Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure and a great honor to welcome you to our Capital Markets Day. Thank you for taking the time out to get to know Sulzer better. We have seen in the film, we are a very international team, and I am here together with a very international team of presenters from more or less, not quite, around the world. You will see them all later on, and they will be also introduced. I do need a cookie, so thank you. When in my mind's eye, I think about Sulzer sometimes, I have this image of a diamond. Sulzer is a diamond. It is right now more a diamond in the rough. It needs polishing, and a little more than polishing, to become a precious jewel.
But at its core, and that is very important, at its core, it is a healthy and strong company. And this is why we are so convinced that over the course of the next few years, we can evolve Sulzer on this strong base to a precious jewel. And today, we are going to show you why, and we are going to show you how. So what will we discuss today? We will discuss some fundamental things. Number one, the markets that we serve, and why they are large and why they are essential. And when we mean essential, they are essential for the well-being of people around the globe. We will show you that Sulzer, yes, does create value, no doubt, but Sulzer creates value there where it really counts. And we can do it because we understand our customers' infrastructure, and we understand our customers' processes.
And this will lead to us growing organically. This means we are going to grow in a capital-efficient manner, because growth comes from within. And because we are going to work on our processes and the way how we do business and how we evolve, we will not have to invest that much to absorb the growth, so the growth is going to be profitable growth. And while doing all this, the company is going to evolve in a very resilient and cash-generating company. Together with my colleagues, we are going to use the time that we have to make these abstract concepts much more tangible for you, much more understandable. And we are also going to give you some very concrete examples, what Sulzer is doing and why this is valuable. A short overview over the few hours that we have together.
Now we are going to speak about the markets and the business until the lunch break. The lunch break is going to be short. We have organized, and it will hopefully work, that the buffet is going to be accessible from all sides, so you don't have to stand in line. Let's see if this process optimization worked. I hope so. In the afternoon, we will speak about profitability, about Sulzer Excellence, and then the end, as we are here at the Capital Markets Day, almost the end will be dedicated to the numbers that may be are of most importance to you. Our Chief Financial Officer is going to take everything that you have heard and then pour it into numbers. I will have the last word, but a very short last word only. These are your presenters.
You have them also in the booklet that is in front of you, so you will always know who is speaking to you. Let's take a very quick glance at Sulzer as a whole. I would like to point your attention to the fact that Sulzer is a very balanced company. Let's start with the fact, and that is not known everywhere, that 50% of Sulzer's business is in aftermarket. 50% of our business is in aftermarket. Of course, the Services Division is more or less all in aftermarket by definition, but also the other two divisions, the Flow Division and the Chemtech Division, have significant aftermarket business. And of course, that gives us a certain resilience in the up and down of the market. Also, we are serving three very large markets. See it here, energy transition, natural resources, and the process industry.
Of course, these industries are intertwined. I mean, doing more and better for the process industry has an impact on energy. Energy has an impact on natural resources, but still, it's three distinct businesses which function along different cycles and which also function along different profitability drivers. And last but not least, I started with the international team. Well, we are an international team because we are an international business. Very well positioned around the globe. You see the percentage points there. So we are proud to have a balanced company that makes the company also resilient, not only set for growth, but resilient with different aspects of balance. A very quick look on sustainability, or rather, on ESG. You will hear a lot about sustainability and what we concretely do to improve our customers' ESG rating, our customer sustainability.
We, when we look to ourselves, have also consistently high ratings from the different groups that do appraise us. We are either an AA rating, or we are in the top 10% or top 25% for industrial companies. Our key messages, and we want to prove it to you, not only tell it to you. We want to prove it. The most important thing is Sulzer is an attractive investment case. Not only short term, because we do have tailwinds from the market. We believe the tailwinds will persist, but we have also, we are also an attractive investment mid-term and long-term. We serve markets which are important. We call them essential, and we are striking a balance between a sustainable society and an economically successful economy, which basically is the same like an economically successful society. You will see why.
We work where it counts, and that lets us command higher margins if we do it right. It is important for our customers, whether the turbine, and you will hear it later, that they are giving to us to have it overhauled, is out after 5 days or after 10 days, for example. It is important that our customers consume less energy in their process, and that they reach the right purity. This is all of the essence of our customers' productivity, performance, and sometimes also compliance. Now, why can we do that? That goes a bit back to what I said in the beginning with the crystal, with the company that, in its essence, is healthy and strong. We have 190 years of engineering excellence.
Now, you will probably say, and rightly so, "Yeah, 190 years, that's a bit of a long time ago." But we kept it, and we built it up. We have many, very, very good engineers. Of course, engineers also have to be directed to the market and think of productivity and not only about great technology, but we bring this clearly together. We will, I'm convinced, convince you that our strategy, our simple strategy that we call Sulzer 2028, is creating growth, is creating profitability, and is turning our business, Sulzer, into a higher quality business. It's already a good business today, but it can be much better. So let's look at our markets, and let's look at our strategy. If you look at our markets, you can say, in a way, our markets are about more and about better.
Why are our markets about more? Our markets are about more because we still do have population growth around the world. We can't imagine it anymore in Europe, but we do. Birth rates are slower, but population is still growing. And we still have many, many, many people around the world who want to live economically much better. And this means more energy, it means more consumption of natural resources, be it water, be it minerals. And it also means that the process industries have to produce more. They have to produce more chemicals, they have to produce more food, they have to produce more cement. And definitely, not only the population growth, but also our trend in digitalization, and now every bit of what it speaks about artificial intelligence, will lead to more.
How much more, we don't know yet, but it will lead to more energy, more consumption of natural resources, and also the process industry will play a part on this. But at the same time, we need better, because we cannot sustain more and more. We need better. And with better, we speak about decarbonizing the energy system, but not only the energy system, also the industries around minerals and the process industry. They have to become carbon, at least, lighter. And the less and the better is also in the pollution topic. Biodiversity, you read a lot less in the newspapers than you do about CO2, but it's just as important. Just as important that we reduce pollution, and Sulzer can help customers to reduce pollution. It is very important that we either avoid pollution, or if we have it, we can remove it.
Like, for example, in the water circle. So these are the fundamental drivers or tailwinds that we have. And of course, we speak about huge markets. If you look at the energy security and energy transition, I think that's the next slide. No, I go back. Now I'm here. It is huge markets. Only energy transition, according to the figures that you read, you speak about investments of $2 trillion-$6 trillion, whatever you want to believe, just for transition. Now, of course, these are not Sulzer's markets. Our accessible market is much smaller. I'll speak about it. But it is a fundamental undercurrent of evolution of these industries. They have to become bigger and they have to become better. So why is Sulzer, this small company here somewhere, at least headquartered in Switzerland, but active around the globe? Why is it that we can make a difference?
We can make a difference because we present real solutions, and these real solutions are around the transport, the storage, the management of fluids. So if you look outside, where you have an exhibit, and there you will see a very interesting turbine. This is a hydraulic turbine, hydraulic power recovery turbine, that is used to get back the energy that you have to invest if you want to capture CO₂ while producing hydrogen. It's a great piece of innovation. It's a great piece of engineering. It was developed in Sulzer, and it is selling, and it's selling very well. On the other side, my colleagues, I think, will speak a bit more about that. On the other hand, we are there to purify, to separate, and to also avoid. You see that in all three divisions. All three divisions do somehow serve the same market.
