Well, thank you for joining us, and thank you everyone from the webcast joining us too. The order of the day is we have Frankie presenting straight away, then Dominik will present shortly afterwards. We got plenty of time for Q&A for both of them. We have got people on the webcast, so I will take your questions on the webcast, so please do submit them. With that, I will hand over to you, Frankie, to start.
Oh, that was quick.
I know.
Thank you, Toby. Good afternoon. For those of you who are not familiar with the way we do our Investors Day, so know that one year we talk about the strategy, and then the other year we talk more about the field trip, which is the case in, you see, Istanbul. We show you a little bit how the lab works this morning. Tomorrow, for some of you that has opted for the port tour, these are scaled-down port activities, but I think it will be still interesting if you have never seen port activities there. This is something that we'll do. For those of you who will stay here, we'll go through some discussion with our EVPs and COO about the different questions that you have about our businesses.
So in term of agenda, so I will give you a quick update of our trading and the group strategy, where we are at. Dominik will go through, uh, the way we invest in our agile platform in term of the level up, WCS, and so on. Uh, we'll have Teymur in term of EEME. This is where Istanbul or Turkey is located within our regions, uh, Eastern Europe, Middle East. Uh, Nadin will, uh, do a presentation on Turkey. You've seen the labs, but we do more than just the textile and the food businesses that we've seen, uh, this morning. And then there will be a couple of presentation on different themes that you've been asking us over the last six months to a year about globalizations of the trade, the deglobalization more likely, and what this means to the, to tech industry, how nearshoring means.
Turkey is a good example, what you've seen this morning, how nearshoring works for the SGS Group. Another topic on the digital. We talk a lot about digital. David is here to talk about how we evolve about our digitalization in term of the lab system, the field system, and all the back office system that we trying to digitalize and create a more data-driven company. On the last presentation will be sustainability. Big topic for most of us on how we as a group look at our internal sustainability, but more importantly, what are we doing in term of external sustainability in term of services to our customers. We have created a sustainability framework that is quite interesting, and we're looking at concrete examples of activities that we're going to develop over the next few years.
The people you're going to meet, uh, I'm sure you met them already, uh, yesterday and t- this morning. But just want to highlight that all our executive VP in charge of business lines are here today. Alim, Charles, Olivier, Jeff, and Derick. We have the chance to have four COOs, not just the hosting CEO, Teymur, but you also have the COO of Northeast Asia, uh, Steven. He's based in Hong Kong. You have also the COO of North Central Europe, Wim. He's based in Geneva. And the last one is Malcolm Reed. Malcolm is the head of, uh, our SEAP region. So do ask them all the questions you can because they are with, at your disposal to answer some of the challenges we're facing. We also have, uh, our CFO, of course, Dominik, uh, I forgot to mention.
We also have David, our CIO, so all the technology evolution, the digital strategy is part of the roadmap. We're working together with David. Obviously we have Nadin that will do the presentation on Turkey, which is our host for this presentation. Let me start with the purpose of our company. You know that enabling a better, safer, and more interconnectable. Better and safer are basically ingrained into every services we are offering. We help our customers to do a better product. We help our customers to do a safer product. Not only, we're also helping our customers to create a better environment and a safe environment for their workforce. We help them in the construction sites to ensure the regulation related to health and safety are properly implemented, so they have least accident possible.
It's again, a value to society, to our customers that we're creating. Interconnected is more toward the future. More and more of the society is becoming more and more interconnected, whether it is through digitalizations or through the different IoT devices that we're using. Also, to make sure that with our customers, this digital journey is safe for them and for society. Cybersecurity, data privacy, these are main theme of the futures that we also need to start to look at as part of our purpose to ensure that in a more connected world, we also help them to create a more safe world for us and a better world for us to operate. The purpose is linked to our credential in term of sustainability. We believe in sustainability. You know that as a company, we have invested a lot in sustainability.
