your chair." Therefore, it's essential to deal with polymers and how we are doing that. Next slide, please. First of all, just high-level view on what is our division about. Last year, we were close to CHF 1.4 billion of sales.
Last year, we ended up with an EBITDA value of 60%. We achieved that with more than 4,000 employees and with basically three different types of business. One is the machine business, plant design business, equipment business. If I talk about plant design, just to give you an idea what we are talking about, we talk about installations producing 50,000 yarn bobbins a day. You might have seen one of the yarn bobbins outside at the table. A typical customer of ours is producing 50,000 of these bobbins per day, which is equivalent to 1,000 tons of polyester per day. You need to have around about 1,000 winders to do such an installation.
Here we are talking about investments of CHF 150 million-CHF 200 million with one customer on one plant. This is on the high-end side. On the equipment side, on the low-end side, and low-end does not mean quality low-end, it really means value-wise. You also see the pumps outside. You see the hot runner system outside, where we are talking about a component with EUR 1,000- EUR 1,500 of value. All together, it's engineering, all together it's equipment, and all together it's a solution because the customer is not looking for a pump or a hot runner system. The customer is looking for a solution, help him to make a better product, make a better yarn, make a better painting on a car or whatever.
In addition to that plant engineering component business, part of our business, also service business, which is start of installation of our big lines, but which is also doing repair of the equipment. This is the same is true for a small pump, the same is true for a hot runner system, and the same is true for large installations where all our customers need our services, where even sometimes we operate repair shops in the sites of our customers. Looking at the regional distribution of our, first of all, not a region. In the distribution by markets, at the moment, 60% is filament and 40% is non-filament.
I think that's already a big difference to our last capital market day in 2014, where our dependency on filament was much higher, and since then, we could continuously grow our activities in the non-filament businesses. Regional-wise, we still have a high dependency on Asia, still a high dependency on China, but at least there are now also some movements in other parts of the world, be it in India, be it in Turkey, on the filament and textile side. Anyhow, now with the acquisition of HRSflow, also our business here becomes, from a regional perspective, more diverse. Let's have a short look to our customer structure. Especially on the man-made fiber side, we are really talking about multi-billion companies as our customers. We are not talking about small mom-and-pop shops anymore.
We are not talking about somebody who has an idea to operate four winders to make a little bit of yarn. We are really talking about big international enterprises, all of them, or most of them are even bigger than the Oerlikon Group. Even the non-filament side, there are automotive companies, there are automotive suppliers, there are tier ones. Again, we have a lot to do with large-scale companies, with big companies. We talk a lot about key account management and, especially on the filament side, what already was mentioned earlier. Basically, we do our business with 50 customers a year, but all of them are international enterprises. I mentioned already before. No modern world without polymers. I gave you the example. We wouldn't have a carpet here. We wouldn't have upholstery here.
Basically, even in future, there will not be a world without polymers. Roland had mentioned before the topic of water consumption when growing cotton. The world population is growing. We can only dress people together if we use synthetic fibers. We have topics in the automotive industry. Michael was talking about lightweight application. Can we reduce steel parts? Can we reduce glass by plastics, which helps later on to save fuel? As I said, there are a lot of applications where basically there is no alternative to plastics or to polymers. What is a challenge, but for us making business also a big opportunity, is circular economy. Can we find solutions to take polymer parts after they got used in a car or as a textile and recycle it again?
There are a lot of interesting R&D work ongoing, and I'm quite sure this will create a lot of opportunities to us in the midterm future. I want to explain to you now the growth areas for our division. It starts still with the area of filament business, of textile business. This is our core. This is still a bigger part of our business. We see here, first of all, there was a lot of growth, more than 4% average in the last couple of years. Later on, we will talk about that in detail, that we are positive that this growth will continue. We see even more growth perspective in the area of non-filament, partially because there are still higher dynamics, for example, in the area of the hot runner market.
If you talk, for example, about nonwoven, then the nonwoven market itself has growth potential. As we started here five, six years ago with a very, very low market share, we even here have a chance not only to grow with the market, but also to outgrow the market. Both then gives us a growth perspective, as I said, which I will talk about later, even to quantify it. Where we see a lot of opportunities for us as Oerlikon Polymer Processing division, but which is at the moment difficult to quantify, is related to certain mega trends. I already talked about recycling before. I will later on talk about biopolymers, circularity, digitalization. There's a lot of topics which will change our industry, I'm quite sure on that, in the next latest until 2030.
To quantify it now, it's quite difficult, but we will talk about it later. There are opportunities. For some, I can already indicate some figures. For others, I would say, just looking at the newspaper, just looking at new legislation, it will be obvious that opportunities are coming there. All the three topics mentioned on that slide, I will explain in a little bit more detail, in a couple of minutes. Before doing that, some of you might ask a question last year when we announced the acquisition of INglass. What does this have in common with man-made fiber and why now the move from man-made fiber into Polymer Processing Solutions? First of all, also man-made fiber is nothing else than polymer processing. Within the man-made fiber, when making the design of our machines, we talk a lot about melt distribution.
We have a so-called spinning beam distributing a melt stream to 12 yarn ends. A hot runner system has one injection point and have to distribute it to five, six, seven injection points in one mold. You need to have a lot of know-how about rheology, about polymers and. That's first of all, a common technology know-how. Second of all, what we discussed before, biopolymers, recycling. It's a common challenge for everybody who is dealing with polymer processing. Utilizing now here the know-how of a larger group, utilizing the know-how of more than one engineer on that topic, creates now additional synergies. Last but not least, we are also we are making big plans, but we are still an expert in precision components. You can see it outside. We have these small pumps.
It's a precision component, costs EUR 1,500-EUR 2,000, but makes the difference later on in the quality of the process. Only with a good pump you can have a uniform yarn. Only with a good hot runner, you can have a polymer part from a car, a lighting part with good melt distribution. Therefore, this combination of precision component, rheological know-how, and manufacturing of these precision components makes it obvious that using now the component business to step into further areas of plastic processing. It's basically a door opener, but as it's nothing new to us, as we are already in the component business, as we do have already the know-how, it's something where we know what we are talking about, something where we already find some synergies and not something totally out of the box.
Therefore, for us, it's a natural way now to grow further into polymer processing. It's the first step and not the end, but I will come to that later. Now let's have a look on the biggest portion of our business, which is the filament business. I already mentioned before, it starts with big plants, which we see here on the upper left side of the picture. This is a view in one of our customer installations. You see here hundreds of winders. Usually customers are ordering thousands of winders. Round about 50% of the chemical fiber products which are produced worldwide are run on our equipment.
If you now, in the evening go out doing some workout, doing some sports, wearing some functional wear, there's a probability of more than 50% that the yarn where this T-shirt or this sport shirt is made from is produced on Oerlikon equipment. Here we are the clear market leader with a 40%-50% market share. What can you do out of that? Of course, everybody when talking about chemical fiber is talking about functional wear. Reality today is already a lot of apparel today, a lot of standard clothes today, it's made from chemical fiber. Yeah, you will hardly find any suit, you will hardly find any T-shirt where not at least a certain content is made from polyester, is made from nylon, or is made from other chemical fibers.
I will come in a second to the growth of the textile industry, and basically there's also good reason for that. Just talking about some lighthouse projects, you see a reference to a customer in Turkey. Also to show, yes, we have a strong customer base in China, but it's not the only one. This factory in Turkey is one of the most modern chemical fiber equipment in the world. For that customer in Turkey, we not only sold filament equipment. For them, we also sold staple fiber lines. For them, we did the whole automation system with handling of 50,000 bobbins a day, fully automatic bobbin handling, including packaging.
With having the ability to talk with big customers, it also brings us now in the position, and that's really USP of us, in emerging countries like Bangladesh. Customers do have less know-how than the big ones in China and India and Turkey. They are really looking for greenfield application. We basically the only one at the moment in the world who can offer from the polymerization plant down to the bobbin, and if required, even within automation, everything out of one hand. That's a USP, especially now in emerging countries where customers are really looking for turnkey installation, for total solution and not just for equipment supply. Let's have a look on the growth dynamics in our industry. What you can see here is the development on fiber consumption.
You see on the bottom the development on natural fiber and on top the development on chemical fiber. What you can basically see since 2000, approximately, the natural fiber is really flat. There are good reasons for it. First of all, I mentioned already before, growing cotton needs a hell of a lot of water. Depending on sources between 1,500 and 8,000 liters per kilo of cotton. Even if it's only 1,500, it's a lot. If you now go to a country like Kazakhstan, you have the Aral Sea, which is drying out due to growing cotton around that lake. There is also an environmental issue with natural fiber, and you cannot grow cotton in every place in the world. There's a certain natural limitation in growing the business with natural fibers.
That means as long as the world population is growing, as long as people want to get dressed, you have to find ways to do it with chemical fibers. That means basically the fundamentals for growing our business are very strong, and they're still in place. What you have seen on that slide here, basically, we can also see on that slide. This is the growth rates in our industry since 2000. It means basically since the last more than 20 years, we have an average growth of 4% on year-on-year basis. Yes, there has been one or two years in between where the business was not that promising.
Basically, if we really look at the overall tendency, since more than 20 years, there's an average growth of 4%, which goes very much in line with the slide, which I have shown you before on the fiber consumption, and we expect that this growth will continue. Why it will continue, and what is maybe different to what we have seen in 2016. One difference is that until 2016, the Chinese five-year plan are very much related to quantity only. There were targets in the five-year plan, and after these targets were published, a lot of chemical fiber producers start investing in new equipment. As 10 companies did have the same idea at the same time, after two, three years, the five-year plan was fulfilled and was overachieved, and then they stopped investing.
Meanwhile, the five-year plan in China is not related to quantity anymore, it's related to quality. Yeah. Therefore, basically, there cannot be any overinvestment in quantity anymore. What happens at the same time, the big players in China, all of them want to have now full control over the entire value chain. They all have invested upstream in petrochemical plants. Some of them even starting with paraxylene, which is basically a product of a refinery. All of them started with terephthalic acid production, which is the raw material for making polyester. From a perspective of economies of scale, one terephthalic acid plant feeds five polyester polycondensation plants, and each polyester polycondensation plant feeds roundabout 1,000 winders. As the investments in terephthalic acid are done, they are under installation at the moment. They are under construction in China.
Customers need the winders because it doesn't make sense to sell terephthalic acid. It doesn't make sense to sell polyester as a polymer, but it makes sense to have the entire value chain down to the yarn and to sell yarn. As all these petrochemical investments are ongoing, basically, we can be sure that at least until 2025, additional winders are needed to absorb that material, which is a good basis now that therefore we are very confident that at least for the next two to three years, our business will grow. What happens then? Last year, China announced a so-called dual control policy. That means also now companies in China are forced to look more and more into the energy efficiency of their operations.
From 2025 onwards, customers in China are only allowed to invest in new equipment if it's more energy efficient than the previous one. Already today, our equipment is the most energy efficient one, and we still have very good ideas in our R&D pipeline in order to have even better solutions from 2025 onwards, which should also then give a push to the market to replace maybe 10-year-old equipment with the latest one because it's more energy efficient. There is still a lot of momentum in the market, where we have a strong belief that at least for the next couple of years, our business will continue to grow and will remain on a very stable high level. Therefore, this time we are talking about a growing industry continuing.
Now looking to the next slide. This is something where most of you have been aware of. Also, in the last years, we might not be perceived as the most growing industry, but we have already been a very cash effective industry. In the average of the last 10 years, each year, we made more than CHF 100 million of EBITDA of cash. Last year, it was even CHF 170 million. We are constant cash contributor. We are still an asset-light business. We have assembly plants, we have a little bit of manufacturing, but basically, a low capital intensity. For the last couple of years, every year, we brought more than CHF 100 million of cash generated with our business. I think this is also something which will continue.
Now we have a combination of a good growth perspective without becoming much more capital intensive. From that perspective, also talking about capital efficiency before, I see us on a very good track. These are some more details on the filament business. Now, let's have a look still on the textile business, but on the non-filament portion of the textile business. In the first slide here, we talk about nonwoven and plant engineering. Nonwoven is a material, where the benefit of that is it's basically a one-step manufacturing process. If you do filament, first of all, you need a yarn. Then you need a weaving machine to make a fabric, and you have to make something out of it.
On nonwoven, in one step, you already have a fabric, which then can be used for diapers, which can be used for wipes, which can be used for geotextiles, which can be used for filters. Fortunately, in Switzerland, nobody wears a mask anymore. In Germany, we have sometimes to do, but I think all of us still have the picture of the mask in front of us, and the mask is nothing else than filtration material made from nonwoven. In that part of the engineering business, we started quite slow 10 years ago. At the moment, at that time, our market share was quite low. At that time, we still were more on the commodity side with diapers. Meanwhile, we said, "Okay, where can we differentiate?" We can differentiate on filtration. We can differentiate on geotextiles.