Not somehow, they do serve the same market, sometimes different segments of the market. You see another innovation out there, a new Mellapak. It's called MellapakEvo, you'll hear more about it, that allows the process industries to save energy and to go to higher purities. Significant amount of energies between 20%-40%, and we can do that because we know ourself in engineering. Of course, very important for us, we keep critical infrastructure running, and we make it better. So if we are in the phase of the energy transition, it will be important that the existing, for example, energy production infrastructure, keeps running for a long time. We have this discussion in Switzerland with the nuclear power plants, who suddenly have to run for 80 years. We will have the same when it comes to other energy infrastructure.
With our help, they will not only run longer, they will run better. At the end, all of the things that we do is enable new technology, enable cost saving, energy saving, and also enabling very new technologies which are emerging, that you will also hear a short moment about. Let's have a quick look at our markets, energy security and transition. I already started with that slide. I said it's a huge market. Transition alone is trillions of dollars, not trillions of billions, trillions of dollars. Our exact segment is much smaller. But still $90 billion, which for us is a lot. We choose not to access all of these $90 billions, because we want to choose those applications and those segments where what we have to offer has a price, because it has a value to our customers.
But in general, in energy, as I said in the beginning, it's about more, and it is about reducing the big environmental impact. Energy production is responsible for the largest part of the CO₂ emission. And our contribution is cleaner, make it cleaner, make it better, extend the lifetime of the infrastructure, which also means you save a lot of this so-called gray energy that is often discussed in the context also of batteries, of electric cars. And we do have solutions for new things like carbon capture, like biofuels. If we look at natural resources, again, it's a huge market. I just read a few days ago that when we speak about water—clean water, wastewater, and also the burning of waste. In Switzerland alone, in the next years, it's going to be an investment need.
Doesn't mean we will invest that much, but in principle, there's an investment need of CHF 30 billion. Milliarden, yeah, billion. Just Switzerland. And it's a bit similar in Europe, and it's different, but also huge around the globe. Again, we pick individual segments there where we are the most useful, and you will see later on how we are the most useful... And then the other aspect of natural resources that is important for Sulzer, and important for the world, as a matter of fact, much more than for Sulzer probably, is that we get the mining that will be necessary. We will need copper, we will need lithium, we will need cobalt, we will need all of these things. The so-called green minerals should not only be green, they should also be gained in a green way.
And we'll need much more of it because of the growth in population, and because we are going to electrify in order to avoid CO2, and we are going to digitalize in order to become more productive. But this means more minerals, and Sulzer can contribute to the green mining of green minerals. We will see how. Last but not least, our process industries, again, huge. I didn't even count anymore because it's also an umbrella expression that covers many different industries. But what is clear is process industries will grow. They will grow, more people, more requirements. They will grow because of new technology. We need more food, we need more fertilizer, we need more cement, we need more pharma products. It's also process industries. And Sulzer can help in clearly defined segments.
So we speak of about CHF 50 billion accessible market for us, and again, there we choose those process steps where we can really make a difference. As you have seen, all three markets are growing. They are not exploding, but they are growing, and they are structurally growing. Because of the changes that are happening with the, with the growth and with the need to become cleaner in all aspects, we believe we have a structurally growing market and not a cyclically growing market. And this is also supported by the statistics that we have here, that we didn't do ourselves. It's global CapEx development in the last years, up until the next 10 years, that clearly show the segments, the industries that Sulzer is in, are structurally growing. Not exploding, but growing.
They have in the past, and they do in the future, energy, process industries, metals, chemicals, pharmas, and water. And this is the tailwind that we have in our company, and we want to use it intelligently and smartly for Sulzer. So how are we going to use it intelligently and smartly? I would just like to highlight two points. Maybe three, or maybe four. Okay, I'll be fast. We have 350 patent families. Now, everybody knows that a patent alone doesn't create any value, but most of these, or at least many of these patent families, are at work in the industry, and that is, that is what counts. And then we have, in our company, 35,000 years, not days, years of engineering experience.
These 35,000 years of engineering experience come with a lot of information in our databases, in our simulation programs, in whatever we do. And that means that even if we are planning and developing, let's say, a highly engineered pump, a pump that can be used at 2,000 m below the sea, or that can eject water up to the Himalaya. When we develop them, we have a very good base to start with. We don't have to start from scratch, and that makes us very efficient and very good. Also, we are very close to our customers. We have 700 active, meaningful accounts, called key accounts, around the globe. And since our HR boss is here, I also want to mention that we are a top employer in many, many countries.
In all those countries where we did apply for the Top Employer award, we did receive it. I am proud of that. We are not such a large company, but we have 90 nationalities, and that is nice. You see that here in the team of presenter, we have many nationalities present. It is not only nice, it is necessary for our business because our customers are very international. Sulzer is not a conglomerate. Sometimes one says Sulzer is a mini conglomerate. Well, it is absolutely not true. We can become much better in working together. That is one of our axes of evolution in the years to come. We do serve the same markets, we do have many customers in common, and we can bundle and package our products and services.
I give you a little example: when we sell one of these top pumps, we can also introduce our spare parts that come from the Services Division to that customer and give the first set at a very attractive economic condition. Hopefully, not for free, right? And then we may be in there for another 20 or 40 years with the Service Business. Or when you look at integrated solutions, they become more and more important. Definitely an example that you will see is in the wastewater treatment. But why am I saying that? Well, number one, you need to pump the fluids, and then you have to separate the waste from the clean water. And that's typically things that we do in both divisions.
Another example that I like most is this picture from your side to the right, this joint development, for example, with carbon capture. There are two important steps in carbon capture. You have to capture the CO2, and then you have to do something with it. One of the things you do with it is that you bring it back into the ground. To bring it back into the ground, you need huge pumps, strong pumps, high-power pumps, and to capture it, you need separation technology that we have. Very strong, very good separation technology. You'll hear more about it later. What is it that we want to do? Sulzer is healthy at its core, and it is strong.
We want to take this diamond in the rough and turn it over the next years into a truly performing industrial company, a, a company that really, truly, truly creates value. And by that, our business quality will improve and many things that go with it. This is our vision, and we will succeed. The vision has three major elements, actually, two leading to a third. One is the organic growth. We will grow organically, so not a lot of emphasis on M&A. And because we are working at the same time on excellence across the value chain, we will mostly find the capacity for the profitable growth in our own installation, in our own plants, and in our processes, which means, again, capital-light growth. And this will lead to a high-quality business. Why? Because you will also have to improve all the other processes, not only the production processes.
It will also lead to us being stricter in our product portfolio, in the focus that we have in our product portfolio, reducing maybe the number of products that we have and concentrating on the key elements. This will lead to a future-proof business portfolio. Future-proof, number one, because we have headwinds, no, no, we have tailwinds from the market in structurally growing markets, and we have the capacity to really orient ourselves towards the needs of the market, always there where it really creates value. So this is our schema. We are engineers, so we cannot live without something like that. We take Sulzer today. We have organic growth. We have excellence along the value chain, and this will lead to a strong industrial company with a higher business quality. Now, this is a vision, and the vision is implemented by many, many steps, small ones and middle ones.