In fact, we started way earlier than when the ESG three letters was popular or fashionable. We started 10, 15 years ago. You see the different, I would say, award that we have. We just managed to get again, number one on the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices. I think, I insist until that we do not work to get those reward. We focus on sustainability because our company, we believe in it. Those reward are just the consequences of the action we take in the company, and never the opposite. We don't take any actions to target any scoring on those reward. If they come, great. If they don't, we are not fuss about it because we believe in the way we work with our sustainability network and strategy. This is important.
I'm not gonna go through all the point that is mentioned on this slide. They are part of the KPIs that we set for 2023 as part of our Sustainability Ambitions 2030. You can see them. Some of them has progressed pretty nicely. For example, for the planet, 49% of decreasing greenhouse gas emission and so on since we calculate from 2014. I think what is important in this slide to mention is that two things. We as a company believe that we cannot just look at performances anymore. You need to bundle people and planet together with performances. I will show that little bit later how we calculate that.
Performances is important to what we do, but we also need to start to look at people and planet as a combination of what we create in term of value to society and not just purely on the financial performances. This is one aspect. The second key point on this slide is that we have updated our roadmap for the 2030 target in term of SBTi. You remember, in the past, we used to be the early adopters of SBTi's science-based target initiatives, where we were looking at the below 2.0 as a target. All our KPIs are developed upon it is 2.0. You know now that, in term of evolution of the climate, 2.0 is not sufficient anymore, and SBTi has revised their recommendations to go to 1.5.
We are revising our target. We have submitted our new target objective to SBTi for approval. We're waiting for the approval. Once they have approved our new objective, then we will revise all our sustainable ambition target for 2030 based on the new 1.5 target we're gonna set. This will be coming in the middle of next year, I would say. It's very important because we absolutely are convinced that by 2030, we'll be able to achieve our 1.5 target, and by 2050, we'll go to net zero.
This is part of the journey in terms of sustainability we're going to go through, and this is going to be revised, and we'll see a new set of KPIs coming as soon as we got the approval from SBTi in the probably mid of next year. On the performances, let me go through these slides would be easier. You've seen our trading for Wednesday. We issued the trading update on Wednesday. We also had the subsequent call for that. Most of you has attended this call early on Wednesday morning. Apology for the early reschedule. Just to highlight a couple of the point, we're now targeting at the upper end of the mid-single-digit growth, organic growth for our trading for 2022 full year.
High single-digit year-to-date for Natural Resources and Knowledge, and mid-single-digit for the other business line. Some challenges in term of inflation, labor turnover, the disturbance of the Ukraine war. This in term of supply chain, but this will be resolved. Some upside on the second half of next year, we say beginning of next year. Pricing accelerations, CHF 50 million of cost saving with our new restructuring plan. The part of the bad debt that we have incurred this year will be recover. Most of it will recover in 2023. These are part of the trading update. What is important for me again is these are short-term fluctuations. You look at the midterm to long-term drivers of the TIC industry, they have not changed.
They're pretty strong, and we believe that in term of performances, we will be delivering a strong performances back in 2023. If I look at the TIC drivers, and I think they're strengthening because you see that in term of regulation standard, which is 2/3 of what we do in term of driving forces, these are starting to get more and more tractions, and enforcement by regulators are getting stronger in the field of environmental and other fields. We see that momentum. I highlighted this in the most simplistic way, but you see that you talk about in Europe, the ESG, Green Deal Taxonomy. These are drivers in term of regulatory framework that's coming up in the future. For the time being, we'll talk about ESG auditing.
In the future, this will evolve into services to help the manufacturers, to help the companies to improve their sustainability credential. These will be new services that we're going to help them to develop. We talked about last year about cybersecurity and privacy. Again, you have the Cybersecurity Act in Europe, new regulations. The enforcement is going to come. They are already starting to implement into a regulatory framework on consumer goods, where you need to have a base cybersecurity structures when you start to develop new consumer good. Again, a lot of drivers. We talk about supply chain evolutions. I think Malcolm will talk a little bit about the deglobalizations, where the supply chain evolutions could be, whether it's globalization, deglobalization, just in time, just in case, all those as outsourcing, insourcing. All those aspect is part of evolution.