We can differentiate on wipe material. Here again now, sustainability kicks in. One of the challenges for wipes is most of the wipes which we use in cosmetic wipes, and are flushable wipes. Can we now make it from non-plastic materials? Can we change the design of these wipes in order to make it more sustainable? Here we have seen also in cooperation with some of our big customers, opportunities to develop different technologies, which now put us in a position to have some USPs. Already last year, we made more than CHF 100 million sales in nonwoven, coming from some CHF 10 million, CHF 20 million, which we had in 2016. We still see a lot of opportunities now to grow in that market and even to outgrow our competition. Key for that is R&D. We have R&D centers here.
Key of that is cooperation with core players in the industry, in the downstream. I say I'm quite optimistic that here a CHF 150 million minimum is possible for us, maybe even more. Another part of plant engineering is what I also mentioned earlier, the polycondensation plants. Where we make the polyester. At the moment, it's polyester. Maybe in a couple of years, it's also a little bit of biopolymer or is a mixture of both. Maybe in a couple of years, a combination of chemical recycling and chemical recycled polymer to feed back into such polycondensation plant. Again, offering a lot of growth opportunities to us and at least giving us a chance to develop the overall process.
It's not only the topic to make a co-polycondensation plant, but how later on to make a good quality yarn of recycled material. With that know-how in plant engineering, again, we are a solution provider. We have very good opportunities to grow. Here, not only in the filament market, but also in the packaging industry for bottles, for films, where we also sold polycondensation plants in the past two, three years. Both of these nonwoven market, plant engineering markets, we see nonwoven with growth even more than 5% and plant engineering 2.5%-3% growth. Both of them remain interesting markets for us. Now let's have a look at two other areas in the textile industry. It's industrial yarn, it's carpet yarn. These are although, especially in industrial yarn, we also have growing opportunities.
You need industrial yarn in a car for a seat belt. You need industrial yarn in a car for tire cord. You need it for the airbag in your car. But of course, here these lines are very, very productive. Here we have some years where you can make a CHF 100 million business. We have other years where then it goes down to CHF 50 million. We overall consider that as a stable business with not too much of a growth potential. Let's say having each year a basis business of CHF 80 million-CHF 90 million, we take it, especially as we also here have a very good market share. On the carpet side, even we have a market share of more than 80%. Again, carpet, it's fashion-driven.
Carpet basically is every five, six, seven years at home, you change your carpet. It's a constant business. At the same time, there are wooden floor coverings which at least compete with carpet. Therefore overall it's stable. Again, it offers us R&D opportunities. Today, already in U.S., 25% of the carpet yarn is made from recycled polyester, and all is done on our machines. Yeah. You also have then replacement cycles. You need new technologies to be able to process this recycled material on your lines. Therefore, we maintain that market share, we maintain a stable business here. It's not too much of a growth opportunity, but from a profit level and, say in total CHF 150 million every year, it's around about 10% of what we are doing, and we're happy to be in that market.
Now after talking about the textile part of our business, let's have a closer look now also into the flow control business. In flow control, basically we're now talking at the division Polymer Processing Solutions about two business units, which we didn't do in the past. One business unit is man-made fibers, and this is what I introduced to you before. The other business in our unit is now flow control. In that business unit, we are now merging our already existing business with gear metering pumps and the newly acquired business of hot runner systems, formerly INglass, today Oerlikon HRSflow. While flow control, I explained it also earlier when we saw the slides on the synergies. A gear metering pump is about precision flow control. A hot runner system is about precision flow control.
You need to have a lot of know-how about polymers, about fluids, how to design components. It's a component business. It's about precision manufacturing. It makes sense to combine that also in one business unit. Now looking at the two branches of the business unit, starting again with the gear metering pumps, and here we are only talking about gear metering pumps. The gear pump market is incredibly big. It's a multi-billion market. There's a lot of flow pumps for water, for whatever. We really focus on small, precise metering pumps, doing metering of paint, doing metering of polymers. Using such a pump in a line for making polyester film, without a pump, you would never have a uniform distribution of the thickness of the film. That is essential here.
The focus is on metering, on improving quality and not on just transporting or feeding a fluid. The market for these pumps is around about CHF 200 million with a market growth of 3%. We are well positioned here. Our business at the moment is in a magnitude of CHF 40 million. For the next two years, we will grow it to CHF 50 million organically. We have invested here in new buildings, in new tooling machinery. We have already a lot of orders in hand to fulfill that promise, and it's a very profitable business. On the hot runner side, we have again two market segments. One is the automotive part, the other one is the non-automotive part. In automotive, we are already today the number one in the world with a 25% market share.
Talking about automotive parts, we talk about lighting, we talk about interior parts, exterior parts, bumpers, and then basically we talk about big parts. Then special know-how of our hot runner systems at the moment very much linked to automotive. On the non-automotive side, the market is even much bigger. You can see it here. It's a CHF 2 billion market instead of a CHF 600 million market. But in that market, basically, nobody has a market share of more than 10%. It's much more fragmented market and also the application is much more fragmented. Take a cap of such a bottle as a small part. Take a coffee capsule as a small part. But still waste containers is also non-automotive, but is a big part. So the diversity of parts, the diversity of polymers is much bigger here.
That's also the reason why this market is more fragmented. With our know-how now, we see good opportunities at least also to come to around about 10% market share in that non-automotive segment. Again, we have started to invest here. We need now to have a focus more on the smaller parts. We have to redesign some of our injection nozzles. We also have to optimize the manufacturing from bigger parts to smaller parts. This is on the way, with additional investment, and we see a very good opportunity here to grow organically in the next couple of years. I said that getting here a 10% market share would offer us another CHF 200 million opportunity, also mainly organically coming from the hot runner business.
On top of the organic opportunities, we still now see with opening the door into this component business, now further opportunities also, how to grow inorganically further. Yeah, so via the component. For me, when talking about M&A, for me it's always important we are the better owner for the business, and that means we understand what we are talking about. If I now would just add injection molding to man-made fiber, the injection molding business model is much more linked to tooling machinery, different customer structure, different end application, different business model. Why should I be the better owner? On the component side, we know what we are talking about. With the pumps, we know what we are talking about. Now, after being three, four, five years in injection molding via components, have a much better insight into the industry.
Delivering pumps not only for chemical fiber, but also into other extrusion lines. We have very good insights in these industries. Now we see a good chance that by stepping into the component business, we get better access to other areas of the polymer processing industries, which then open to us the door for further acquisitions. Really in a way, in a sense that we understand the business, that we know we are the better owner, that we know that we can create some synergies. Therefore for me, that step via the components is a very good first step in that direction, but I said, not the final step, and we are looking for further opportunities here. Yeah, that's basically on our component business, Oerlikon Flow Control. We also talked before on the topic of mega trends.
Let's start now with the topic of mega trends we are talking about. One is recycling. The topic energy saving will continue. Another topic is biopolymers. Here on purpose I am talking about future mobility. Yes, everybody's talking about e-mobility, but yeah, maybe politicians see it like that, but as an engineer, as a technician, I'm always open to alternative technologies. But whatever will be our mobility in 10 years, one thing is for sure, the lighter the car, the less will be the energy consumption. Independent if it's an electrical drive or it's still a combustion engine. Lightweight is a topic for mobility. Last but not least, also digitalization is a mega trend, not only for our industry, but for many industries.
Now let's have a little bit a deeper look into these mega trends. Let's start with the topic of polyester recycling. At the moment, around 70 million tons of polyester yarn, only yarn. I'm not talking about bottles, I'm not talking about film. It's only yarn is produced every year. At the moment, around 6 million of that is based on recycled material. I would say this grows to 9 million tons, which would already be around 50% growth over a period of seven years only, for me seems still to be quite conservative. Yeah. For sure it will be partially pushed by legislation. You might have seen four weeks ago the announcement of the European Union that by 2030 there must be certain quotas of recycled material in textiles.
Today, if you buy a T-shirt and if you see on the T-shirt it's made from recycled material, you can be sure 99.9% it is a recycled bottle. You convert a bottle into granules again, and out of the granules you can produce yarn again. That's if we talk about recycling today. Now legislation will first of all force the packaging industry to recycle a bottle to a bottle again. Second of all, it will force the textile industry to recycle textiles into textiles. Therefore, there are a lot of dynamics in that entire system, and it makes sense because what we can recycle, at least what we can mechanically recycle, is much more efficient from a CO₂ perspective. It's much more inefficient from energy-saving perspective.
Basically, if we really consider then post-consumer textiles not as waste anymore but as feedstock for making something new out of it. I still would say the 9 million here is a conservative guess. It's not made by ourselves, but it's by Wood Mackenzie, so by an external agency. But even if we only take that figure, if we only take 3 million additional tons to be converted into polyester, knowing what today is roughly the cost of a polycondensation plant, knowing today what roughly is the cost of an extrusion system, it will basically open a CHF 500 million market to us on annual basis. Yeah. There are opportunities. We are working on that. As I said before already today, 25% of the carpet yarn is already made from recycled material.
It's still bottle, but it's made on our equipment, so we know what we're talking about. The most prominent company already today offering recycled polyester fibers in the world for textile is a company Unifi. All this yarn is produced on our equipment. Now the challenge is how to make it run not only with bottle-based recycled material, but also with textile-based recycled material. Here we are doing a lot of work in our R&D center. Here we are also collaborating with other companies, also in the areas of chemical recycling and not mechanical recycling only. My personal assumption here is we will see in the next two to three years, very interesting developments here, that the technology gets a certain level of maturity that we would then can really commercialize on it.
As I said, for me, it will for us open an opportunity in another CHF 500 million market then. That's on the recycling topic. Let's now talk about energy saving and, maybe, can we flip to the next slide with biopolymers and then go back to the energy saving? Because biopolymer and recycling goes a little bit more hand in hand. There's always a discussion, what's now the better way to go? Is it recycling? Is it biopolymer? In my opinion, it will to a certain degree be both. My opinion is whatever is durable and can be collected. If in future we would wear a polyester T-shirt, it's durable. If we would have a collecting system, it's easy to collect, and then we will find ways to recycle it.
That would, for me, be the most efficient way to do so. If we talk about diapers, to collect a post-consumer diaper might not be a good idea, and to find a way to recycle it might even be more difficult. Therefore, I see a lot of opportunities on biopolymer, but more for disposal materials, be it on packaging, be it on diapers, be it on wipes. For durable materials, for me, the bigger potential is on recycling. That's the reason why we are talking about both. We are, again, for both, we do have partners also on the biopolymer side. We are working together with producers of biopolymers. We try together with them to develop new materials, be it new yarns, be it new nonwoven materials.
Together with them, we find ways how to adapt our equipment to get a good quality out of these materials. At least here there are certain perspectives how much the market for biopolymer will grow. For us, it's difficult now to make an assessment what does it mean for us, because I see it here more as a kind of replacement market. That means goods. Let's take for example, in the packaging industry, coffee capsules. If they will be made from biopolymer in future, we will not have more coffee capsules, but it will now made from biopolymer and not from a polyethylene anymore. That means will we then sell more hot runners? Most probably not.
At least the world market for hot runners will not be bigger, but hopefully our market share will become bigger because we have a better knowledge how to do it with biopolymer than with polyester. On biopolymer, it's. I don't see that the equipment market will increase. There will be a kind of substitution, and it's on us with better technical solutions to grab a bigger piece of the cake then. For today, let's say difficult to judge and partially already implemented in the growth figures which you have seen before. Now going one slide back on energy saving, which is another growth driver, and as already mentioned by Roland, since 2009, at least in the man-made fiber business, we label e-save. E-save is not just energy saving.
E-save means whatever we do in R&D must either E energy, E environment, means by the end of the day, we produce less weight. Economical, that means easier to operate for the operators. The E stands for different things, but of course, our customers, the main driver has been energy. The WINGS winder, which we introduced in 2009, the one for POY yarn, for unstretched yarn, was 25% more energy efficient than the previous generation of machines. The one for stretched yarn, the WINGS FDY, was even 40% more energy efficient. We did a good job already here, 2010, 2011, 2012. Okay, this is now 10 years old technology, and now customers are looking for the next generation.