And that's a journey that we have already started in 2023. That is the Knochenarbeit. That is what we have to do now, and we are fully focusing on implementing, and we have a very rigorous tracking of our progress. In the phase that we are now, it's the doing. We did quite a lot of thinking. Now it's the doing, and we will do. What are the key takeaways? The key takeaways of my presentation is that Sulzer is in good shape, and Sulzer can become much better. You see it already in the 2023 results, where we were very proud to give ten-year highs, to communicate ten-year top results, basically on all the parameters.
This is because Sulzer already now is serving essential markets, where there are very essential steps and critical steps for our customers, where they need to save energy, where they need to reduce their pollution, where they need to have installations which are smaller, so they can fit into the geometries or where they want to put the installation. We need these high-performance pumps. We need this, water treatment technology. We need to get the minerals out in a cleaner way going forward, and we need to separate and purify just about everywhere in the industry. So we have tailwinds from the market, but also from the development within the market.
Important for us is that we don't get lost in all the opportunities that the company has, that we focus on where value creation is the highest, where what we can do, where our 35,000 years of engineering experience in the company can be brought to bear, can have an impact, can have an effect. We cannot do everything. But since technology is becoming more demanding and the requirements are also becoming more demanding, this market is also growing for us. All of this with very consistent and serious implementation, rigorous implementation, will lead to significant creation of value for the shareholder, for the society, and I believe also for the employees, because it's fun to work in an organization that is so much oriented towards the future, and that has so much to offer. Thank you very much. So now you have heard these concepts.
Now we go a little bit deeper, and we are going to be a bit more concrete to make this tangible for you. We start with our Flow Division, represented today by the President of the Flow Division, Jan Lüder, and by Gilbert Faul. Where is he? Here. Who is the Business Unit Head for Industry and Water. Thank you.
Thank you, Suzanne. So Suzanne introduced me already, Jan Lüder, Head of the Division Flow. With me, Gilbert Faul, he will talk a little bit, a little bit later about water and also the industrial part of our division. But before we are starting and coming to some really exciting examples, I would like to give you an overview of what Flow is all about. We are a division of CHF 1.4 billion of turnover, of gross revenue, and we are growing. So we will see, in this year, definitely an upward lift in the right direction there. We are profitable, and it has not been always that, the Flow Division, specifically in certain portfolio elements, has been so profitable.
We see already the first dynamics of what Suzanne was talking about, the One Sulzer approach, which we are generating, and also working along excellence along the value chain. 5,500 employees across the globe with 19 factories. We are, Suzanne was talking about the essential markets. We are in these markets, and there we have also our production facilities. A very nice spread across the end markets, which we are serving. Energy, security, and transition, and I come a little bit later with, with, some examples to it. The ones Suzanne mentioned already, you will definitely see outside. It's a super interesting one, and it's something where engineers of ours, have designed out of basically waste and, or we are recovering energy from, from water, which we originally have put into it and, recovered there.
We can see this outside. We will talk about process industries. Gilbert will a little bit talk about these ones, and you will also hear we focus. It is not like this. Normally, when I'm talking to our employees, and rethinking what we have done in the past and what we are doing differently. In the past, we had an approach of a water cannon approach, and we were everywhere, doing a little bit. This has changed, so we are really focusing on the essential industries, the essential markets, and then also on customers, which are demanding, which have demands for our products and our solutions, and also our process know-how at the final end. Natural resources, quite nice examples. Suzanne was also talking about these ones. It's minerals, what we're talking about.
It's, it's green mining, it's green metals at the final end. And no one would have assumed that Sulzer has a couple of nice solutions, and can contribute to a, to a greener environment, specifically for materials which are essential for the industry transition, for the energy transition. As Suzanne was talking about, we are in the aftermarket. Specifically, and Gilbert will talk about this one, Flow Equipment is serving the aftermarket in the water and in the industrial side. For our energy side, we are jointly doing this with our Services Division, where we have the new build, and our Services Division is our partner for the aftermarket. And you see also a nice split on energy, water, and industry. This is roughly the ratio of what we had in 2023.
It will not much differ, whereas we have to be honest, a little bit energy is starting to grow. So we will be, this year, most likely in a 60/40 range, 60 on the side water and industrial, 40 on the side energy side. But it fits perfectly into our way of doing business, that we have an equal, equal split. And also, when we are looking how we are servicing the globe, it's going, pretty much in line with, what Sulzer overall, is positioning themselves. We are in leading positions or in leadership position in multiple applications, and we are coming in a, in a short moment to a couple of these examples.... I would like to talk about energy. And when we're talking about energy, we're talking about oil and gas, and we're talking about power in the past.
But we have done something already over time, in the last couple of months and years, we have investigated in everything what is energy transition. Suzanne was talking about carbon capture, we're talking about hydrogen, we are talking about, at the far end, our mining and minerals. We are talking about new power plant applications, like small modular reactors. We are talking about geothermal applications. All these ones, which we consider as energy transition, we serve with our existing products. And this makes it so much interesting for us. It is what we mentioned here, capital lean. We don't have to invest that much in order to serve these markets. We have to do it only in a smart manner.
We have demanding environments, and we are in it with our applications, which are in the harshest environment possible to operate. Super high pressure, super toxic conditions of whatever liquid we are talking about, super high pressures. And at the far end, this works only with highly sophisticated engineered pumps. Without these ones, we are not in the position to serve the energy and the power market and the energy transition. And with this one, would like to hand over to Gilbert, who gives us a little bit insight on the water side and on the industrial side.
Thank you. Thank you, Jan. First, before we go to this directly great market of water and treating the water, somebody of you has a responsibility in your municipality? No. Because if not, you would be confronted directly how to treat the water. And this is where we really expect the biggest growth. Already, the water part is quite big part of flow, but on top of that, not only the market is growing, but we have great opportunities. Very simple reason: we are a lot competition, several competitors, international level, on the pumping side, moving the water. Moving the water, at the end, it's a, it's a motor, an impeller, a housing. You discuss about energy saving on the motor, different, different levels of energy savings, what you know from the European level, international level.
But what is coming now on top, and if you would work in such a municipality or being responsible, you would know when you spend CHF 1 million on the water treatment part, you have to spend half of it on the pumping, but you have also to spend half of it on treating, on making the water clean, the bloody dirty water, to get it clean again, to be reused somewhere else. And that is where we will grow, because we had a quite strong—we have quite a quite strong brand in the pumping area, but in the last 3-4 years, we have acquired 2 very strong brands, 1 in the U.S. and 1 based in Europe, internationally. And these companies are dedicated to make the dirty water clean.
And that is why we see an over-proportional growth in the water treatment area, and we will also explain how we leverage our existing sales force from the pump side to support this treatment part. And by the way, on the third side, we will explain why this is even more interesting on the margin side, because it's a higher demand due to regulations, standards, and all that. Before I go further in details of water treatment, in this market, you see the municipal water treatment. But you have heard also, we are quite good in the industry. And what happens in industry? Every industry has to reject something. And Sulzer is there, because we are also not only good in the water treatment part, which the dirty, the water you make dirt, dirty, we make dirty, but also what the industries are doing.