All those changes of industrial practices also drive activities for the TIC sectors. When you change supply chain in term of countries, it create a new drivers for our customers to ask our services to help them to establish a new supply chain, which is quite complex compared to a more mature country, where they already have this kind of structure in place. Product complexity is an interesting one. A few of you asked me about commoditization of the product. I think it's true. A product can get commoditized, but you need to understand how the product complexity evolve.
So if you take any basic goods, in the past, several years ago, we were just doing mechanical testing because this was the most important things for the regulators in term of properties of the goods, mechanical. Then chem- chemical testing, because they're starting to realize that with all the plastic, all the chemicals you're putting into consumer good, you need to start to worry about that. And in term of chemicals, there's still hundreds of thousands of chemicals that's been used in different industries where the regulator doesn't understand fully the long-term impact in the human body or in the environment. So this will be coming every year, this additional requirement for the chemical, uh, restricted substances to be tested in the consumer goods and this evolution. Then you also have the functionality of the products.
Consumer is asking more and more functionalities, and our customer is asking us to start to test those functionalities. They need to be safe, they need to have a certain functionalities, and they're becoming more and more complex, and you need to test them. It comes to sustainability. Nowadays, customer is asking us, "Well, you know what? You can produce a good, but I want you to do testing to make sure they're sustainable or they're recyclable, they're reusable," different parameters. We need to add those testing into the product protocols. Cybersecurity, I mentioned about that, data privacy is also an evolution.
You can see that on the basic product, as we evolve over time, these products that used to be just been doing testing on the mechanical evolve over time to become a much more complex product in term of the range of services that we're offering. This is where part of our business drivers goes, because we just create a different portfolio in solution for our customers to be able to help them to ensure that the product is compliant to the market in which they're delivering this product. One last example on these evolutions, we talk about energy transitions. Obviously, we talk a lot about fossil fuel, refineries and so on, and the question was very often, well, if you transition to sustainability, renewables, what happens to your business model? It's just one-to-one transitions.
The, the answer is yes in the long term. But in the short term, in next five, 10, 15 years, depending what you look at, you could actually not have a one-to-one transitions, because today you do CapEx, OpEx on the refinery. Tomorrow, you start to build a, say, a wind farm, so you have a lot of, uh, CapEx, the wind farm being built, but you still need to maintain your current structures. The wind farm being built, so you start to have OpEx, CapEx, maintenance CapEx and so on. Then you start to have, uh, the decommissioning of the existing infrastructure in the oil and gas sectors. And this cycle could last five years, depending on, uh, you look at the basic oil and gas structures. You look up on nuclear, it could be a 15 - 20 years, uh, cycle.
Again, this also create additional opportunity for the industrial sectors where the energy transition renewable to the traditional to the renewable create a lot of opportunities in term of overlap over the next five, 10, 15 years, depending on what activities you're looking at. Again, strong drivers for the product sectors and the regulator will have to implement additional requirement to ensure that all that in term of environmental impact, considering that we need to take care of the planet, become stronger and stronger, and this also will drive some of our environmental services. Oh. How do we do that? What differentiate us from some of our peers, and how do we ensure that we can deliver these services to our customers? We like to believe that the sustainability and purpose is what we look at first.
I talk about where we stand at in term of sustainability, and this is the starting point of what we look at when we look at the strategy in term of the SGS Group. Sustainability is core to the DNA, to the culture of the company. The next is we people. As a service company, people is the critical asset for us. We had, in the recent years or recent month, some turnover in term of people because the work-life balance of some of our workforce has changed, and we need to take additional measures to ensure that we keep the most talented people. This is done in the short term, but in the long term, it's about the expertise, the experiences that we're helping our colleagues to develop is critical for us.