Maybe next time it's not another 25%. Maybe next time it's only 10%, but already on a totally different level, and it still allows our customer to become more energy efficient. That's what we're working on. That for sure will not only for man-made fiber equipment, also for hot runner systems, whatever we do in plastic processing, because first of all, plastic processing is energy intensive. You have to melt a polymer, you have to cool down a polymer, you have to heat it up again to stretch it to get certain properties. Whatever we can do here to save energy helps our customers a lot and will remain a strong driver in what we are doing. If we're doing better than our competitors, it will help us to maintain or even increase our market share in different industries.
Let's now step to the topic of future mobility. Here are only a few examples. A few examples of lightweight parts in a car. Here again, we are already today quite strong in the automotive sector. We have a 25% market share. What is our business model here? You also might have seen the part of BMW outside. It's not just that somebody comes around the corner and says, "I need a hot runner for such an exterior part of the car, and it's a standard part." No. Basically, first of all, the customer, the design engineers of the automotive industry, they show us what they have in mind. Then they go to the mold makers. They go t o their Tier 2 suppliers.
The question is, "Okay, what do I have to do in order to get such an automotive lighting?" We have the strength that we have a lot of, let's say due to our big market share, due to our big customer base, we have a lot of similarities, and we have simulation software. Basically, we recommend to say, "Okay, if you do it like that, if you inject the polymer into your mold like that, you might get a better quality. You might can, like, do it with a shorter cycle time. You might do it with less waste. You might do it with shorter heating cycles, and." That's basically how we then consult our customers to come to the best possible solution. Basically, again, the customer is looking for functionality. He's not just looking for a part.
He's looking for functionality. Based on our know-how from the past, combined with polymer know-how, in the first step, we help him to fulfill the functionality. If he says, "This is the solution I'm looking for," then we make a quote on some steel parts which you see outside. The key to sell these topics is really what can we do better than others to help the customer to fulfill functionality? Just a small side remark on the touch panel. This even now offers opportunities in the combination with our Surface Solutions business and the Polymer Processing Solutions business. Yeah. On Polymer Processing, of course, we know how to do the injection, how to distribute the melt. Such a touch panel also needs coating of a polymer part to get a certain functionality. Lighting is a transparent part.
Coating of a mold very much impacts if the part is really transparent or not. Here we have now a lot of opportunities also on the customer side, on the technical side, to create additional solutions which neither OSS alone could create, nor we as OPP or HRSflow could create. There are not much other companies in the world who have this common know-how in order to create functionality and to create common solutions. Last megatrend to talk about is digitalization. This is, of course, always the most difficult to explain, and therefore, let's try to do it with a picture. I think all of you are aware about autonomous driving. You need a car. You need sensors who know the positioning of the car.
You need sensors that see, okay, there is a pedestrian in front of my car in the car. You need computer capacity in order to do the calculations with millions of data. What we are talking about in the chemical fiber line is basically nothing else than autonomous driving. In autonomous driving, we talk a lot about 5G technology in order to transfer the data. You have seen the picture of the plant before, a plant with 1,000 winders. How do we transfer the data? That first of all, we install a kind of in-house cloud system to our customers, what we call the common service platform. On that common service platform, we can now collect data of 1,000 winders, thousands of data.
On that common service platform, we can now add so-called service app, and that is basically the artificial intelligence. On these machines, sometimes you have a signal, the ampere of a small roll which controls the yarn tension. 150,000, 200,000, 300,000 signals a day. An experienced engineer, he would know there is now a peak, what do I have to do in order to improve the performance of the machine? No engineer can control 300,000 data a day. With such a service app, we can do, and we can immediately then give a hint to the operator, "Please look at that. Please look at that. Change the bearing, change the temperature in order to control." In the next step, maybe we can even teach the machine to do it automatically. The basis is data collection.
The basis is data analyzers with algorithm who really recognize patterns in a lot of data which is available today. We have now the first installations in place. To give you just a short example from one customer in Turkey, with a specific artificial intelligence module, which we call AIM for DTY. He was able to increase the A-grade material, which he's selling to the market from 92%-96%, which each week for that customer is a saving of more than EUR 20,000 or additional earning of EUR 20,000 because he can sell the material to a better price on a higher quality level. It's a small example, but here, I would say we are much ahead of our competitors. We have very good solutions here which are appreciated by our customers and more to come.
Yeah, the more you step into that topic, the more you see opportunities to come. Yeah, that's on the megatrends. Finally, what are the key messages? We are the leader in filament, and we believe we will remain leader in filament, and the filament market will continue to grow as world population is growing and as a constant demand of textiles is in place. We see even bigger growth dynamics in the non-filament area, both in the nonwoven side, which is still textile, but even more in the nontextile side now with the acquisition of HRSflow, which opens the door now to further application in different industries.
Coming from the upside trends like recycling, like biopolymer, like digitalization, we see areas where we can significantly differentiate from all of our competitors, which really then will help us to maintain or even grow our market share and offer new business opportunities. Putting that all together, it comes to the figures which Phil has presented before. It comes to the figures that we are confident this year to end up with around CHF 1.5 million of sales and that we are on the way even to become on mid- to long-term basis, a CHF 2 billion company with all that additional portfolio changes and with all the opportunities which I've just introduced to you. Thank you very much for your attention, and I'm open to your questions.
Great. Thank you, Georg, for the presentation. Now it's time for Q&A. For investors participating via phone, please dial the number shown in the webcast and press star and one. We now first start with questions in the room. Please first introduce yourself and the institute you are representing. Yes, please.
Christian. Christian Arnold, Stifel. Question on the growth expectations for the filament equipment market.
Yep. Yeah.
Thinking about fast fashion and lots of governments and now also the EU actually are fighting against fast fashion, what does it mean for your growth expectations?
It's a good question. First of all, if you look at the real fiber consumption, already in Europe and North America, it's stagnating since three, four years. So I'm now talking about the per capita consumption. The per capita consumption in Europe is around about 30 kilo per capita. In emerging countries, it's at the moment about eight kilo per capita. In emerging countries, you have a population growth of 4%-5%, whereas in Europe at the moment, the population is even shrinking. So if we put all that in perspective, yes, fast fashion is part of the story. It's a story which is very much discussed here in Central Europe.
A much bigger growth driver for textile industry in the last couple of years was really what's happening in the emerging countries, where the per capita consumption is increasing from eight to 10 to 12 kilo per capita. At the same time, we have the population growth. Therefore, for me, the statement to say there will be, there's still a stable base for further growth is still there. It might be a certain shift, that it might be a little less in Europe and a little less in North America, but more than in Asia, more in Africa, the more wealth is created in these countries.
Okay. Thank you. Second question, maybe, some of the large fashion labels, they are not so keen on having a Made in China label anymore. What does that mean for your business? Thank you.
At least it means for me that on midterm basis, we do have a lot of opportunities. Yeah. At the moment, 70% of the textiles are made in China. You're right. I also agree that at least some of the brands mainly they are concerned now on issues around the lockdown in Shanghai, for example. Yeah. If they order the winter collection in China and the goods are stuck in the harbor for 10 weeks, the business is gone. Therefore, there's indeed a tendency now China plus one. I don't see that people want to go fully away from China because at least for the time being, China has the most modern equipment in the textile industry, not only for chemical fiber manufacturing, but also the downstream, more modern than any other country.
It will take some time before other countries can come to a similar level. They have started. Yeah, I mentioned before, I showed you that example of Turkey with which is one of the most modern fabric factories in the world. I see similar tendencies in India. We even have discussion for Central America. We have discussions on Egypt, where now projects are popping up. Therefore, I see an opportunity for us. There might even be, on midterm basis, a change as the market becomes a little bit more regionalized. On the equipment side, yes, but as I said, at the moment, the technological gap of China is that big compared to other countries, it will still take some time here.
Also, people want to be independent, but it's not that easy.
Yes, thank you. Michael Foeth, Bank Vontobel. I have one question regarding textile recycling. Can you be a bit more specific on where the technology stands, what you have today, and what the challenges are in order to break through and really recycle textiles?
As I said before, already today, recycled polyester bottles into textile is state-of-the-art. We have delivered plenty of installations in USA for making carpet yarn based on recycled polyester. We have installations converting recycled bottle into filament yarn for textiles. We are doing it for staple fiber. This is state-of-the-art. Here, basically, it's a question on extrusion system. It's a question of filtration to get the melt quality as good as possible in order still to make a good textile out of it. What is now the challenge? If you look at your textiles today, you will hardly find any textile which is 100% polyester or which is 100% polyamide. All these textiles are made from blends.
There is still some cotton inside, there is still some wool inside, there is some elastane inside. Which basically make it impossible to recycle the textiles which we are wearing today. Here we are also in different circles with VDMA in Germany, with the European Textile Association. How do we have to change the design of textiles to make it recyclable? Where do we might have compromise on the functionality of a textile, but then to have it 100% polyester or 100% cotton or whatsoever. This is for me, one path which we have to go, where we are actively contributing these associations, and not only on the machinery side, but also on the textile side.
If we succeed here to make a 100% polyester shirt, we have made already trials. Then the technologies which are today available for recycling polyester bottles, we can use very similar technologies and also to do the recycling of textiles. If we talk about mixed textiles, cotton and polyester, then this mechanical recycling is not possible. Then we have to find ways on chemical recycling. That means basically then to break down a polymer into the original monomers and make a new polymer out of that. Already here, some interesting technologies on the way, some in a semi-commercial stage. It works pretty well for, again, 100% pure polyester, but maybe here I even don't need it because then I have the mechanical alternative. For blended materials at the moment, it depends very much how much is the contamination.
Is it 20% cotton beside 10% cotton, 30% cotton? Here, a lot of very interesting basic research work is ongoing. There are already very interesting topics on the lab scale, where I say I believe that in three, four years, five years from now, we might here really see a mature technology which could be commercialized, which then could be a door opener for real textile recycling.
Hi, I'm [Rishni], z Capital. You talked briefly about the volatile cyclical nature of the carpet and yarn business. Can you give us some insight about the cyclicality of the other businesses? I think everybody's waiting for a downturn in filament for quite some time, and it seems not to
I would not say everybody. I'm not waiting for the downturn because for me, business is much easier to manage if the downturn is not coming.
It's not happening. Also in nonwoven and in flow control, maybe some words on cyclicality there.
Yeah. Let's first of all start with the filament business. What I explained before that due to the different structure now in the industry, first of all, due to the fact that, as I said, we really could see there was a certain linkage with Chinese Five-Year Plan, which basically was only focusing on quantity. As they're following the Five-Year Plan in China, the downturn which you are expecting, which you're waiting for, should have happened already in 2020 or 2021, which was not the case. Now knowing that we are fully booked into 2023, that we have already a good backlog into 2024, and that we now already start selling orders into 2025, at least here, I do not have any indication that this should change, at least on short term.
This is very much driven on what we discussed before. First of all, that our customers are going upstream, and to utilize their upstream capacity, they need downstream equipment. Second of all, there are big projects coming up in India and Turkey and other parts of the world, which also want to balance against China. At least I would say for the next three, four years, I don't have any indication that on the filament market, there will be a downstream. On the HRSflow side, as long as we talk about automotive industry, basically, we could say it goes hand in hand with the automotive industry, which is not fully true. Here it goes more hand in hand with how many new models are on the market.
Because you need new hot runner systems, you need new molds if a new model is popping up. At the moment, a lot of new models are coming around the corner. Not only on e-mobility, but also combustion engine, but smaller cars, more compact cars, lightweight cars. With all the new models, we have good opportunities to maintain our business, to grow our business. Again, here, I do not see that this dynamics on new models, I would say even we can observe in the car industry that the lifetime of a certain generation of car is shortening. New functionalities are kicking in. Even a facelift of a car gives an opportunity for the flow control business because a facelift might need a new front grill, might require a new design of lighting.
as here, the number of new models is decisive. At least we consider it as a very stable business, which we could also see in the past years. Here the growth is more depending how good can we succeed to maintain or even increase our market share. At least in the last three years, HRSflow could gain a 5% market share by having a global footprint, which some of our competitors don't have. By having a different service concept, the one which I explained to you before on modeling a part, having some simulation on such a part. On the nonwoven side, I would also not expect. I'd say we have to differentiate. Of course, to be very frank here, of course, last year we had a boom.
Everybody last year needed face masks. For sure, that face mask topic to a certain degree was over-invested. This year on the nonwoven side, even sales might slightly go down. Last year it was an overshooting due to that special COVID event. On the, I'd say, on the long-term rational, if talking about filtration material, air filtration, if talking about geotextiles, if talking about wipes, yeah, this is again a tendency which goes hand-in-hand with population growth, which goes hand-in-hand with new technologies. If we would cut out the one-time peak on face masks last year, then also the nonwoven business is a very stable one with a very stable growth, which hasn't shown the cyclicity in the last couple of years.