And then it gets even a bit more critical, because we know, as we're in the process industry, we know what is in this bloody process. We know which types of acids and how it goes. And that's why we'll come back at the end, by the way, on an example of industrial water treatment. But let's speak about these industries. Where are we historically strong? And first of all, when we are in the process, it's like the dirty water, but we don't move dirt in the process, we move, we move abrasive and corrosive fluids. And that's good for us, because historically, our market is, we're strong in the pulp and paper. But what happens in the pulp and paper? We just not-- we do not move water to cool the process. We move really the, the cellulose. And what is good? Sorry, Suzanne, it's not an aftermarket.
We even have consumables. They consume our impellers. So the industry, as it is abrasive and corrosive, they consume the impellers. And who do they call? Of course, us, if they want to have the original part and all the warranty and all the service which we have worldwide. And that's a great amount of our business in our major industry, which is the pulp and paper. Another strong leg of the industry is bio and ethanol, but we're not in all the bio and the food, food and food and biofuels. We are on selective ones where we can play a major role. So typically, for example, in the sugar area and where we generate ethanol.... recently with Brazil, who's by the way, they're consuming half of their petrol in the cars, is pure ethanol, not 10% or 20%, no, 100%.
We have generated, we have worked with them to be on the second level of the ethanol, what we call the green ethanol, because we use the bagasse, the rubbish of the sugarcane, to regenerate the greenest ethanol you can have. They have used for test plant, our pumps, and now even in Brazil, where we are well positioned also with our service department and energy department, to serve them in supplying this green ethanol. But these are two strong legs, which is representing about half of the industry. What, as Jan mentioned, now we need to have selected markets where we want to grow. What are the selected markets? The first one is metal mining, where Jan will explain typically in countries like Chile, where we work on lithium.
I think nobody needs to explain what lithium is used now with electrical cars, but also on the copper area. So this is one area we are selective and further growing. Two other areas; the next one is fertilizer, where with our worldwide presence, we do fertilizer with our customers in countries like Saudi Arabia or Morocco, where we work together with our engineering, energy and service guys, to make sure that we have the right presence at the right time. And last but not least, CPI. We have Chemtech, where we are already quite good in the processes. Uwe and the colleagues will explain it, and here we are there also supplying all the process pumps which are around.
So two strong legs, pulp and paper with the consumables, and bio, food and bio for the future and all what we can do there, but selective. And three new areas, which we have selected based on our strengths, which we have with our colleagues. But this is general introduction. Let's deep dive. Sorry, I have to make to deep dive into the dirty water. I cannot say shit, but okay, it's in the really, the dirty water. And you should know, each of you, you are generating 200 liters per day of this water to be treated. So imagine a big swimming pool per year, only for one person, and this has to be treated. And what is interesting here is that now our customers has three problems to solve, more and more, the municipalities.
A higher demand, because people are concentrated more and more in cities and even in some medium cities to work on. Higher constraints due to regulations, because now we have to get to clean more and more these chemicals which have inside each types of chemicals, which are now in the dirty water. Another constraint is now we have to control the floods. Even if you only one flood a year, you cannot reject, you cannot over put it, "Oh, what is coming now? We put it further into the sewage system." No, you have to treat it. This now comes into force in the different areas of Europe, but also in the US and the other areas. Third level is good for us, is benefit for the customer. Because here, with the solutions, you will see one of the examples.
We don't save some little percentage of electricity and air. We save double digits with special solutions, which you will see. So we have very short paybacks, and we can work with them to really set in the new systems. What we have done here is we have really integrated this treatment portfolio in our general pumping sales force. So we use our existing, we leverage our existing sales force on the pump to generate and have access, give access to our customers also on the treatment part. What else do we do, like we have done in the US? You know, US, Trump, other people following, whatever, they have implemented the BABA, Buy America, Build America.
So what we have done, we have been the first one in the pumping industry to be capable to serve since the beginning of the year, our U.S. customers, which is, by the way, one of our greatest markets, also profit-wise, to really offer them what they need and what our customers in the municipalities accept from us. Now let's go even further, but before you go there, look at this picture on the top here, this pond. I think this you all know. We have not put in an exhibition here. It would be a little bit stinky. So this is what you see everywhere. But the problem, this is civil works. And what happened in a very nice country, and this, I'm sure you know about this place.
I'm sure you have already tasted some wine in the Puglia, and you were contributing in increasing the sewage. And what we are then doing there in the whole region, by the way, of Puglia. Puglia is South Italy. It's not the richest area of Europe, where they would expect they spend a lot of investments in treating and the municipalities and all that. They have done it. They had not only the Sulzer pumps, they not only had the Sulzer grinders. They, on top, came to us, where, with our sales force, saw they have a big problem. As I said, we have to treat now more because we have a higher population. We go up to in Bari, up to 32,000 people, so we need something to treat further. But we cannot extend the civil works.
We cannot make this 15 m tank or 25 m tank even larger. It's already built. So what we have proposed, we have proposed a device which is as big as your living room, and who is doing the similar stuff than what you're doing in this big pond. And not only doing it, it's working because we have sold several of them in the past years, but in the whole region, we are implementing this. And on top, they are saving not only the space, because we put this device of the living room on top-
... nearly of the, the tank which is already existing, so that's why the saving of space. And not only we are doing this sedimentation process, because part of the sewage treatment, we have to wait that everything goes down. We don't have to wait that the dirt goes down. We make it through these cabins, which you see here, and we even do not only sedimentation, but what we call in our language, also filtration. So we do it the two in one. So that's a great example, which we are now expanding with all our sales force around, and this was presented in our last exhibition in Munich, where I was and had seen a great success around the world. Now comes a video. We change the world, from the world a little bit, coming back into the industry.
What you will see in this industry, it's biogas. What is biogas? You take all the biowaste, it's in the Netherlands. You take the biowaste, and you, our customer, make out of this gas, LNG at the end. Fine, fine to do. But what is at the end still remaining is what is when you have taken all out energy, is you need still to treat it. And in our portfolio, we do not only pump water, looks with a very special device, which where we have acquired this from the 30 years. It's 30 years old now. We still have the same engineer. We pump air. But in this very special way, where now with you-- a maintenance-free system, you will see it, it's a, it's a box like this. Yeah. No noise, very energy efficient. And what makes it great, it's made on magnetic bearings.
We already heard about magnetic, magnetic motors, so it's like we have invented what Dyson has invented for the hair blowing, but we have made it for the water treatment, okay? And this is where you see these bubbles coming out later in this video. But let's look at this video.
Gilbert, a big, big thank you for these insights. And you see, we are not only supplying pumps, we are supplying solutions. And we have process technology and process know-how, which matters to our customers at the final end. This one is really something which is super close to my heart. The people who know me know that before I came to Sulzer, I worked in the mining industry. And I was never assuming that I'm doing something in mining again, but we are doing it here. Yeah.
So this is super, super interesting. We can, with the technologies, what we are supplying and Flow, we talked about dewatering, we talked about water treatment already, but that we are working in metals processing is something which might be new, but we have done this already over decades. We see that our applications are ready to serve markets which we haven't thought about earlier. Green mining is on everybody's agenda. I think no one is really neglecting that the energy transition is relying on essential ores, which are... We talk here about lithium, which are, like Suzanne said, copper. We're talking about cobalt, we are talking about zinc and tin. So all these ones are at a certain point in time in a liquid phase, which makes a lot of sense that Sulzer is in it.