In a lot of countries, for example, the expertise and the experiences we have developed is helping us to support the regulators themselves to understand how the product evolution, how the industry evolution is. We are actually involved in advising some of the regulators in different countries about what to do and how to enforce the next generation of regulation and standards. This is an important recognition of the expertise a company like SGS has created over time, where the regulators are coming back to us. The experiences is also linked to the way we support our customers to develop new products.
A lot of our customers is coming to advise us, to ask us advices on how develop a product in a safe and better way, and this is little bit the fine line between us consulting them, doing the product versus testing and certifying the product. We don't do both on the same product, but it's also some of the expertise we're capable to offer to our customers. In term of focus on capital allocations, Dominik will talk a little bit more about that. I'm not going to get into this for sake of time. The engine is important. David will talk more about that. In term of the engine development, beside the people, we're also looking at the digitalization of our network.
This is critical in term of the evolution of our LIMSystem, our field system, the automation of our laboratories, and so on. You've seen some of the example today here in Istanbul, but it's an evolution of this process that is important. Level Up is an important initiative and World Class Services as well in term of the engine, the optimization of this engine that we're looking at. This leads to the last point, which is the digital companies that we're trying to create. This is an important aspect because SGS Group generate a lot of data, and for the time being, we're still at the onset where we can start to use some of those data to drive new services and new solution to our customers. Just give an example. Charles may talk a little bit to you later on.
Truum is a new services that we have created for the e-commerce. Well, often on the e-commerce side, you need to have the same kind of attributes on your portal versus on the physical product. You will go look at around the e-commerce world, a lot of the attribute are not correct. In fact, they're missing or they're wrong. We have created solutions that help us to go through those portals and help to identify the mismatch of the product versus what should be, and we can help our customers to correct this automatically through a digital solution. There's not human intervention. A lot of those attribute comes from our database. We're using our customer database to help us to do logic to ensure that we can help our customers to correct that.
This is an example, a concrete example, we're selling these services already, of the use of our databases once it's structured properly to support our services to enhance our customers in term of their compliance to some of the regulatory framework. One minute left, so I'm going to speed up a bit. In term of the updates where we stand, this was presented to you last year in term of the objective and performances. In term of Knowledge and Natural Resources, we're consolidating the market. We're number one positions since a while, and we continue to be number one while we're consolidating this position. C&P is interesting. We were, I would say number two, but we have gained quite a lot of market share and growth on different markets.
I'm pretty confident to state that we have reached the number one positions comfortably, and we're going to continue this evolution, particularly in China, where we have a really strong growth. On Health & Nutrition, the CHF 1 billion targets is on target. Will be a good growth for next year for Olivier, but we're on target. We'll achieve this target by 2023. On the R&D side, again, the environmental sector side, we're comfortable with the acquisition of AIEX that we are on path to derive this leadership position. The energy transition for the industrial services is continuing, so there will be some disposal, there will be some acquisition, and the transformation is ongoing. We're comfortable that by 2025, we'll see a totally different industrial portfolio than we have today.
On the becoming the most digital company in the TIC sector, David will talk more about it. Again, all the infrastructure we're putting in term of IT, lean system, field system, back office system, is part of the greater plan that we have to restructure our data structures to be able to use them in a FAIR way, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, so that we can start to generate data mining, generate services, generate value to our customers. This is not yet the case, but we'll be able to finalize that 50% by 2023. We're on target for that. 2025, we should be completing the transformation of our data structures.
The last point will be discussed by Toby and the team, where we have a full presentation on the way we offer new services, not just evolution of our current portfolio, but as well as the new services in terms of sustainability we're offering to the market. Toby will talk about that across the sustainability framework that we have developed. Just to finish my presentations on one last slide. You probably seen that in our sustainability report, if you read it through. Methodologies that the [Danone Group] has created with different outside stakeholders to calculate value to society. Again, it goes back to my introductions where performance is not enough. You need to add people and planet into the equation, the way we look at the businesses.