Thank you. A few words from you on cost inflation and how you cope with that. Probably also a little bit of view of the different businesses.
Yeah. What we do is, let's say basically in the engineering business, it's not usual to talk about index pricing. That's a typical topic in material business, but it's not an engineering business. What we do, and not just in this year, that's something which we do since many years, we calculate an inflation markup in our pricing. If a customer signs a contract today with a delivery in 2025, at least already in the past, we had a 3%-4% markup on inflation on our pricing. It means if the delivery is in 2025, the machine is more than 10% more expensive as if it would get the machine today. Knowing that markup, we try to safeguard the cost for that delivery in 2025 already today.
With long-term frame contracts with our suppliers to say, "Okay, I know that I need it in 2025, buy all that already today based on today's cost basis." Which here and there might result in a little bit higher inventory, but by doing so, we have costs quite well under control. What is still a driving factor on cost is design to cost. We have a very, let's say, our R&D engineers have a very close cooperation with our purchasing department. Together with our suppliers, how can we optimize functionalities? Just this year, we have released a new generation of inverters which we specifically developed with Siemens for our winders, which help us to even reduce costs, in which then also can compensate for these inflation topics.
With these topics designed to cost, having a kind of inflation markup in our pricing, and at the same time, as soon as the contract is signed, securing prices of long-term contracts, we see ourselves in the position to manage this kind of inflation to safeguard our profitability.
Okay, thank you. Christian Obst from Baader Helvea.
Yeah.
Hello. Yeah, it's concerning first of all, thank you for the good presentation for a company which was almost labeled with no growth certain years ago. Now you'd showed us some growth opportunities. I have a question concerning the CapEx you have to invest to grab these opportunities. How much CapEx over the time until 2026? How much of underlying free cash flow you can generate despite investing into growth? Thank you.
Yeah. I would say basically, what I showed in that one slide, that we can invest roundabout 2.5% of our revenues year- by- year. That has been sufficient to finance the growth from 2016 up to now. I believe that it will also be sufficient to finance the further growth, as long as I mainly talk about organic growth. It's this 2.5% of course, excluding any M&A investment. In addition to that, we invest at the moment for today's business roundabout CHF 40 million per year in R&D. Which also, if I talk to our R&D guys, they confirm that is for them enough money to maneuver.
I feel quite comfortable that the demand neither on CapEx nor on R&D spend will be much different than what we're spending today. In case we have an attractive M&A target, then I will talk to Phil how we finance it, where the funding coming from. Whatever we also do on the M&A side, we have then to make clear, does it fit into our business model or will it significantly change our business model? As long as we stay with that 2.5% CapEx of sales, 3% R&D of sales, we will generate even the next couple of years, the same magnitude what we have seen last year, CHF 150 million-CHF 170 million cash on a year-to-year basis.
[Uber Oba] , OBA Consulting. I have a question about polymers.
Yeah. Okay.
Polymer business. I understand that you don't produce the polymers, but could you explain a little bit about the biopolymers? For example, mechanical characteristics and so on the biopolymers. Because if you use a polymer applied in the automotive industry, your requirement must be very high. The second question is that, are you competing in the automotive sector with Ems-Chemie?
Let's start with the first one, biopolymer. There is not the one biopolymer. There are biopolymers, the most prominent one at the moment is polylactic acid, PLA, which is based on corn. There are other biopolymers which are starch-based. Yes, you made the right point. One of the disadvantage of biopolymers is still that their properties are not as good as the one of polyester, as the one of nylon. On PLA, for example, the heat resistance of that material is by far not as good as it is for polyester. Therefore, it's my judgment to say I see biopolymers more on the disposable side, where basically you need something for a one-time use only, a coffee capsule, a packaging film, and.
Where durability is not a topic, and therefore you can make compromises on the properties of the polymer. If it now really would come to textiles, the functional textiles, nobody wants his shirt to start degrading as long as you want to wear it. Therefore, to say that on the durable side, I believe still there will be a long period where we still need even oil-based polymers, which personally I do not see as a problem. Let's say, if we do not burn our oil in a combustion engine, if we only use the remaining oil for making polymers, it's not so much of an environmental problem here.
There is a lot of topics of biopolymer recycling, which by the end of the day, are much more unfriendly to environment, because you have high energy consumption, you have a lot of water pollution just to make it recyclable. Therefore, I believe we still have a period, long period with standard polymers and biopolymers I do see more on the disposable side, where you can make compromises on the functionality. Second part of the question, no, we are not a competitor of Ems. As you rightly said, we are not making polymers. Ems inventor who was an engineer, who is still or today Uhde Inventa-Fischer , is a very prominent engineering company. They are one of our customers even, and with a lot of cooperation 20 years ago, where they were much stronger in chemical fiber.
Today they are more in the packaging area. As I said, they are one of our customers and we are not a competitor. If it comes to Ems-Chemie, as we are not a chemical producer, as we are not a material producer, we are playing on different play fields.
Stefan Frischknecht, Schroders. I'm positively surprised that so far, the Chinese have not emerged also as a competitor producing polymer processing equipment. I was wondering, why is that the case? If I look at natural fibers, then obviously there is a trend that local producers in China are entering the market. If you could possibly contrast the two things, so that we get a little bit of comfort also that down the road, you're not suddenly being faced with heavy competition.
Yep.
from what is today actually your customer base.
Yep. Happy to do so, yeah. First of all, if you look at the technology of natural fiber equipment, compared to chemical fiber equipment, there is a different level of technology, and it is not now nothing pointing towards natural fiber. Even if I look now at our portfolio, we have the spinning lines, and these are the big installations which you have seen on the pictures. To give you just an idea, such a winder has a chuck length of 1.8 meter. On that chuck, you have 12 bobbins. Each bobbin, if it's full, has a weight of 15 kilo. You are winding the yarn here at speeds of 300 km an hour. By the end of the day, the target here is each of the 12 bobbins must have exactly the same quality.
Each of the 12 bobbins must have exactly the same amount of yarn on that bobbin. It's not only the 12 bobbins on one winder, there are 1,000 winders in one factory. This, for a non-technician to have 300 km per hour, 12 bobbins on one winder, it's a real challenge, and that is really high tech. Vibration is a topic here. Bobbin formation is a topic here at that high speed. If the bobbin formation is not good enough, then in the downstream process, you are losing 20% efficiency. These are defects in the bobbin, which sometimes you cannot even see optically. Yeah. Therefore, the entry barrier in that technology is much, much higher than it's for cotton spinning, and it's also much higher. Now we take an example from our side.
We also do have our DTY machines, texturing machines, where you take the spun yarn from a spinning line and convert it into a textured yarn, into a crimped yarn, which then really feels like cotton. This texturing technology is also very mature. That's the reason why since 10 years, we are building these machines in China only. Because for these machines, yes, the Chinese competitors are very close to us. Here, the difference on technology is not big enough that you can justify to make such a machine in Europe. On the spinning, the entry barrier is much higher. It's a much higher level of technology. There are even state-owned companies in China.
Two of our competitors on the winders are state-owned companies, and since 20 years, they do not come close to us. We even last year took two of their winders. We made a defect analysis on it. To be very frank, they are able to make one good winder. They are able to make 10 good winders, but they are not able to make 500 good winders. To put one good winder in the showroom, yes. Really to have 500, because here then operational excellence and design know-how, everything kicks in to make 1,000 winder, one as good as the other. Here I still see we could maintain the entry barrier. At the moment I would even see this from China perspective.
Our two competitors in the chemical fiber industry create altogether 400-500 jobs. This is of no strategic interest for China. Strategic interest of China is protecting jobs in the textile industry at our customer sites. Here we are talking about 10,000 jobs. China at the moment has a war of talents. They want to have young engineers for the aerospace industry. They want to have young engineers for the car industry. If they have now 500 engineers building winders, yes or no, they want to make sure that we still can supply to them. If they would be afraid that there would be a certain trade barrier and they couldn't get winders either as Japan, from USA, from Switzerland or Germany, they would have a problem.
As long as they have the feeling they will get the winders, they have also no motivation to push their local suppliers into that industry.
Andy Schnyder, zCapital . I have an add-on question on the margin 16%-17% and 16% already for this year. According to the presentation, the higher margin also comes from the expansion in non-filament. I expect that non-filament business has higher margins. We know that INglass certainly has, and this is growing faster. Why is there only such a little bit of margin expansion from 16% today to 16%-17% midterm, when these more profitable businesses should grow faster than the rest?
Okay. Let's say, first of all, I believe for the man-made fiber business, the EBIT margin is even better indicator than the EBITDA margin. There would be easy way to create, to increase EBITDA margin by being more capital intensive. With a 12% EBIT margin in that chemical fiber environment, I think we are far better than all of our competitors. Of course here then you also have natural barriers. As long as there are competitor out, you are not fully flexible on pricing . I think here to a certain degree, we reached a very profitable level.
To increase that level with the chemical fiber growing further on in the competitive environment where we are in, and also looking at the moment that also some of our customers at the moment are struggling to earn money due to supply chain issues, due to increased oil price. At least we see a certain limit here. So that indeed the further increase of profitability is then mainly related to the non-textile business. For the time being, this is only CHF 150 million out of CHF 1.5 billion, so it's only 10%. Of course, if we have further opportunities on inorganic growth, this might change. For the time being, with the overall leverage here, yeah, this is what we can see.
I would say for me, at least from the man-made fiber business, maintaining an EBIT level of 12%+ is already a challenge. We take it, and we are working on that. Compared to many competitors, in my opinion, it's not too bad.
Andy , let me also maybe one other component here. You don't have the same operating leverage that you have on the service side. Naturally, it's a project business and so on and so forth. I think very critical is also, especially on the non-filament side, we're making a lot of very targeted additional investments to continue to grow the company. We're not just letting that run. I think both on the R&D side, on the marketing and selling side and so on. There's just investments that we're making deliberately that are weighing maybe short-term more on the immediate profitability of that part of the business, but will drive growth. I think that's a conscious decision.
Does that mean that the INglass part still is operating at these high margins?
Yeah.
Probably a little bit lower because you're investing more and then the other non-filament businesses are operating at rather low margins at this point because you're investing so much in growth opportunities.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that we're investing so much. Maybe first of all, it's a good point. The INglass acquisition is performing actually ahead of our expectations, both in terms of top line and profitability. We are making the growth investments across the board to grow the non-filament space. I don't think at an you know over-dimensional level, but those growth investments are obviously coming today and driving growth in the future. You can already see that now, and you'll see that in the future. I think that's a healthy trade-off that we have at the moment.
The 16%-17% guidance is not really about the cycle, but it's about the mix. That would mean that we steadily climb over this five-year period as the mix gets better, more attractive, and probably should reach in a normal environment, the 70% towards the end.
I think so, yep.
Okay, perfect.
Great. If there are no further questions, then this concludes the Polymer Processing Solutions section. We will now make a coffee break and restart at 4:20 P.M. with Surface Solutions.
Welcome back for our third and final session today. Before I introduce Markus, I would just like to remind everybody that we have a flying dinner afterwards, where again, you can continue to have the conversations with our leadership team. Now I'd like to introduce Markus Tacke, CEO of Surface Solutions. Sorry, there's a mistake in my notes. He joined Oerlikon two years ago and previously was the CEO of Siemens Gamesa. Markus has over 25 years of leadership experience in the renewable energy and gas turbine industry, and is well recognized for his ability to reposition and develop the business. Markus, over to you.
Thanks a lot, Sara. It's a pleasure for me to present to you the Surface Solutions division. Before I do that, I maybe give a few words to myself. I just joined Oerlikon in October 2020, so it's a little bit more than a year now. Exciting time, and we've done a lot in the meantime. Also achieved a lot, so I'm happy to share that with you. What I bring to Oerlikon is certainly my experience of a number of management positions in Siemens, but much more important than that, what I bring is the customer's experience. The customer experience in terms of thin film running manufacturing operations around the world, it's all about the tools. Performance in manufacturing is all about the tools, and tools is all about the coatings on the tools, and this is what we do.
Really knowing how to optimize tools, how relevant a coating on the tool is, how you need to deal with the tool manufacturers that then come back to us, getting the right coating from Oerlikon, that is an experience I'm bringing. I'm happy to contribute that. The other one, I will come to that, why these two areas are so important a little bit later. The other one is the thermal spray business. No aircraft would fly if there would not be a thermal barrier coating on the blades and there were abradable coatings in the engine. That is also my background, is gas turbines. I've done a lot of business, gas turbines, steam turbines, all kinds of turbines you can think of, even wind turbines. They all have somewhere a coating in order to make them operate.