When we are talking about green mining, we are-- we're talking normally about brine. Brine is 97% salt, a little bit lithium then inside, and the rest is water at the final end. So we can basically contribute to such kind of solutions by getting out of 400-500 m depths, the brine up. We are an essential partner, if not the one partner in desalination plants, so getting salt out of water. And then the separation from lithium is only one next process step. So we have the right technologies, we have the knowledge on these ones, and we have the products.
... So why should we not focus on these ones? And, we are, we are, as Sulzer, really passionate about going into these areas, and we have a couple of good examples already. When you're talking about lithium brine, you are understanding it's South America, to the vast majority, a little bit also Australia, but the vast majority is Argentina, it's Chile, it's some surrounding countries, but Chile is by far the biggest country and nation, with the biggest reserves on lithium brine, and we are the partner there. So, we have our applications in a, in a new lithium mine with, with SQM. Together, and we are allowed to talk about the customer because the customer is super happy that they have us as their partner.
24,000 cu m per hour, we can pump the chloride brine slurry. With our pumps, with our solutions, performance improvement of 5%. And the interesting one, and for us, where we are super proud of, we talked about ESG, we talked about sustainability, 100% fulfillment of governmental requirements. And the governmental requirements in Chile getting stronger and stronger. So the old way of processing lithium brine will disappear. So we will see the direct lithium extraction, the DLE technology, and 100% of all new builds will be these ones. We have also solutions in order to participate in these new technologies. We support customers' growth, and we are a global, sustainable partner to contribute to these targets of our customers.
The takeaways of Flow for you today, and I would like that you keep in mind that we, as Flow Equipment, Sulzer Flow Equipment, like all the other divisions as well, have very strong technologies. Our Suzanne was talking about 35,000 years of engineering expertise. The only one organization in Sulzer which exists 190 years is Flow. It's our pumping division. So from the very early start, our founding fathers have started with the pump technologies. And we have not forgotten on where we are coming from, but we have evolved and we are on top of all technologies which you can think of, in the market of pumping. We might have, for a certain period of time, not put our customers in our center.
We have done this last year, we have doing it this year, we will continue doing it, because our customers are essential. Everything what we are doing is for our customers at the final end, and customers are appreciating that we are, again, much closer to them than we have been in the past. New energy, I was talking about, wastewater, Gilbert was talking about, and focus industries. We have chosen our battles in areas where we can grow profitable. As we said, we are not only a product supplier anymore, we are a solution supplier, we have advanced technologies, and we have process know-how, and we have chosen the markets where we can make a difference.
Flow 2028, as part of Sulzer 2028, is one topic where we, as a Flow Division, are 100% aligned and focusing on what the other two divisions are doing, plus what we are doing as Sulzer overall. We focus, focus, focus in resilient markets with resilient products in resilient industries. We understand the macro trends, the global macro trends, and we understand how we need to participate and how we can participate in these ones. And as I said, at the final end, it's, it's our solutions, it's our portfolio, it's our high, high quality offerings, which we have for the market. With this one, big, big thank you, and the next division, which comes, is service. You will be super encouraged also to see their applications, which you would never assume that, that Sulzer has them.
It's really a pleasure having Tim on board, having Ravin on board, and having Darayus on board here, and having them on stage in order to give us more insights about the service. Thank you.
Thank you, Jan. Thank you, sir. Okay, thank you, Jan. So after all these exciting stories about Flow, why should you care about service? Well, let me show you why. Because we are an important piece of Sulzer, and we're the most profitable piece of Sulzer. That alone is already very exciting in my mind. And we're growing. Our markets are growing, and we're growing faster than the market. And historically, we have been very resilient. We have proven to be resilient through the markets. So why is that? You know, one thing is because it's a service business. We sell and service. We don't sell, we really sell a service, and we service the products that Jan and other OEMs have sold. And when things break, it's critical, and if you're there quickly, and you have the quality, typically, people are willing to pay. That's one reason.
Another reason is, you know, we are highly diversified, and that's what you see here. You know, we are diversified by region. Yes, we have some regions, such as Americas and Europe, that are more important than Asia, but we are highly diversified, and not only by region, we're also diversified by product line, as you can see. Naturally, our pumps business, where we're also the OEM, is the largest business, but Turbo Services is very important, and we service all types of brands, and so is EMS, and we'll show you a little bit more, another strategically important business. Very important to us. And what you don't see here is really the regions, 120 service centers. So it's not just three locations in three regions. The revenue comes through 120 service centers.
Yes, some of them are bigger than others, but generally speaking, it's highly diversified. And one number that you don't see here, but I thought it would be interesting to share with you, our average deal size is below CHF 500,000. So it's a lot of smaller deals in a lot of locations, which makes it really resilient. Well, that's at least what we think and what we have proven to be. But I'll be honest with you, sometimes when I go home, I wonder, what is the future of an industrial service-based business like us? You know, you hear about artificial intelligence, there's the internet, there's software, and you wonder, do we have a future? And that's where, you know, I think you need to look at our end markets. We are in very relevant industries.
You know, we are in energy security, we are in energy transition, and we are in process industries. Some of you seen, you've already seen with Jan and Gilbert. So when I look at that, I'm actually very confident about the future. You know, we serve relevant markets, and we are very relevant to most of our customers, and that gives me confidence about the future. So because of that, we are a very profitable, cash-generating business that has proven to be resilient through the cycles. That's really what I want you to walk away with. I have a short video now, and I hope you keep more than just the soundtrack. But I want you to remember that, you know, we are more than pumps, very important, and we are more than turning wrenches. We're really applying technology in a lot of locations to a lot of customers.
Let's play the video. So at this point, I want to introduce Ravin. He will tell you more about pumps. Ravin is our head of EMEA region, but he also sets the strategy for our pumps business, and he'll tell you more about pumps. All yours, Ravin.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you, Tim. I thought this video really showed how much technology goes into what we do. So I will introduce Pump Services to you, and how I want to do this is to walk you through an example. So think about a customer we have that runs a pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. This customer to distribute. So basically, this customer through this pipeline is let's say delivering refined products from Canada to the state of Texas. This pipeline is equipped with Sulzer pumps, pushing all these refined products to the end market. Now, imagine if those pumps stop working. The economic impact would be tremendous on this customer, and this is where we come in.
The services we provide through our Pump Services product line allow this customer to ensure that their pumps keep running round the clock. And how do we do this? We are providing the full aftermarket solution package to the customer. We are providing, as you can see on the screen, spare parts, repairs, but also retrofits, which are essentially a great solution to the customer. Our, we believe that the market we serve is large, CHF 15 billion, and our position is strong. Again, you can see on the screen, we are one of the top three players globally in this market. We believe that the market will keep growing pretty nicely over the next few years, 45% per year, and we believe so because the markets are on trend.
First of all, the equipment we serve is an aging installed base, so there's a constant need for repair, maintenance, and spare parts in the market. Secondly, as our customers are embarking on sustainability journey, they would rather repair rather than replace, and this is the solution we provide to them. They can keep their current equipment running for much longer. And thirdly, with the emission requirements being imposed by regulatory bodies, those customers need a more energy efficient solution, and this is where our retrofit solution can help them. We believe also we can grow faster than the market growth through three vectors of our strategy.