In here on the left-hand side, you have the financial capital, which is our performances in term of P&L. You need to start to calculate the manufacturing capital, the human capital, natural capital, intellectual capital, what we generate as a company to the outside world. To add all that, so some of them are positive, some of them are negative. Once you add all that, then you create a new value. It's called the value to society with a different value in term of dollars. This value need to be positive. Basically, you cannot create better performances by taking too much from the planet and create a negative value to society. This is a model that we have created. It's been validated by some external party. We'll be using that as a trial runs to understand how we evolve.
It's part of the evolution in term of our commitments to the planet and commitment between these balance, between performances, planet and people that we're looking at. On that, I'm going to hand over to Dominik to talk a little bit about our lab network that we have, and we'll come back later on with some of the Q&A.
Thank you. Thank you, Frankie. Good afternoon. I would like to cover the next 30 minutes financial highlights, talk about our active portfolio management, give an update where we stand on Level Up, a bit more insight on the restructuring measures we're gonna take, and talk about capital allocation. If we kick off with the financial highlights, if you look to SGS as a company in the long term, we achieved, yeah, consistently solid growth. What is important when we announced the Plan 2023, we are very committed to grow our business stronger. Stronger than solid growth. With having a growth goal of high single digits, including M&A, we are well on track, implying organically mid-single digit growth.
If you look to the recent past, yeah, almost two years, we are really well on track to achieve this. To be fair, in 2021, obviously also somewhat helped by the recovery from COVID, but if you look to the LTM basis so far or the first 10 months, we clearly have mid-single digit growth or actually for this year a little at the upper end of the mid-single digit range. It's for us very important that we strategically focus on it and change our portfolio towards stronger growth. When we talk about profitability is very resilient. We had up to 2021, since 2017 - 2021, every year margin increase even in 2020 when it looks on the slides 16.1%. The same in constant rate.
This was actually 20 basis points up despite a 6.5% drop in revenues in the first COVID year. The 16.5% we achieved last year was the best margin since 2013, where we had 16.8%. Now that being said, during our trading update two days ago, we basically looking this year for a stable AOI in constant rate, which of course implies a margin drop. What I would like to talk or will talk more about the structural measures, the Level Up initiatives to drive long-term productivity. I would like to give three points and maybe repeating a bit what Frankie said, that obviously we will take measures to quickly recover from the implied lower margin for this year, which is first of all pricing.
We had a year-to-date impact of +2.7% to revenue growth. This will further accelerate as we move on, as we go into 2023. Secondly, the restructuring savings of CHF 50 million, they are here to stay. I think we have proven this with Program 2019 that the savings were really achieved or were really in the P&L reflected because otherwise it would have been not possible to basically offset a 6.5% drop in revenue with a slightly higher margin back in the year 2020. We had somewhat abnormal higher bad debt expense occurred, which we are confident to recover them into next year. Our cash flow is very robust. This is underpinned with a high cash conversion and over the long term, a strong free cash flow generation.
Obviously, very important in our business is how we manage working capital. Since two years we were able to, yeah, post a year-end negative working capital, which is historically new in the last two years and clearly industry leading. This year's growth, we have a bit more working capital need, but if you look to H1 and H2 and just simply look to the movement from H1 to H2 per year, you basically can conclude that we also for this year looking for negative working capital in percentage of revenues. Not to the extent the last two years, but still negative. Our return profile is generally strong as covering several times of our cost of capital.
You see the returns as of 2020 lower than the years before, which is not surprising because it's about our 2023 plan where we said we also want to allocate more into M&A to stronger growth and obviously acquisitions in a business where M&A was historically not that relevant will initially have a dilutive impact. All acquisitions which we buy will over the years increase their return profile. From this point of view, I'm confident that we improve our returns in the midterm and we are very focused on it. Let me talk a bit about the active portfolio management. On this slide we have our five divisions by color code, but under these five divisions are 23 segments.