This experience I bring to Oerlikon to really get the market insight into our company. What is Surface Solutions all about? What do we do? I think it has been stated already quite well from Roland before. We are in your daily business. We are touching you every time. I'm sure the car you were driving here, if you were coming with the car, not with a bike, then you might have had the brake from outside, but if you were coming with the car, the piston pins in the car, you never see them. I'm sure you're never gonna see them if you're not really a technician and love to take cars apart. That had been coated with coatings from us in coating centers from us.
We are deep in the car, but we also can be outside of the car. We are part of your day-to-day experience, you just don't know. That is the trick of our business, and it goes really from oil production, where we do laser cladding technology to make the oil rigs working. We have the coatings and turbomachinery I mentioned already. The car we mentioned already. The aircraft engines I already mentioned. We are in space. We make rockets fly, so a lot of thermal barrier coatings in the rocket's engines. We do, and the last acquisition I come to that, is we even take care of luxury to make you good .
Not you look already great, but the stuff you wear, we make that even looking better with our coatings on luxury goods. It's a daily experience. Putting this in a nutshell, I see us, Surface Solutions, as an enabling organization. We enable our customers to make their products even better. We are not really seen, but we are always core in the product, enabling our customers to be better. Roland has mentioned it already before, normally our value contribution to the overall product is rather small, giving us a unique opportunity to also earn decent margin on these small volumes, because normally procurement organizations look at the big procurement items, not in the nitty-gritty pieces that we are contributing.
I don't wanna call it a niche business, because that's too much of importance. We are simply too important. Our technology contributions to those products are simply important. To give you a better feel for what it really means, I think it has been said, how to do more with less. You see it on the next page, the example with drilling holes. A typical standard drill you probably buy in the markets for non-professionals does about 30 holes, then the drill is broken. A typical titanium nitride coating you get on the market does about 2000 holes. Big improvement already. We bring coatings that the drill still works above 5000 holes with the BALINIT PERTURA coating.
Really, we do more with less. The weight you save on materials to produce those drills is equal to two bowling balls. It's really a significant contribution to material savings. We do more with less. I mean, the other examples, efficiency you have seen already, but also range extension in e-mobility. Always a discussion, how much mileage do I get from my battery? If you go lightweight with the parts in the car, where we do the molds as well as the coatings of the parts together with the hot runners from what Georg just presented, this is really we do more with less. We provide and durability and efficiency to the products of our customers. Rather simple looking at that, but very essential.
Looking at the next slide, how does the business look that it has been created out of these opportunities out of this market? Number one, mentioned already, around the market, we are the only one to combine those capabilities in one company. Around CHF 1.3 billion sales, 18% EBITDA in 2021 and 7,250 employees. We go with three product lines to the market, very focused, three product lines offerings to the market. Important to note is we are well diversified in terms of geography as well as industry. We kind of giving us a resilience in our operational model, well diversified. Looking at our customers, over 30,000 customers around the world.
Ticket sizes from customers can be a few hundred Swiss-francs, so a rather small one. The operating shop next door that just gets some drills coated, still good margins on it. It goes in our larger volumes, but our larger customers. Very essential when we look at our customers, we basically serve the top OEMs from the industry. Going through the tooling industry, the automotive industry, aviation, power generation are on our customer list. Just to give you a few names, it's VW, Toyota, Tesla, our customers. GE and Siemens as power generation. Kennametal, Ceratizit, that's tooling. Louis Vuitton, Hermès, customers from us. Applied Materials and Lam Research out of semicon industry. The top names are relying on technologies coming from Surface Solutions from Oerlikon.
The market we are looking at, traditionally, we look at how you see it here on tooling and automotive, on the Asian space and energy. What we do is we grow faster. We have grown in the past and also going forward, we are growing faster in these markets because we are providing in the mainstreams of this market, key enabling technology, what I just described. We are helping our customers to sell better. They be getting good, our fair return from that one. For that reason, we have the capability to grow faster in our markets than the overall markets growing, given those enabling technology. How we do that? The two levers we are working on is transformation, working with good customer proximity and the technology push.
We go through by market, what do we do? For instance, in tooling, we bring in the next coating. In automotive, we are taking benefit from the electric vehicles that come into the market. In aviation, we have an overproportional exposure to single aisle aircraft, which are now recovering much faster than the wide body aircraft that go to transatlantic, do the transatlantic business. We see here good prospects to grow faster than our traditional markets. However, we want to do more than just grow faster than our traditional markets. We've looked at our strategy, what other markets are out there, what are future opportunities to secure that future growth. We selected five strategic markets that we also need to address to broaden and diversify into future growth markets. They are not surprising you probably.
They are well known, and they have different levels of maturity. On the very left side, we are investing in battery technology and technology around the battery. You probably have heard about our thermal insulation systems. That is to make the e-car even more safe than are today. You, I'm sure you heard about thermal runaways from e-cars. That's a technical feature. They happen to burn once in a while. Then you need to have the right time, to get out of the car, not to make a hazard out of it. We are providing technology, give you five minutes, sometimes even more, to take yourself, whatever you have in the car, out of this car. This technology we are providing, and it is driven by legislation coming up in Europe and being pushed actually in China, legislation that passengers have that time.
We're investing, and we are growing with that opportunity significantly out of that. At the same time, we are not going only for safety and secure technology on e-mobility, but we are also on the R&D scale yet investing into next generation lithium solid-state battery technology. We are working on upcoming technology to participate in the 4th generation on solid-state batteries. That's something still in the labs today but will be in the market of three and four years to come, really take momentum out of that growth opportunities. That's a strategic push. Hydrogen, big topic. I still see hydrogen as a fuel, especially for heavy trucks. Trucks, the payload is essential, so you don't wanna use that for batteries to carry, but for payload to carry.
Hydrogen, there's an opportunity there, but hydrogen also in power generation is always a topic, huge opportunity. Somewhat more mature than what I just said about batteries. We are participating but already today doing coatings for the bipolar plates used in fuel cells as well as in electrolyzing equipment. We are working in our R&D efforts in order to create lifetime for those electrolyzers as well as fuel cells. You all know lifetime is a limiting factor here. Doubling lifetime seems possible. The technology we have, we're working on that. I come to that in a minute later. More a question of focus are the two next markets, semicon and medical.
Surface Solutions has been in these markets for quite some time. These are growth markets, not only because of current shortages in the semiconductor that we all see in the market, but also because of long-term trends. Semiconductors will be more and more in our daily lives. An EV car has multiple number of integrated circuits in the car compared to an IC car. There is a growing demand. The cyclicity of semicon market that we always seen in the past either will go away. Simply, there's a push for more electronics in the equipment that is around us. We're investing with that. We're enabling basically the manufacturing industry in order to grow there.
We have their strategic push in order to use our PVD capability and thermal spray capabilities in that market. Medical, obviously, with an aging population, health on the agenda of about everyone from us, that is a key market for Class I, Class II medical applications. Robotics in medical requires coatings that are also antiseptical. There's a number of opportunities we are pushing there. The recent push into new markets is luxury. That's a market that always had been there. It's a rather stable, uncyclic market, given a crisis or not a crisis, it seems the market continues to grow well and grows nicely. The recent acquisition of Coeurdor also opens us really a new market where we had not been before.
Going on the next page, we have put this in a number of growth levers. We are in your daily life with our technology. We have in the traditional market with the capabilities we have, we grow faster than the market, and we have defined strategic new markets to give us additional push in those markets. Putting this all together, we have, of course, the question is how to address this. I've worked around four pillars, and the most relevant pillar I'm also touched before is regional expansion. Regional expansion, I expect 20% sales uplift simply by going from a central organization into a regional organization.
The second one, giving out about a 10% sales uplift, is using our technologies in broadly in our markets, getting better market penetrations by using these technologies in the markets I've just mentioned. Number three is we continuously work on portfolio optimization. On the one side, reducing portfolio on the lesser margin line items. At the same time, adding portfolio either by R&D efforts or by M&A, and certainly stressed by Phil before, cost stewardship, making sure our fixed cost, but also our flexible costs, variable costs are well under control, is a key element, seeing an uplift in total of around 300 basis points going forward, giving us altogether a profitable growth of 4%-6% midterm over the years to come. Let's now spend the next 10 minutes or so going through these items.
What does it really mean? How do we operationalize those four levers that we push in the markets? Let's start with the sales upside of 20% I've just mentioned going into the market. We have a very strong foothold in Europe. We are undisputed number one in our technologies in Europe. Americas is a clear path for growth. Biggest opportunity out in Americas, looking at the penetration in America, it's a technology market, it's an industrial, highly industrialized country. Looking at the penetration, if you compare to Europe, there's a significant opportunity out there. We don't need to invent something new. We just need to go there and do what we have done well, copy that to U.S. and do it fast and efficient going in that market.
Asia always had been a growth market. Asia, I think we are in terms of penetration, well-positioned. Still, there's more room to go. Do we do this, one solution serves all markets equally? No, we go very specific. In Europe, we go for clean tech and luxury, we just mentioned. These markets are really giving us growth potential in Europe. In America, we see the push for aviation, absolutely aerospace aviation. We are in with the large, rocket manufacturers. We are in delivering our solutions, aviation, aerospace. At the same time, of course, semiconductor. U.S. is pulling back some of the semiconductor into the U.S. that we can take a benefit from this. In APAC, it's a lot about e-mobility.
There's a big push on e-mobility, especially in China, but also semiconductors in Korea, Japan. These are the opportunities we have there. We have a specific kind of approach to those markets using the market penetration as they are as a growth opportunity for all of us. How do we do this practically? We have turned for that one, and you see that on the next slide, the organization by 90 degrees. We have now. The question had been here before, how does it work with the regions? Do we have now responsible in the regions? Yes, we have 11 key countries that are the P&L owners. They take decisions very close to their customer base, seeing the needs of their customers. It allows speed and customer proximity and one face to the customer.
These 11 countries are grouped then into the three regions that hold the P&L. On top of that, we have what we call the horizontals. It's a Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Technology Officer and the Chief Operational Officer to make sure you're not creating three regions that try to act independently, and create some kind of a silo out of it. We're clearly optimizing across the regions by market, go-to-market with the products, go by our technology portfolio. It's one technology portfolio and by our operational excellence. One face to the customer is important, but also equally, if you wanna accelerate, we need to give people responsibility and ownership. We want to have entrepreneurs as the country presidents. That already we've seen it. We are now in one quarter in the organization.
One quarter into that organization, we've seen that really the momentum picking up. If you're not kind of managed from abroad, if you are responsible for your own destiny, that is a good motivation for all of us to act faster and exactly not only faster, but really smarter. Having touched that one, it is a kind of windfall out of this new organization, cross-selling our portfolio. In the past, we were going in by a number of product and business lines into the countries, and they were suddenly meeting in front of the customer. Here comes Mr. Metco, here comes Mrs. Balzers, here comes also somebody from additive manufacturing. All try to convince the customer what would be a good thing to buy. In the future, the organization, as I said, it's a windfall of new organization.
Suddenly, our salespeople go there. We have this, and this, and that. We actually combine it into solutions for you and solutions for you that give you more than the simple product we have. It's a windfall out of that. Going regional, it's not only giving an entrepreneurship and speed, but also integrated selling our portfolio to our customers. Let's make an example that we actually have integrated solutions on the mold business. We have the hot runner, we have the coating, and we actually are able to coat the part afterwards, metallizing plastic parts, if you've seen it in front of the door. This is suddenly sold by one person selling solutions and not by three persons going independently to the customers.
On the next page, going from the push for regionalization into technology space. Before going in technology space, I want to remind you, we are the clearly undisputed number one in our tools business based on our strong expertise in plasma vapor deposition, PVD coatings. We are the one player in the market giving the best solutions, the best technology, to our customers in terms of tools. We're working on next generation coatings, but at the same time, having a great coating, you still need a great performing organization because the coating as such will not give you the good business. It's the speed and the coating. This is the value proposition we bring to our customers.
The turnaround time for their tools, plus a good coating, which is a little bit better than what the competition is doing, really allows you to create very, very attractive markets in this very important business for all of us, and it is cutting tools and forming tools. We are using these capabilities in order to expand that into precision components that are also PVD coated, as we have the installed base, basically from the tooling market. We are using these capabilities to go also in the PVD market, but we are leveraging our very strong market position about the tools, the cutting and forming tools business. Globally, we are double the size as our next competitor. That is the strong position we're having, and we are certainly able to defend.