The first one is to grow our market presence, so capture more market share on our install base, but also other people's install base, so other equipment of other brands of pumps, and there, we believe we have a lot, a lot of runway. The second one is, as I told you about on the retrofits, we are on trend, so the market really needs those energy efficient solution, and we can provide that. The third one is a very important one. In service, being at the doorstep of your customer is key. You need to be able to provide them service with speed, agility, and flexibility, and by having more and more footprint closer to our customers, we can help them on this journey, plus we can drive the growth of our, of our business.
With this, I will hand it over to Darayus to talk about Turbo Services.
Thank you, Ravin. So I'm Darayus. I run the Americas business, and as well, I look after the Turbo Services business on the strategic side. I'm gonna give you an example. Today, I'll talk a little bit about it. The Turbo Services business is a little bit unique for us because we don't make our own turbines or our own compressors. But if you can see the size of the equipment we touch, we do steam turbines, we do gas turbines, and we do aero engines as well. If you look at this engine out here, we are the largest independent provider in the world. We are the most advanced provider of repair services on turbo machinery as an independent provider. If you look at this engine, this is obviously not a Sulzer engine, it's actually a Siemens engine.
But this engine, you can see that the turbine blades are not there, the compressor blades are installed. Typically, when one of these engines run, it's about a 250 MW unit. What does that mean? 250 MW means that if that engine goes down, about 250,000 homes don't have electricity. At the same time, on the back end of it, obviously, the exhaust is about 800 degrees, so you're running a steam turbine on the back end. The steam turbine is also producing... Has another generator, and that is also producing electricity for about 250,000 homes. So when a unit like this goes down, you're talking about almost 500,000 homes are affected. So timeliness of repair is extraordinarily important.
Now, if you look at our steam turbine and compressor business, we are running the main trains. We have the main trains for the chemical plants, for the refineries, for the fertilizer plants. When you touch those machines, the downtime on a chemical plant or a refinery or a fertilizer plant could be $8-$10 million a day. So naturally, when one of those engines is down, there is no time to spend, to waste. You're running around the clock. Most of the time in the turbo services business, we are running around the clock, 365 days of the year. If we are down one or two days, it's kind of unusual if we are down one or two days in a year. So we are running around the clock.
If you look at our aero turbines, aero derivative turbines, and we service aero turbines as well, but I don't mean flight turbines. If you look at the gas turbine, that's exactly the same as a, as an airplane engine, correct? Except it's land-based. Of course, this one's not gonna fly because it weighs, the rotating element weighs 60 tons, right? So... But that's the kind of equipment we service. The aero engines are very often used as backup power. So you have wind, and you have solar constantly, and you know the big renewable story today. But every renewable machine and all the renewable power needs backup power, correct? Because the sun is not always shining, the wind is not always blowing. And at a flip of a switch, you can put 20-20 MW with an aero turbine on the grid.
So when Suzanne talked about essential services and essential industries, that's exactly where we play. Now, we play in a segment of it. The segment we play in is the segment that we can add a tremendous amount of value to our clients, and it's also a segment that we play that adds a tremendous amount of value to Sulzer. Now, when we take that, of course, we will move into adjacencies. We little by little, carefully move into adjacencies, and we broaden our portfolio over the years. And that's been incredibly helpful to us. Over the last, I guess, four years, we have gone into the aero engines, and that has increased our market size significantly for us and has given us the ability to look at different engines as well, based on the technology that we currently have.
We have a very strong position in the Americas, and we are taking that same technology, and we are moving it to EMEA, and we are moving it to APAC, and we believe there's a significant room for growth out there, and we are growing substantially faster than the overall markets are growing. What we do is our investments, we spend a significant amount in research and development, but our research and development is targeted. It's not basic research. Our research and development is targeted towards improving the life cycle of an engine, to improving repair capabilities that we have, and to make sure that the engines that we service are running for a longer period of time, and more efficiently as well. At the same time, we want to expand our footprint.
We keep expanding our footprint, but we do it carefully to make sure that we have sizable organizations, sizable service centers, because in the turbo machinery field, you need a fairly sizable service center to be able to service large engines like this. With that said, I'm going to pass it on to Tim, and he'll close it out for you.
Thank you, Darayus. Let's say a few words about Electromechanical Services. We also have a strategy head for it, but he's not here with us today, so I'll explain a few words. You may ask yourself the question, it's a $10 billion market, and you don't sell that much in it, why you still do it? Why do we still do it? Number one is, it still positively contributes to Sulzer profitability. The markets we serve are profitable, and we help the company. Number two is the strategic position. You know, Darayus actually put it very well. Every turbine has a generator at the end. Every pump has a motor that goes with it.
And we have large customers that say, "Can you serve the full powertrain?" And then we want to be in a position, we say, "Of course, we can." We don't want them to go somewhere else. So that's why we still do it. It's profitable. We're very mindful of where we want to grow, and that's why you see the word opportunistically. We grow with customers, we grow with certain markets or with certain applications where we think we can make a difference, and the customers are willing to pay for it. It will never be as big as pumps, but we still consider it a very strategic business. So with that said, we actually prepared two examples to give a better understanding how we create value. Ravin will show you one on pumps, and then Darayus will show about on Turbo Services.
All right, thank you, Tim. We'll dive a little bit more into retrofits. As I told you, retrofits are basically upgrade solutions that we can provide to our customers. To anchor this, I'm going to take you back to the example I started with. Again, imagine that customer that's running that pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. With demand increase, maybe, maybe with population growth, that customer needs to be pushing more fluids to their end markets. They really have two solutions to address that. Number one would be to build a new pipeline, and as we know, this is basically not going to happen. They will not get permits to open new pipelines. The second solution is to come to Sulzer.
What we can do is basically partner with the customer, understand the infrastructure, understand their current pumps, take those pumps and upgrade them so that they can push more refined products down that pipeline. And we've done that successfully with this customer. So we are able, through retrofit, that is one vertical, to increase the capacity and the performance of existing installation. The second vertical in retrofit is around energy efficiency. And with those retrofits, we're able, again, to look at the aged installed fleet, take the pumps, upgrade them with new fluid dynamics, new parts and materials to allow those pumps to run more efficiently. And this does two things for the customer. One, the pump will, will run with less power, so giving them energy savings, which is power savings and cost savings.
And two, it helps them to meet their energy requirements when it comes to CO₂ savings. So when it comes to those ambitious targets about carbon emissions, we can be there for the customer. We've been a pioneer in the retrofit markets. We've done more than 5,000 of them, as you can see on the screen, and we know what we're doing. So we believe that now, with this product that we've had for the past 10 years, we can actually take it further because the market is primed for it. Next, I will go into one more example to show you a bit more in detail what we did. So we have a customer in Turkey running a power plant, and when you run a power plant, reliability is key. Having to start and stop a power plant is not what you want to do.
So this customer had an installation of pumps, which were other people's, somebody else's pump. It was not a Sulzer pump, it was another brand of pump. The plant was running, but the pump was kept, kept on failing. So it failed once. The customer rightfully called the original manufacturer. The pump was sent back to their facility for repair, sent back to the customer, installed, and it failed again. They did this two times, and it failed again. Afterwards, the customer got frustrated and called on Sulzer. And the reason they called on us is that we had a local presence. Our local field technician went to site and was able not to, we didn't just want to do what the other manufacturer did. We took a consultative approach. We sat down with the customer and tried to understand what their need and objective was.