You see where the segments are posted depending on the color code that gives you an indication to which division these segments are belonging. We basically map them towards their growth profile, lower growth, mid-single-digit growth or high growth, and we map them towards their relative market share. On the right side you see leading, where we are the clear strong leader. In the middle it's equal, so where we are co-leader. We are either number one or number two, but the difference between the number one and number two is not that significant. On the left side we are a challenger where somebody else is a leader. If you first look to the growth part, obviously towards we investing organically in M&A towards our strategic priorities.
With this we have in mind to strengthen, especially segment mid-single-digit growth and higher growth. If we look on LTM basis compared to 2018, so really a couple of years back, we increased the exposure to mid-single-digit higher-growth segments from 49% back in 2018 to now 68%. That means our portfolio itself has a better growth, underlying growth profile than several years ago. The same for the relative market share. Also here we increased, not to the same extent, but we also increased from having 1/3 of our business back in 2018 to now 46% of our business where we are either a strong leader or a co-leader in a certain business. Our ambition is, of course, to defend our leadership positions or strengthen them.
On top, looking to the areas of our strategic priorities also on the left side, where we see good return potential for the future, good growth potential to allocate more capital to narrow the gap to the leader. Because what you can see very obvious, it's also not surprising, as you go more to the right, you see stronger returns. The pluses, different pluses, the equal, the minus, you see this on the right, indicate the return profile. Three pluses basically say we're earning more than five times cost of capital. A minus is value destroying. Equal means we have a bit more than one or up to two times earning of cost of capital. Not surprisingly, if we have a strong market position, we have higher returns, and you see this towards the right side of the slide.
Just given the scale effect, but also there is maybe less need to make acquisitions because we can do it organically, having a strong market share. On the left side, you have, especially on the higher growth segment, challenging, but also mid-single-digit segment challenging. You have, I would say, temporarily some return profiles a little bit lower because we allocated more capital towards M&A. As we continue to develop this business, we will leverage the capital base, and the return profile will go up. On the far left down, we have also some businesses which are value-destroying, where we also consider some strategic options and, yeah, consider some disposals. Now, how do we assess these acquisitions? We use our EVA methodology, where we basically ask ourself how important is this asset strategically.
Is this nice to have or is this strategically of utmost importance? I will not go through all the criterias. You see them on the right. Indications that the acquisition needs to be in the year one EBA positive or indication that it take several years more. Now, in the last 12 months, we concluded only smaller acquisitions for two reasons. First of all, a bit more sizable things which would be of strategic importance for us were not really in the market, so to say. Secondly, valuation levels were in general still, I would say, rather demanding. We really focused on smaller acquisitions. A lot of them more in the year one EBA positive, but also some of them strategically of high relevance, which you see on the lower end. To outline two of them, one is the cosmetic segment.
With the acquisition of IDEA in France and proderm in Germany, we are now co-leading the cosmetic industry. It's a smaller market, but we co-leading the market. Very attractive growth profile, very attractive return profile. Of high strategic interest for our Health & Nutrition business. You see Quay Pharma, a British U.K. company, who's basically also of utmost importance for our health science strategy, because by acquiring this company, we entering also into the formulation business. Of course, in that respect, this asset will have more time until we expect a positive EVA out of it. From the divisions, from a return profile, the best return profiles across the divisions we achieve in Connectivity & Products, given their strong market share, but also given their high profitability, relatively speaking.
In Natural Resources, very strong market share coupled with lower CapEx intensity. In Knowledge, strong market share and at the same time low CapEx intensity and low net working capital intensity. Health & Nutrition, Industries & Environment, especially Environment within Industries & Environment, a focus area for M&A. Also Health & Nutrition. Therefore, given the capital allocation, the return profile is currently a little bit diluted. In the midterm, there will be a step up in Health & Nutrition to two plusses and to Industries & Environment, at least to one plus. M&A focus within Connectivity & Products, very strong in connectivity. Softlines, Hardlines, we can do organically. We have a strong position. Health & Nutrition across the portfolio high. You have seen this in the recent years. Quite a lot of acquisition, like Frankie outlines, more than CHF 1 billion revenue next year.