Going from the tools business, and the sheer size we have, that gives us, talking about technology, an unparalleled capability to innovate. By sheer size, we can spend double the amount of R&D into technology and into solutions than our next competitor. We do this not only for the tools business I've just mentioned, but across the board. We're investing basically in three core technologies. That is why in the beginning it looks complex. We are about everywhere. If you then drill it down and to start to focus it, we are basically working on three core technologies, and there we focus R&D efforts on there with a significant amount of money, about 5% of our annual revenue we spend on R&D, new products, new solutions and very innovative solutions. I've mentioned the efforts we're doing in batteries.
We work on next generation coaters. The total cost of ownership, 15% down. We work on spray gun development materials for the thermal spray business. In the AM business, it's all about process capabilities. We're working on being the best one, having the process stable and reliable, so the first part that is printed looks like the hundredth part that is printed and looks like the thousandth part that is printed. It's process stability, and that opens us unique opportunities in that market. In the end, it's three core technologies. It's five routes to market with applications that gives us this broad spectrum addressing such a wide market and out of that, a competitive advantage. Going from there. The beauty of having those three capabilities, core capabilities, now we can start to combine them.
We combine these capabilities, so for instance, we print a part, a precision component part, and then we coat the part. We are the only company that has these capabilities under one roof, can combine it, and can give the customer a ready-to-use part for their production, for their continuous process. For instance, the bike you've seen out there, you will not believe that some of the elements in the frame are printed by additive manufacturing. Then they're combined into this nice frame. The printing gives unique capabilities to the designers to create the shape. Then the whole thing is coated with actually thin film coating derived from the aerospace industry. Why is the frame coated? It's a gravel bike.
You run through a lot of gravel, the rocks hit your bike, and you get all these dents. You for sure, everybody who has a bike sees the dents in the color because your bike is not coated with Oerlikon thin film coatings. They wouldn't see the dents. The coating is significantly harder than the little gravel piece that hits your bike. There we combine technology solutions into one offering and then enable our customers to give better solutions to their market. Another example, maybe a little bit far-fetched, still out there being developed. The one is real. You can actually buy the bike in a store. Taking the last example, combustion heat shields. The cooling patterns getting more complex day by day in order to allow higher efficiencies.
These cooling patterns for the cooling holes in the heat shields cannot be produced anymore by conventional methods like machining or drilling, things like this. These parts need to be printed. We print these parts, we machine those parts, precision components, and then we coat the parts either with thermal spray, thermal barrier coatings, and actually sometimes even thin film where there are contact points to harden the contact points for longer durability. We are the company that can basically out of three core technologies, three core competencies, combine these in offerings that gives ready-to-use solutions to our customers. Now on the next slide, I would spend kind of a few minutes on five technologies that are really of strategic high relevance, of strategic importance for all of us.
I've mentioned, I think all of them, but spending a little bit of a few minutes on a deep dive on those components, I feel it's quite relevant. First one, additive manufacturing. It's a key enabling technology, and I'm continuously surprised still after one and a half years. It is such a door opener to talk about customers. When we come to customers, they want to know about coatings, they want to know machining, they want to know a bit about this and that, but then if you start additive manufacturing, they recognize they talk to a technology company that has leading-edge capabilities that will play a major role in the future parts that are in our equipment that we are using. It's a key customer enabler. It's a future technology.
Oerlikon has invested quite early into that technology, and there at that time, there was still some hype around that technology in the market. There's huge investment into the market. We've seen that all, and we have some of that, we're struggling with that. In the meantime, the whole market has moved away from the prototyping, that was it five years ago, into small series production. Small series production out of three reasons, either functionality which cannot be produced by different means. The second one would be weight reductions. Producing equipment in a form and shape where significant weight reductions can be achieved, especially for aircraft and space applications. The third one is time to market.
There's three good reasons why there is no way around additive manufacturing, and this is just lifting off. We see in the order entry, from last year, we have a very good backlog from last year. It's lifting off. The orders are coming in. We see in that market a CAGR around 25%, so there's a great opportunity, still small, but great opportunity to grow very, very fast. In order to make that also efficient, we have invested in three key applications, which is satellite components, the weight topic in rocket engines and rotating parts. Really three key applications. There we focus on making sure we are the best on the market, combining our printing expertise, our materials capabilities, our post-processing capabilities, as well as our surface technologies or, coating capabilities. Now about the profitability of this industry.
There's always a rumor in the market, how profitable is this? We've seen a lot of discussions around this. With the path forward, we have clearly set ourselves the path that by 2025 it will be a CHF 50 million-plus business which has been turned around in that time. Given the backlog we have now, given the promises we see in the market, giving the small series industry that is just picking up, Oerlikon has spent the last five years very well to position itself at that spot that we participate right from the beginning and don't need to start invest now because investments and of course the respective depreciations that come with investments have been done. It is big, great opportunity, important for us being a technology company. Next slide. Not to forget, e-mobility. A key one.
There's a big discussion in the market about e-mobility. Is it a threat or an opportunity for Surface Solutions? Clearly, it's an opportunity. We see so many opportunities to go into e-mobility, which is a growing industry, and we have positioned ourself quite well when this is picking up. I talked already about the e-mobility part with regard to batteries, thermal insulation systems, and also fuel cells. That's a growth opportunity. We are positioned in that. We are growing with that industry. At the same time, we may not forget the powertrain. The powertrain in e-cars has significantly more coated parts than an ICE car has. For instance, the shafts in the differentials need to be coated because of the higher torque an e-motor has compared to a combustion engine.
Suddenly we see coated parts in the car that had not been coated before. A different part, so-called e-gears. Electric motors of next generation have very fast speeds, 30,000 above RPMs. That gives a lot of noise in the gearboxes. To solve that noise problem, you start to coat the gears in the gearbox. This is opportunities for precision components, where we have created a growth momentum around giving us opportunities. With our DLC coatings we have developed, we are perfectly situated together with the leading car manufacturers in the e-car business in order, you know, to take benefit from that growth momentum. Finally, the vehicle body. I talked about rex, right, range extension. Georg was mentioning the opportunities we have out of the forming tool business.
Together with OPP, we deliver the two core technologies in the forming business. That is number one, the coating, which has decisive impact if the part will be good or bad, if it will be transparent or not transparent, and the hot runner. We deliver together the key elements for those industries which will give more. You saw the rear door in one of the pictures. Today, it's out of metal. In the future, it will be a composite or even a polymer part, and we are providing the tools, the coatings, and the hot runners for that. There's opportunity in the e-mobility market, and we have taken the last month and years in order to position us well in that one. Next one. I've talked much about this.
I still want to spend a few minutes on batteries. Why is this such an exciting story? I mean, batteries, we talk about gigafactories that are invested today. That is not where we're engaging ourself. That's the play of somebody else. We are engaging ourself in the solid-state battery, as there's a strong belief in the industry and a strong belief with us there will be a solid-state battery. It will be lithium-based and PVD, lithium PVD can be a key enabling technology in order to produce those batteries that deliver more capacity per weight and charge faster charging times. That is why the industry is so excited about this. We, on lab scale, currently do lithium PVD in examples where we would be able to coat the anodes on those batteries with our technology.
The market opportunities, around 300 coaters, would be a market potential as can be expected today. We are only at the beginning of e-mobility, so huge opportunity for services as well as for equipment. The size, just for the fun of it, if you calculated the size of coating you need to produce, is 10 times the area of Paris. There's really a lot to do. It requires a lot of coatings, relies on lots of technology. We are getting just into the shoes to start and run with the industry to be, again, not the battery manufacturers, but being the enabler of key technology that is essential to make these batteries cost efficient. The second one, hydrogen economy, also a key part.
We are now working on technologies to give 15,000 hour lifetime to the bipolar plates. If those components come into the market, they are today not with 15,000 hours. If they come even in higher volume to the market, people expect longer lifetimes on those equipments. We are working on these technologies. For that, we have a company in California called Scoperta. It has a patented technology we call the RAD technology. We use AI, artificial intelligence, to do rapid alloy development on those coatings that gives us a head start. In the past, we have done it in the lab, doing test by test. In the future, we do basically AI-based development and then just do the very promising material combinations we do then in the lab to check them.
Going from the exciting stuff on the next page to the next core levers, that is, I've talked a lot about integrated circuits, semiconductors. It's a growing market. It's a booming market, not only because of current shortages. We have decided to participate even stronger in that market. I have been asked in the break what actually we do there. We don't coat the chips. We, again, are an enabling part of it. We are essential to coat the etching chambers where the wafers, those big pancakes, you know, quite often seen on pictures. They're moved into the machine. They're etched. The etching process to create really these integrated circuits are happening in these chambers, and then they're moved out again.
This is a very aggressive environment, and we do the coatings of these equipment. These the equipment with holes, the various assets you need to apply in order to the etching on these machines. Going ahead, the 10 nanometer, the sub-10 nanometer IC technology is around. We're working on solutions. The solution is called Sapphire. It's in the prototype, not in the prototype. Actually, we are doing the sampling right now with key customers like Lam. I've mentioned we do the sampling right now to allow this technology to go even faster and allow larger wafers to go to the sub-10 nanometer technology. Again, we are enabling this technology. Exciting things to come.
On the next one, I think next page, I think I touched already the luxury industry. What is important, stable market, very attractive market, and again, here we are a technology provider. The luxury industry, to a large extent, has been based. Almost everything has been based on electroplating. That's again chemicals, not always fully sustainable. We are bringing in PVD technology. We're basically replacing electrochemical process with a PVD process. Gives better surface quality. Gives surfaces of higher density, means higher quality, higher durability. You want your surface to stay on your leather goods. We are kind of helping this industry to go within with technology to give a better quality product, but also a product of higher sustainability and a growth market.
It's a growth market that delivers nice margins because the willingness to spend on these kind of accessories is amazingly. You just need to walk the streets here and see what such a bag costs. Obviously, unfortunately, the margins are with those companies, but it's a good business also for us to go into that one. Having talked about these strategic technologies that are behind that, we, on the next page, are not forgetting to really work on our portfolio optimization. We are working on our portfolio optimization in terms of leaning out our portfolio line items that have low demand, that don't have the right profitability, that create complexity in our system, which is not justified. We are sorting them out.
You see here an example of stock keeping units out of the material business. Without reducing the materials business as such, revenue basically has been unchanged. We were significantly, kind of 30%, reducing our line items in that business. That takes complexity out. You don't need to look at R&D. You don't need to maintain material sheets. This is a significant cost introduction. Just an example, but we're working across the organization on making sure our operations and our portfolio we need to take care of is well-maintained, and we look at that in an ongoing way. That is true for materials, but also for coatings. We phase out coatings while we phase in, of course, coatings on the other side. Not forget, portfolio is on the one side, the portfolio we have.
There's an inflow and an outflow we need to manage well in order to manage our complexity and our cost structure. At the same time, we continuously look, of course, for smaller bolt-on acquisitions that are accretive to our business. Talking about the luxury, I see the Coeurdor acquisition we have done as a first acquisition. That is an industry, the metalware, luxury metalware. That is a market that is in consolidation. Maybe Oerlikon even triggered some kind of momentum in that market for that consolidation. We are building a platform in into that market to be clearly, as I've said before by the chairman, we want to be a number one and number two in our markets to building our market volumes there to participate even stronger in that industry.
Having said that, it was all about top line. Now let's look also at the bottom line. Of course, the bottom line, talking about the growth momentum, 4%-6%, we may not omit to look at our bottom line, and we have a clear-cut plan in place to make sure profitability is increasing. You see that our EBITDA in 2021 had been above 2019, where the volume as such had been lower than 2019, the sales, the revenue. That's a very strong indicator that managing fixed cost has been done quite well in the last two years. Of course, we are on that track record to continue that one. There are three contributors to that one. It's operational excellence. I've mentioned that we're going through our factories, simplifying, leaning them out, automating our factories.
There's a significant potential is still in there. We're working on our overhead structure and finally digitalization. We are still there. For me, there's still too much paper in our companies. There's too little data interfaces we are working, we are having. Those three elements, if you add them up, operational excellence, overhead cost reduction, and digitalization together, it adds kind of 300 basis points to the bottom line, giving the targeted 20%-22% EBITDA midterm target we're working on. Talking about this one, I should not forget to mention the CapEx. With all that growth, of course, we need to manage our investments.