Rather than just doing a repair in our local shop, we agreed with the customer to send that pump to our center of competence in Germany for full root cause analysis and also understand how we could upgrade the pump. That was a solution we suggested to upgrade the pump, change the materials, adapt to the operating requirement of the customer. The pump was sent back to site. Our local guys installed it, commissioned it, and you can see the result on the screen. The outcome was great. We improved the reliability of the pump, matching their need. On top, we also improved the performance of the pump, so even giving them additional benefit. The cherry on the top was to provide the 2,200 ton of CO₂ savings for the customer. And what two hundred-...
2,200 tons of CO2 saving means is basically the equivalent of the emissions of 500 cars in a year. So here we're talking about substantial saving on that sustainability journey. So for me, this example really shows the value of the strategy of our division. Local presence matters, right? Without having this local presence, we would not be able to go to that customer immediately upon their need. Second, we chose a consultative approach rather than just doing a plain, plain repair that a lot of people can do. And third, our engineering center of competence really brought in that overlay of the technology piece, and so that we could together carve out a solution, a real solution for the customer that added value and responded to the particular need of this customer.
This is one example, and I will pass it on to Darayus to look at the case study on turbo.
Thanks, Ravin. So the one thing to understand is that when a machine is sold, the biggest value of that machine really comes on the service side. So more than 200%-300% of the money that's actually spent of the original equipment is on the service side. 'Cause you can't put a $40 million gas turbine and expect to throw it away in a few years. You wanna run it for 30, 40 years. So there's a tremendous amount of service that goes in. You cannot take a steam turbine or a compressor that's sitting in a chemical plant and say, "Okay, I'm going to just replace it," because you'll have to rebuild the whole plant. I mean, there's a huge amount of work that goes there, correct? So that's where we add value to Sulzer.
We come in at the back end, and we provide the service for those engines, whether it's no matter what the manufacturer is. Now, 100% uptime need, naturally, when you have such large engines, governmental regulations are very critical, emissions regulations are very critical, so safety regulations are very critical. We have seen accidents that have happened, not on our machines, nothing that we've repaired, but on machines where a turbine can explode, and they will find a piece go through the case and find it almost a mile away. So you're talking about super high energy equipment. I know it surprises you, but we've seen exactly that. We've seen pieces about that big on a compressor blow out half a mile to a mile away. So high energy equipment, guys. A full range of services we provide under one roof.
We do the engineering, we do the parts manufacturing, we do all the service, and we do it quickly. Now, strong service culture, I told you earlier, we work around the clock, and the very best facilities in the industry to do that. There is bar none. We are the-- we probably have some of the best facilities, bar none, globally. R&D, like I told you guys, our R&D is very specific to increase the life of the engine, add services and repair capabilities that the OEMs cannot, to which our competitors cannot repair. So when they wanna replace it, we can go back and repair, and repair it. And that's where most of our R&D goes. Tons of R&D for that. But very targeted, and naturally, high-margin solutions.
When an engine goes down, I don't need to tell you that when an engine is losing. When it's down and is losing $8 million or $10 million a day, the customer's not that concerned about the margins. So I'll give you an example of a customer that came to us from AdvanSix. AdvanSix is one of the largest producers of Nylon 6 globally. Nylon 6, you say, "What is Nylon 6?" Nylon is used in different things. There's Nylon 6, and there's Nylon 6/6. Your carpet right now that your feet are on, that's Nylon 6. Most of you, I don't know if all of you did. Switzerland has great trains, but if you came in a car and you were wearing a seatbelt, that's Nylon 6.
If a couple of you have a boat on Lake Zurich, the ropes are nylon 6. Your airbags in your car are nylon 6/6, which is a high-temperature nylon. So you're talking about very, very critical products that are used around the world, and we service the engines, and we service the main trains that help produce those products. Okay? Now, in this particular case, the OEM repaired an engine. It blew up in six months. Six months, they had a failure. The customer said, "Okay, can you come back to us?" They came to us, and they said, "Can you repair it?" This was actually a two-stage machine. You can see three turbine stages here, correct? There were two stages. Within the same envelope, we put three turbine stages.
We upgraded the machine, almost 40% extra power, and the reliability, it's been going, it's been running for about almost a year now, and probably as of this date, it's just over a year, it's been running reliably. Now, the same process that's used in nylon 6 and the base chemicals, they also make ammonium nitrate out of that process, and ammonium nitrate is used in the fertilizer industry. So a lot of our fertilizer clients have come to us and said, "Guys, wait a minute. You just repaired this engine and you upgraded it, and you upgraded it reliably, and you gave it 30, 40%-50% more power.
Can you give us the exact same solution for our engine, which is almost identical to it?" So now we have four or five clients coming to us and saying, "Hey, look, we want you to take our engine, and we want you to upgrade it." So that's what we are doing. So what do I say in general? In general, in the turbo machinery services, entry barriers are pretty high. Not everyone can start a turbine repair center around the world. You know, it's not the easiest thing to start a turbine repair center and say, "Okay, we are gonna repair some of the largest and biggest engines in the world." So entry barriers are pretty high. Sulzer is deeply embedded in this business, and today, when a small player comes up, it'll take them 20, 30, 40 years to catch up where we are.
It's not like overnight you're gonna see 50 different competitors, even 3 different competitors. Of course, with that comes specialized services and very, very specialized engineering and specialized facilities. I'm gonna pass it to Tim. I hope you guys have had a good idea of what the Turbo Services business is.
Thank you, Darayus. So, takeaways. Don't do the reading. I tried to do the work for you. So, you know, we want to be the leading provider in what we do. And you can ask yourself, "Why doesn't it say number one?" But I think it's a mix, right? Because on the pumps we sell, or Jan is selling for us, and then we service high energy, we are number one, and we wanna stay number one, no question. But then we are, like you have seen, we do other people's pumps and other people's turbo systems and other people's Electromechanical Services, where we're not the OEM. And there, we want to be the leading independent service provider. That's why it says leading and not number one.
Of course, I would like to tell you we're number one, but if you run the math, you guys do the numbers better than I do, that's what I've come up with. And it's important is, not just sold the brand, all the brands. Next one is, you know, our markets are growing, and we're growing faster than the market. All regions are growing, and all product lines are growing. And I have not been in many businesses before where I can say that. And I tell you, that's quite exciting. It's also exciting for our people, right? If you think employee motivation, that's one. Everyone, no matter where you are, you have a future. We're growing, and it's exciting. That is a good vision for the future. Second, you know, we believe in it. We keep investing. You can see technology is important.
We keep investing in technology, we keep investing in people, we keep investing in key initiatives, and we keep investing in footprint. I think Ravin just had a good example. I'll give you example. This year alone, we just opened one in Vietnam, we have two in India to come, and one in Malaysia to come, all in one year. Hopefully, we can replicate. So where do we wanna be in 2028? We wanna be more profitable where now, we wanna continue to be the profit and cash-generating machine for Sulzer, and we wanna continue to outgrow the market. Thank you very much. And now, Uwe will tell us more about another very exciting business Sulzer has in this portfolio, Chemtech. All yours.