Obviously, this considers also some acquisition in that regard. Industries & Environment, selective plus Environment. Natural Resources, very strong position in general, though. If they are nice asset like Sulphur Experts, where we see value, of course, we consider this as well. In Knowledge, we are open for acquisition in selective areas. Talking now about Level Up. We initiated Level Up one and a half years ago and basically used the Level Up initiative as umbrella for several key projects which will have, yeah, a very positive impact in the midterm in terms of productivity, in terms of efficiency. These projects or these initiatives are around finance, around IT, around operations, and sometimes they are interlinked with digital. I would like to give you an update what we accomplished since we launched this initiative exactly one and a half years ago.
Financial shared service centers. We had a set up historically, and as I mentioned at the last Capital Market Days, it is very important we have this set up. We did it in a lift and shift approach, and now we standardized and harmonized all processes. This is completely done. Every new country we onboard go directly to the B model. With this we can accelerate. We onboarded in the last 1.5 years 25 additional countries, so basically more than double the number of countries. We cover almost 60% of group revenues via financial shared service centers where we manage the P2P, R2R, and O2C processes for all the countries in scope, and we achieve 5% productivity increase per annum. Billing centralization.
Billing centralization is a still very young initiative, roughly two years old. We cover today 30% of our revenues. If you look today to our network billing, and you heard this also this morning and it's great that the Turkish team have also on top of local initiatives to drive this more. You have basically in every lab you have billing. If a very big lab, it is easy. If a very small lab, it's not so easy to manage this accordingly. What we're doing is basically we take this activity out of the lab network, out of the branches, and centrally put it together, but within the country, because billing is still very country-related.
By doing so, we have seen in all the 17 countries which we cover a clear productivity increase because we could reduce the number of these FTEs more, the admin related work, compared to the people hired in the kind of central hub. The productivity target is 20%. In all of the cases so far, we exceeded it. We cover now 17 countries. We added 11 in the last one and a half years. An additional nice effect is the DSO is improving because if you have a dedicated billing team, they bill when the job is done and not whatever towards the end of the month. All the countries in scope on average, there's of course a bit of variation, but on average, they were able to reduce the DSO by five days.
That's also from a working capital point of view, quite an interesting benefit. IT transformation. David, our CIO, joined two years ago, right? Two years ago. Basically under his leadership, this year we completely outsourced all application management, all application development, all of infrastructure operations to third party, because with a strong partner we can move much faster in developing new technologies. The savings, there will be savings of the outsourcing because the outsourcing partner with a set up in, you know, from a labor cost point of view, more attractive countries, we will have savings and this is part of the restructuring savings for next year. At the same time, we developed a global target operating model for our IT organization to really foster new technologies and different programs. Global platforms.
One global platform is the certification platform, CERTIQ from Certification business. The whole certification business was transitioned to one global new platform, which is now completely live. Having now this platform, we can now with new digital enablers, bring new features, new ideas to this platform to drive productivity, but also to increase intimacy to our clients, also to our auditors. At the same time, we focusing a lot on investing into the core of the Digital Lab platform. I will not talk too much about it because David has a dedicated presentation, but we will cover end of the year 20% of revenues and basically transition more than 130 labs until the end of this year.
CRM, obviously we have a lot of local CRM systems, and we decided to replace them with Salesforce, which is the leader when it comes to CRM software globally. Salesforce was rolled out this year in 70 countries. The remaining will be done during next year. World Class Services, you heard this also this morning that our lab here in Istanbul will be part of this program. World Class Services is really about to provide, yeah, the best service to our clients by focusing really on productivity, on efficiency, avoiding waste, lost time in the lab process, and focusing on safety. That's an initiative which we did since several years, which is continuous improvement. It's a rather tough scheme to improve. Today we have 65% of our labs audited.