Currently, we are investing below depreciation rates, because coming out of COVID, Surface Solutions had been at 2019, around a little bit above CHF 1.5 billion. Thus there's room to grow in our installed base, creating larger volumes out of the existing installed base. The CapEx we are doing is really targeted at new technologies, like S3p or DLC coatings, where we need to bring new technologies into the markets. It's not a need for volume CapEx, growth CapEx. It's really the need for technology CapEx that allows us right now, rather low compared to depreciation rate, allow rather low spending on CapEx. Of course, seeing the growth rates and the technology opportunities out there, we see ourself also growing towards more getting closer to depreciation rate.
Right now, it helps us certainly to have very positive cash conversion in the overall business like you've seen in the 2020 numbers. In order to wrap that all up, we are the market leader in Surface Solutions based on three core competencies, and we will continue to be so, expanding those core competencies into markets that are not our traditional markets, that are clearly future markets where we're going after, like battery, like hydrogen, luxuries, and I've mentioned them. There's a significant upside potential out of an accelerated regional expansion. Simply, not going from a central perspective, but giving entrepreneurship into the regions, into countries will accelerate our growth in the regions where our penetration rate is lower. We will continue to do so. We see the first successes already out of the last couple of months.
There's an upside where we can upscale our technology, pushing our technology into markets where we have not been so strong in the past. Like we have proven in the tooling business, we can be a number one, we can be a very profitable one, number one in the tooling business. There's no reason why we cannot scale that and repeat that in other markets. All in all, it gives a very good upside on the profitability. In a nutshell, we have a clear growth plan going 4%-6% growth CAGR year over year on average. You know that we have grown last year a little bit faster. Maybe this year also, we grow a little bit faster giving our guidance. But I think that is also a recovery from the COVID time.
Clearly directions going towards 20%-20% EBITDA, supported by a credible and worked out plan that is currently being executed. Thank you very much. Over to your questions.
Thank you, Markus, for the presentation. We are now ready to take questions. For investors participating via phone, please dial the number shown in the webcast and press star and one. We will now start again with questions in the room. Please first introduce yourself and the institute you are representing.
Hi, I'm Andy Schnyder, zCapital. I would have a question on the geographical expansion. I can see that the new organizational structure and this entrepreneurship you mentioned might give a push, but I think that will not do the job alone to get to this 20% more sales, and especially 70% in Americas. I can see that on the West Coast, there is a lot of blank space. How much of this growth do you expect from the expansion into new regions and hence CapEx, and how much is coming from the new organizational structure and some cross-selling, as you mentioned before?
You're right. Certainly giving entrepreneurship and ownership into a region, more needs to come. I think Phil has touched on before already on the topic, how do we do capital allocation? Clearly, the capital we spend, we invest in strategic markets like the Americas. The silicon industry has been positioned there right now. We have the space industry, and it's not on the East Coast, more on the West. We opened just a new coating center in the West. We could also going towards the South. There's opportunities out of the aircraft industry. In the past, we have been very much focused more on the Northeast, following the automotive industry. There's opportunities in other industries like the ones I've mentioned.
There we clearly focus on specific industries which will trigger CapEx on those areas. Or let's say sites that would need to be opened there to be close to our customers. It's a clear demand from our customers for faster turnaround times to have our shops close by. We either need to invest into new equipment for technology reasons or what we also do in a very efficient way, but also since many years, is relocate equipment from sites that have not that high demand to sites where we have the strong demand. It's a mixture of CapEx and relocation of assets that we have in order to allow that growth.
Andy, I think we've talked about this a couple times. It goes back a little bit to the concept of capital allocation that we showed and the zero-based budgeting. I think historically, what you would have done is, in an established business that's already relatively sizable, they would have said, "Last year, I invested CHF 100. Next year, I wanna invest ±5%." We've really changed that. In our example, one of our best businesses, most profitable businesses, the cutting tools business in Germany, is very well established, is running like a well-oiled machine.
It is big, but doesn't need a lot of growth CapEx anymore because we already capture a very, very sizable part of the market. The whole intention is then to maybe the overall CapEx envelope is unchanged, but a lot more of that capital is going to those growth areas. I think that doesn't work always perfectly, right? We're not magicians, but that's really the concept behind it. I think we have an opportunity to really optimize it that way.
Thanks. Is it fair to say that most of the 20% on geographic expansion is in fact geographical expansion, going to new places, targeting new industries, new places where you haven't been before. Of course, the new organizational structure and this entrepreneurship is good and will help too. The biggest part of this 20% is really expansion into new fields and regions and industries.
Looking at the situation, the specific situation in the U.S., the growth in the U.S. was not satisfactory over the last periods. Given the current assets will change the situation. I think the decision actually taken before I was coming to go into regional organization will help to drive that. On top of that is exactly what you said, we need to go after other customer structures and expand in following their site developments. You see the semiconductor industry now putting up shops in the U.S. We will certainly follow those because what I've mentioned, what we do in semicon, it's a service business.
We need to be close to their operations in order to do these coatings on their equipment. It's a service business. Those coatings were of course also giving the very aggressive environment they are in. We need to be close, that we will follow. It's a mixture of grabbing more from the market that we already have, plus expanding with new sites towards, as you rightfully said, towards the West.
Yes. Michael Foeth, Vontobel . I've two questions. Just one follow-up on Andy's question. I mean, being present and close to the customer, I guess is not just the only argument of winning the business, especially in semiconductors. On what arguments really are you going to displace the existing players which are operating there today? If there are already established players? That would be the first question. And the second question is a bit more general. I mean, you talked about a lot of different applications and many of them are PVD.
My question is really the coatings that you are using across all these applications and the processes that you are using across these applications, are they really similar, or do you have to make new developments of different coating materials and specific processes for every applications you're going into?
First question was, how do we differ in terms of semiconductor and how we displace others that are already in? Semiconductor as such is growing rapidly. We have one site in the U.S. totally focusing on semiconductor that has basically doubled the volume in the last year. There is a significant pull out of that market for those coatings. As I said, it's a combination out of having a superior coating to your competitor, but it will not always only do the trick, but also fast turnaround times. Everybody is focusing on assets, on stock being reduced. Having fast turn and reliable turnaround times, it's essential. You need to deliver to promise. This momentum I'm sure we will create with ownership as close as possible to the customer.
Questions that might arise can be solved locally, and you don't need to go back to Switzerland and to ask somebody because you have at least two or three days until the time shift and all this. It's a superior coating, but equally important, it's a reliability and short turnaround time, times in the service business that gives you the job.
Markus, sorry for stepping in. There is another dimension, Michael. There is a shift in technology. The core elements of these equipment, the etching chambers, are today coated with thermal with metal.
Today, thermal spray.
Thermal spray coatings. Here there is a clear roadmap going for PVD coatings because the level of cleanness and the level of disturbing materials in these etching chambers is going down. That's why the entire landscape of companies being in that business are moving towards PVD, and here we are. This is our home turf, right?
To add on this one, give example. In addition to that one is those wafers go very fast over the e-chucks. That's how the piece is called. Today, it's a solid surface, just as a flat surface. In the future, it will be little dots only, to allow less friction, to allow faster speeds. These dots can only be produced by PVD and not by thermal spray. It's going there and we are developing proprietary technology. We are the only ones who will be able to produce an e-chuck with those little dots.
In order to allow faster processing of this. We're providing actually technology that's differentiates us in the market in order to gain and win that market.
Michael, to your second question, I think or also the first part, being present alone obviously isn't enough. Remember the starting point that Markus described here is that oftentimes we're serving the same type of customer and the same type of application already in Europe. We differentiate by superior technology and speed and cycle time. I think bringing that then to new markets and to applications which we're already serving, sometimes you need a little bit of an iteration to that. Especially when we're talking about precision components, is a huge opportunity and there's a lot of congruency because between what we're already doing in a market like Germany and what we can do in the United States.
Hi, Tobias Schulte, UBS. An additional question on that. I think you opened more coating centers in Asia and in China especially, and I have been always in the discussion we had in my mind that region was more profitable for you. I was wondering now to change to the, first of all, why U.S. has been in the past maybe a little bit not taking so much into consideration in your expansion plans. Secondly, don't we go into a risk that region is less profitable when you are opening here the coating center? Or is that what you just described now is this new, let's say, coating opportunity for semiconductors offering also on the margin side some interesting potential?
A little bit goes into what Tobias just said. Going in the regions allows us to. We have these horizontals. We have certainly the applications will not differ by regions, so the applications will be equal. We make sure that we have around a world of around 1,000 applications for various products, and we copy-paste them into regions. We make sure we use the same technology. What is different in the regions is certainly the pricing. There's some regions with very aggressive pricing. For instance, Germany for tools is one of the more aggressive markets. Other markets allow higher margins, depends on the market.
When you look at the differences between regions, you need to look also at the competitive pressure we have in the regions. I don't see that the margins should deteriorate by going in the region. Just the opposite, as going faster, we will grow more business. More business will be more, a better fixed cost assumption.
That's what I would've said, Tobias. You know, you are absolutely right. In a market like China, our pricing is highly advantageous. However, the pricing in a market like the U.S. is still, and our contribution margins are still very, very strong. The fact that the volume leverage, the operating leverage we generate far outweighs this relatively small pricing differential, and so it's still very accretive to grow there.
Maybe I can add a little bit to this, because you asked, though, was U.S. not in the right focus in the last years, something like that. Yes, it was not in the right focus. We had the right focus on Europe. We had a pretty good focus on Asia. U.S. was mainly dominated by the drives business. We had CHF 350 million-CHF 400 million drives, plus another CHF 220 million-CHF 250 million, so we made CHF 700 million-CHF 800 million revenue in U.S. Looked everything nice. You had your people there, but it was never, besides the Metco story, where you had the big U.S. players on the aerospace side. On the thin film side, it was underutilized. It's not a contradiction now to Asia. We will completely perform on our Asian path.
We simply add a much stronger focus on the U.S. with a U.S.-centric organization, where we want to utilize the service centers and PVD which we have there for the industries. One application is thin film in aerospace, which we have seen here with our European partners massive interest. There's the same interest from GE and from Pratt & Whitney, and going deeper into those stories, and there are a lot of other applications which we can do with PVD which we simply haven't touched. That's why it's a real additional opportunity for us. It's nothing to do that we are slowing down in Asia. We're not de-focusing Asia anymore. The profit pool, Asia is good. U.S. is good as well. As Markus was saying, the most competitive one for us is Germany.
That, on the other hand, is the pool where you always go for, let's say, better solutions and see if you can beat competition here. You can beat them everywhere.
Lothar Lubinetzki from Octavian. I have two questions. One is, you are selling to a whole variety of industries, from tooling to automotive to aviation. Can you help me to understand a little bit better your cyclicality? The first part of the question is, in terms of your customer base, what are you seeing today? Are there slowdowns, something like that?
The second question is, and I apologize if it's a too blunt question, but you were talking about a 300 basis points margin improvement by 2025, and I'm wondering how much of this is coming from additives?
Talking about the specific industry, that's more short-term question now. How do we see the industry? The industry overall is in a pretty robust situation. If you've seen quarter one was a good quarter given the overall situation. We basically see quarter two developing more or less in line with quarter one, maybe even a little bit ahead of that. There is ups and downs. Certainly, aerospace is recovering from low volumes that we have seen through COVID. Here, especially the single aisle customers that operate engines that are on single aisle planes. That in many countries has gone back to normal, more or less. In U.S., if you fly in the U.S., airports are full.
If you fly now, basically since late April, May in Europe, the airports are full. That is our key business for us for abradables and thermal barriers. That is key important business for us. It is coming back, and I'm really looking forward for now the summer. What I hear from the airlines, they have increased bookings. That means increased flight hours. That means increased sales for us. Automotive, there is huge demand out of automotive right now. It's more supply topic. You've seen a number of, and I don't need to repeat it here, I'm probably, you're all aware of chips and cables and what you all have. We were planning with the uptake of the volumes in the second half of year.
Now we need to see how this develops, but it's too early to really have a judgment on this one. Based on those two industries, aerospace and automotive, looking at the tooling industry, looking at the precision components we are doing, looking at our materials business, looking at our equipment business, it's pretty solid. It's pretty solid going forward and it's a good outlook so far.
On the second part of your question, on the additive business. We're talking about 300 basis points to overall improvement, 50, 75 basis points, I think, from additive. We're not thinking about it that way. We're really thinking about it in those buckets that we described, operational excellence, overhead efficiency, portfolio optimization, digitization, and additive, just like other, any other, business within our portfolio has a contribution in that. I think you can kind of calculate from the chart that we showed you there, how much that's gonna be. Although that chart was gonna be until 2025 that we showed you on additive and the overall 300 basis points we talked about 2026 or medium term, but gives you an indication.