The best score is 34, and we're working constantly to get the labs step by step to a process award. This one is a very simplified way to show our future system and process landscape to drive efficiency. All gray bars is not new things. These are things which we have today, which are done to a large extent, very local for the local needs. We see the opportunity, based on different priorities, to be fair, to have a solution to a much richer, more state-of-the-art solution which we can leverage also globally. CERTIQ, so on the left side, you see, I would say this is really the heart of the business. That's the system for the operations. CERTIQ for Certification is completely a global platform. It's basically done.
Digital Labs, we move from 20% end of year to 30% next year, and then to 70%. David will talk more about it. Field activities, field applications, they are today local. Some of them are used across several countries. We believe there are also a lot of opportunities, but our priority currently are really the Digital Labs in that regard. You will most likely see throughout next year, there are also certain field applications where we digitalize them. The business is supported with a shared service center approach, where we processes which are not necessary to be done in laboratories, and especially in countries where we have higher labor costs, where we could move these processes to shared service centers.
For example, one is in Manila and one in Katowice, and we use the same structure like, for example, in the financial service center, but we're doing this for the business. CRM, I mentioned already, and the customer portal. We have a lot of different customer portals, and also here we have initiatives, David will talk more about it later, to have a global platform for each business when it comes to the customer portal. What are the targets for 2023? We're aiming to move financial service center coverage to 75% from currently 60%, by adding one additional shared service center, which we're currently ramping up in Mexico, because with this one we will cover first Latin America, but later also the U.S. to cover whole Americas.
Billing centralization, October we are 13%, end of the year we expect 15%. Accelerated rollout to bring it to 33% next year. IT transformation, I already talked about it. Digital labs, David will cover. World Class Services, next year we want to have 20% of the World Class Services labs in scope to achieve a Bronze award. Briefly on the restructuring measures which we announced two days ago. This restructuring program is really, yeah, focusing on certain businesses, activities who not performing according to our expectation or according to our return requirements. You see from the headcount reduction, it is very much in the area of operations, but also in certain countries we see opportunity or the need to take out more of admin or overhead costs.
There's also some business closure involved, but it's very limited as it is indicated on the pie on the right. From a regional point of view, you see the impact is much more in the broader European area and Americas. From a business point of view, there are also certain activities which are multiple business. If you take overhead out in a given country, it's allocated basically to all businesses. In tendency, it is more geared towards Natural Resources and especially Industries & Environment. We expect this annualized savings of CHF 50 million to be recurring to be achieved in 2023. Capital allocation. When we launched the Plan 2023 and said we need to grow faster, we want to grow faster, it was also about, as I said before, organic growth.
We said, while we had between, yeah, 2018 and 2020 on average, roughly 4.5% CapEx and percentage of revenue, our aim was to go closer to 5%, yeah, roughly 50 basis points more. Half of it allocating especially organically to our strategic priorities in terms of growth. For example, investing in food labs in Latin America, investing a lot into connectivity where we see consistently strong growth and adding more capacity. The other half is more capital allocation towards digital labs. We had 5.2% in 2021. LTM is also 5.2%. If I look to the whole year, I would say CapEx is roughly similar than prior years, so implying a tiny decrease in percentage of revenues. Capital allocation in terms of shareholder return.
As you recall, we had a stable dividend going into COVID, and we decided to stick with the CHF 80, given the strong balance sheet, given our free cash flow profile, and therefore allowing also temporarily a payout above 100%. We stick with this CHF 80 until we achieve due to earnings growth a payout ratio of around 75%, and then we would increase the dividend again, reflecting more or less organic earnings growth. Overall, what are our balance sheet principles? We are very committed to sound and prudent balance sheet policy with sufficient debt capacity and headroom for M&A growth. We clearly prioritize investments over distribution. However, we follow a very stringent, yeah, ROIC and EVA approach and would not jeopardize our dividend capacity.
Share buybacks is only on a very opportunistic basis. As you know, we launched a share buyback this year, which will be finalized until the end of this year on an opportunistic basis, but also due to the fact that this year it was pretty clear that M&A from a valuation point of view, very demanding. We did more selective acquisition and had less outflow for acquisitions. With this, Kai, we have Q&A session now, right? Thank you.