Thank you very much. Taking the question. Sorry for asking about a third layer of dimension. In the end, you're talking about regions and, of course, customer industries, but you're also producing or selling different products, so to say. It's machine and it's materials and it's services. Can you give us some kind of a share? Do you what how much it contributes to the entire sales? How much is machining? How much is selling of equipment? How much is materials and how much is services? What will be the main growth driver going forward and where do you have the highest profitability? Thank you.
I think starting with the last part of your question, the highest profitability we have in our service business. This is not a secret, right? We do see a certain regional pattern. We touched it already. I have to say, sorry, with, for all the rest in terms of disclosing in our material equipment share, this is nothing what we do and we don't want to do. We do see, I think we gave already an indication in our Q1 results. We said, "Look, we have been a little bit lower on the service side, but our equipment business, our material business was doing extremely well here." This is something what we normally summarize when we in a phrase, mix effects, right?
We would like to keep it like that.
Very, very important also a little bit to maybe the background of the question, there is a hugely synergetic effect between those different businesses. You cannot run a thermal spray service business without the material knowledge that we have from our materials business, or at least you can't run it that well. You can't be a PVD service leader without the leading technology that we have on the equipment side and so on. We really think those all go hand in hand. That's the reason why we're number one in all those markets. Differentiating between them, they have different growth patterns and different profitability patterns and so on to an extent, but they're the reason why we have the leadership position.
Maybe a comment on this topic, Metco and Balzers. Once the acquisition of Metco some time ago was announced, I would say there was quite a bit of excitement about what you could do with combining these two businesses. In my personal view, I don't know if I'm completely right or having the same view as you, but all this opportunity maybe didn't materialize as probably at the time were thought of. I was wondering how these synergies, are they still there? What didn't go maybe as thought at the beginning of the acquisition or already a long time ago? Not all of you were there at the time, but I was wondering, can you give here your feeling?
Are there possibilities that you combine these two ways of doing coating equipment that you combine it more to serve your clients from one hand?
I think goes exactly to what Markus described, right, on the slide. That's. I would say there were some strong synergies in the acquisition between thick film and thin film. I think the cross-selling may be not as intensive as we would have wished, and hence the regional organization one face to the customer.
I think it's a key differentiation we do now. In the past, it was going on as separate businesses. Sometimes they were even competing in front of customers. Should it be thermal spray or it should be thin film? The extreme is probably not today, the experience, but to take it to the extreme. Now we have the country president, and he or she needs to decide, how do I create the best value for the company? I have these technology brands that has been explained before that is now technology brands for us, Balzers, Metco, but not decisive anymore for any structure or go to market. It's technology brands.
Maybe an add-on. How well integrated are these two brands now in Oerlikon itself?
They're fully integrated now.
Do you mix the R&Ds? Do you have sales personnel which are potentially selling both brands?
Yeah.
Yeah.
With the regionalization, we have combined the sales teams of respective former business units. There's one sales organization that sells, let's say, coating for components. That's one of the business line you've seen. Coating services for components. If it's a thin film, a thermal spray, it's the same salesperson. If you go in deep technical discussion with the specialists from an aircraft engine manufacturer, you might need to meet or ask for a specialist that is specialized in one or the other. Certainly, the lead generation that is done in one organization independent if it's Balzers, Metco or additive manufacturing.
It creates a lot of new opportunities in front of the customers, because sitting with the customers, we have a customer that looks for additive parts, and while discussing with the customer, realize, "Oh, I have other parts that actually could be served with thin film coating, why don't we discuss?" This conversation today is windfall out of the organization which did not happen maybe to that much extent in the past.
Thanks. Yeah.
Should we do maybe one or two more?
Yeah.
One more.
I would have two more questions. First, a quick one on the margin. On what does it depend whether we reach the upper or lower end of the margin range? Is it just pure volume and operating leverage? If we grow at the upper end of the growth guidance, we will end up at rather at 22% than vice versa. Or is there something else?
Yeah. I think there's also a level of just, there's a mix effect in there's a timing effect in there, timing of translation of the benefits and so on. Then there's frankly just a level of accuracy five years out that we don't have. You know, I think we're naturally working towards the higher end of that guidance range, and then it'll depend on any given year where we are. Growth investments, timing of those growth investments, that kind of stuff.
Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Then the second one would be on additive manufacturing. CHF 50 million in sales seems in three, four years so insignificant for the group. Especially if you consider it as one of your three core technologies, and when you look at the market data, it gives the market triples. If I'm not wrong, I mean, your sales today are around CHF 20 million-CHF 25 million. You even lose market share, as it seems. What is the long-term plan for that business? Why doesn't it grow much more than it's supposed to grow?
Maybe I take that one, because it's a control question. Maybe give you an example. If you go in a jet engine, you have to invest between 15 and 18 years, which we're not saying and doing that in additive, until you earn your money. Typically, aerospace experiences first seven, eight years you lose money, then you get some money back, and then after 15-18 years, you start making money. What we have done with additive is as we have embarked, based on what we have, powder materials, experience on that, we have invested in new powders, in powder research, and in cooperation with printers. We have done a certain approach to applications. In aerospace, typically, you have to have three to four years to qualify and verify yourself. This is done.
Second is when we bought Citim and Barleben site, they had an additive part of maybe CHF 2 million in their revenue, which is typically if you buy additive companies, they have a small part of real additive, and then there's a lot of other stuff.
Meanwhile, it's almost 90% purely additive. When you say CHF 50 million, it's insignificant, and I would say it's a new industry, even in 2025, which is only three years down the road. CHF 50 million is not huge. It depends simply what you expect and later on from the markets. What we do expect with the know-how we have out of our network from our industries we've been in, between 2026 and 2028, there's a launch of a new single-aisle application because the Boeing and Airbus, they're simply waiting on each other. Both a little bit exhausted by other projects. We are flying on single-aisle aircraft today which are 50 years old. Both have been launched in the 1970s. This will require a new generation of engines, which a lot of parts in.
Like on the FCAS, where the next FCAS is a future combat air system in Europe, between France, Germany, and Spain, which has joined. 15% of parts in FCAS engine can only be done by additive because of requirements. We have invested in an industry which will materialize in 2023, 2025 or 2028, where we otherwise, as I mentioned that, maybe it was in lunch. When you go there in five, eight years down the road, we have to invest CHF 1 billion-CHF 1.5 billion to be in the business. Because we have to be in the business by materials, by the capabilities you can do, and by the interaction with our coatings. There is no question to be in or out. It's only a question how to get in.
Either upfront by serving the wave and limit, let's say, the losses, where we've been sometimes a little bit over, how to say, over positive. You know, when we built Hartford, Connecticut, we built a site where you can place 70 printers in, and actually there's 25 printers in, and we don't ramp up only because we want to fill the site. Building too big. Some activities not coming as fast as you thought. There was an environment on trade discussions and trade discussion environment. Trump administration is not positive for new technologies. You don't invest if you feel insecure about the future. COVID was as well not good for that industry.
COVID was good for our nonwoven story, where we made a lot of additional machines because in crisis, it's only that technologies are really pushing forward which are helping to solve the crisis. Energy demand in future, more defense in future, a lot of other stuff will push massively towards additive industry. The decision makers, the designers, have to realize the full capability of that technology, which is partially taken, partially not. Another aspect, and it's a very complex story, by the way, but I would like invite you on the Additive Congress in Munich, which is on the 12th of October, which is organized by us and some other business partners, and it's the biggest fair or congress around additive globally.
If you are really interested in future of that industry, you should go there because the complexity is massive because we're coming from a, how to say, quality of the printers even, which was more Home Depot quality. It was more a Black & Decker machine and not a Hilti tool solution. Now we have players like a GE when they bought Concept Laser, like a TRUMPF. EOS has materialized a lot further on, where we really do industrial application. A lot of challenges which are in the process are on your way to be solved. That is the sparking inside, the flow inside. I don't want to get too deep.
For us, to make a long story short, for us, it's essential to be in because we want to save CHF hundreds of millions of investments if you have to buy in later on. We want to shape this industry from the beginning. To do that, you have to show something. You have to have printers, you have to have application engineers, you have to understand which materials fits better. To do that by ramping up business, and last year it was CHF 10 million or CHF 12 million revenue, it goes maybe 15, 20. 2025, if it's 50, 40 or 60, I cannot predict. It's on a level where the burden for the company is already now very small. It was the first two or three years was high. We could afford to take that.
By the way, almost 50% of that was investments in materials which would have to be done anyway because there was not too much invested in further materials. We had no atomizer for material production which we have driven by additive in the past. That burden is, let's say, through the books. The additional burden is pretty small. The positioning of the company, meanwhile, is good. Now it's simply important to figure out which application is growing faster. Because you're not selling Airbus an RF antenna, which is then maybe important for the satellite to be connected, and if it doesn't work, you lose the satellite. You have to qualify first, which we have done. Now we are there. This we have done in a lot of other applications.
You have to go that way showing something. It's the hen and egg problem. If you don't have anything, nobody qualifies you.
You are not only in aerospace, right? You are also in other fields.
We are not only in the aerospace, but we are in space and aero. We are in rotating equipment business. So impellers and something like that. We have focused. By the way, that was another challenge. At the beginning, what is the most promising stuff? We even thought it's about inlets for bones or something, medical applications. We moved into that, and we simply failed because we don't want to take a Tier 1 position being in the full, let's say, accountability from companies. By that, we thought we can do with Stryker, second source or something, but they decided not to outsource anything. That's why we stopped that medical application story, and it's not growing that much. What's more important now in the medical sector is the way of surgeries.
They have improved that massively, the way of surgeries, that you don't need an individualized hip. We thought that's the model. You take one of the 12 hips you can buy, but with the way of surgery, you feel after two or three days very good. There is no need for an individualized printed hip. We thought there is one. You study markets, you identify opportunities which we've done. Now after four or five years, I think we know where we are. We had some burdens. Burdens taken, burdens out, and now let's shape the future for that. That's the story.
Yeah, I can see the long-term potential. There's no question about that. I just always thought that with the bold move you made, you are one of these really early movers. Yet it seems that the market growing from CHF 900 million to almost CHF 5 billion and you're still being just at CHF 50 million. You don't look like an early mover who is winning a lot of market. That's why I struggle.
By the way, the CHF 5 billion is not the metal market. What you're looking at and where we focus on the metal printed market. Within the CHF 5 billion, you have all the kind of applications of polymer prints, and there are already companies a couple of years out there which make CHF 500 million-CHF 600 million on polymer printing.
Mm.
Which is not our focus, not our business. It's if you take the 3D metal printed market, maybe that's a CHF 1.5 billion market. We are an early mover, and we are, by the way, leading within this movement. What we have to do is do the right application approach to translate a design into a print design and to work on that you get all these design freedoms in. That's why you have to deal with a design community and a purchase community which is ready to take a risk for a complete new technology.
Mm.
To convince them, I would say that was the major work the last three to four years in certain areas, simply to convince people that this technology is a reliable one.
Okay, thanks.
Sorry, management, but this is.
It's a long lasting story.
Yeah.
Okay. We maybe have time for one more question. Otherwise, if there is no further questions, then this concludes the Surface Solutions section. Roland will now present the closing remarks, and afterwards, you are all very much welcome to join us with the flying dinner.
Ladies and gentlemen, the formal part of today's capital market day is coming to an end. Before we go to the flying dinner, let me do some short statements. First of all, I'm fully aware we had an intensive afternoon. Honestly spoken, sitting here at stage and listening to the two presentations, knowing almost all the details, I was asking myself how you did digest it and how you did receive the messages. A huge amount of information. I think afterwards we still have a chance to interact, to answer questions and to exchange views here. I don't want to extend it very much here. The key messages we want to convey, and I'm sure we have been able to convey, are simple ones. We understand our business.
We know what we do. The second one, Oerlikon is in good shape, but not only on the financial side, also on an operational and technology and content side. We are intending to grow the company over the course of the next few years, between 4% and 6%, targeting a CHF 3.5 billion revenue. We are targeting an EBITDA corridor of 17%-19%. Last but not least, a double-digit ROCE. This part is coming actually rather sooner than later, not only midterm. You know where we have been in 2021. These are actually the key messages from today's capital market day.
That brings me to the point I want to say thanks to all of you for the time you are spending here, the afternoon, for the lively Q&As and discussions, and also in general for the long-term cooperation and what we did together and all your support. It's the last Capital Market Day for me. I want to say thanks to all of you. It was a pleasure to be here and to work with you. Do me a favor, just take care for the company. It's a good one. It's a great one. There is a bright future for our Oerlikon company. Having this said, thanks a lot, and let's move on to the flying dinner. Thanks.