Thank you, Tim, and a warm welcome from my side. I'm happy to introduce the Chemtech business, together with my colleague, Emmanuel, to you. Before I go to all the details on the slide, let me introduce you what separation technology is all about. If you do separation technologies, it's about taking out a component or components from a mixture that can be liquid or gases, and then we either purify the components or we purify the rest of the mixture. I'm pretty sure you all come along our technology each and every day. This morning, hopefully, you did some toothbrushing and you enjoyed a fresh peppermint taste. This peppermint taste is only possible because of our separation technology. We are purifying the flavor of the peppermint.
If you had a baby at the time, and you enjoyed some good sleep at night because the baby was kept dry overnight, this is because we are purifying the precursor of the super absorber in the diaper. And if you are enjoying driving an EV, and you enjoy some decent driving range, this is because we purify the electrolyte in the battery. So everything what we are doing is about product purity and product quality, that in the end translates to an end product performance. And the second angle to look into separation technology, and this is really a kind of DNA to separation technology, is process efficiency. Everything what we are doing is increasing yields, decreasing energy demand, and minimizing investment costs for our clients because we are optimizing the equipment sizes.
Last, but not least, going forward, I think it's most important what Suzanne said: We need to balance prosperous economies, prosperous societies, and bringing this together with sustainability. I was traveling last week in India to quite some rural areas, and I could observe that millions of people don't have reliable electricity supply there. But there is a strong commitment of the Indian government to build photovoltaic system across the country. And there is our customer willing to produce solar cells in India to exactly do this, bring solar cells to rural areas. And they built a value chain for the solar cells, including the entire chemistry behind it. And we just signed a contract with them to purify the silanes that are responsible for the performance of the solar cells. So we are in the middle-...
of improving millions of people's life in India, and as well, building the foundation for economic growth in rural areas in India. So coming back to the slide here, all what I told you is about application know-how. It's about the variety of applications that span across the entire process industries. And that is what is really important in our business. And yes, there is an aftermarket service to it as well, because we are, of course, able to replace equipment in the plants of our customers and improve it. And all of that is building the foundation for a CHF 800 million business that we operate with 3,000 people. And how do we do this? We are actually selling the 3 different business models, and by far the largest, with 70% is we are selling Mass Transfer Components, products, and services.
That will maintain a strong foundation for our business going forward. Nevertheless, we are pushing hard to diversify the business model to number one, Modular Process Systems, where customers come to us and asking for a dedicated and unique process solution for very sophisticated tasks. I will explain later on in a little bit more detail. The last one is, we are spending our own R&D money to develop technologies, especially in the field of plastics recycling, biopolymers, carbon capture, and synthetic fuels, to address challenges in the process industries and sell licensing and equipment to our customers. Of course, going into these diversification of business models, we will improve the quality of business, and we will improve the quality in terms of profitability and resilience. Let me start with our largest business, the Mass Transfer Components business.
This is a CHF 2-3 billion market, and it's growing 4%-5%, which is already above GDP. I'm really happy to say we are the market leader in it. We are able to shape this market. Despite that this market has products since decades that are able to do the processing, we are still able to innovate, and Suzanne talked about our new structured packing called MellapakEvo. This is a new generation of our flagship product. As an engineer, I'm completely fascinated about the gas and liquid flows inside, about the surface structures, about the production process that we have established for it. But in the end, the most important is we can increase efficiency by 40% and capacity by 20% to our clients.
This is the real value, and this product will unlock revamp opportunities that have not been viable so far. It was technically not doable and commercially not doable, but with the new product, it's actually doable. With all these kind of superior products and the application know-how and the competitive production process, we have the opportunity to create really new markets on top of this market size. Looking into plastics recycling, for example, nobody of us likes plastic waste at the beaches or in the oceans, nor do we like landfill close to our cities. There is a lot of technology development in industry to tackle circularity concepts for polymers. There is not a single one technology that works without a separation technology, not a single one.
The second one is, the chemical industry is replacing oil and gas as a raw material by bio-based raw materials, such as cellulose. And of course, they want to keep the entire process designs. So what we need to do is we take the cellulose and the respective intermediates to purify, to be able to use them as a drop-in raw material into the chemical processes. Last but not least, we are looking into carbon capture. The carbon capture is at the inflection point. We need to really make this technology happen, and we see the regulation kicking in in the U.S., we see the funds being allocated, and we see projects going on in Scandinavia and in the U.K. Emmanuel will talk more about the carbon capture going forward.
All of these products then will really help us to unlock new markets, and we know about the responsibility to develop these technologies, and we know about the opportunities that come along with it. On the Modular Process Systems, the case is slightly different. Customers come to us asking for a dedicated process design, and they know that we have all the infrastructure and the knowledge in place to industrialize their process designs rather quickly. We have the labs, we have the testing facilities, we have the people to do so. And all of that, we have demonstrated, like, being able to provide a Lego brick to the other Lego bricks that the customers develop for their process developments. We are actually working on technologies like purification of solvents in the vaccination plants in the US.
We are doing purification of waste streams in the pulp and paper to purify valuable chemicals. We already delivered a purification skid for green methanol used as a ship fuel. All of these technologies, we put basically into a steel framework. We put all the process equipment in there, we put all the piping, the electrical, the automation systems in there, and bring it to the customer site and click our Lego brick to the other bricks of the client. This saves the construction time for the industry, it saves development work, and it actually saves costs for our client. Looking into the market size, we already get a feeling it's a fragmented market.
We are able to pick as many projects as possible there, and we are able to choose ourselves which projects we wanna win and which we wanna work on, where we can provide the best value to our clients. With that, I hand over to Emmanuel, talking about the third business model on the end-to-end solutions.
Thank you very much, Uwe. So Uwe introduced our first two business models, one being really specialized component supply, and the other one being how we address particular process challenges that our customers are encountering and not able to sort on their own. So the third one is. Right. This third one is something a little bit special, and I'll take you on a small detour to explain it a little bit. So what we see is, let's say, as an individual, you're willing to build a house, and you might have done that a few times in your life, and you're comfortable with this exercise. So you identified an architect, you identified land, you are ready to do permitting, and you might have a number of, you know, workers you want to work with, being electricians, being plumbers, being all kind of functions.
And you believe that with your know-how and your experience, you're in a position to actually run through that process and get the best possible outcome and deliver in time and in budget as planned. But that's what a lot of our large-scale petrochemical customers are able to do, and that's what they do. They select specific contractors and stakeholders and run the project with a large project organization on their own. Of course, there are people, and I would put myself into that, I would not go into a journey like that. I believe I need a little more hand-holding to make sure that the house I'm gonna get is actually what I plan to have within the timeframe and the budget.
And of course, there are different models that helps to support customers from, you know, all the way to delivering, to deliver, a complete, complete, service package. But what we're doing here in the licensing business is something which is a little bit in between. Customers come to us because they know we are specialized technologies, which allow to get very strong outcome from a, from a performance standpoint and from a product quality standpoint. And they just wanna make sure that we give them a little bit of hand-holding throughout the process in terms of how to implement the technologies throughout. And that's what we are doing by building a portfolio of licensed technologies in biochemicals, where not only we are the technology owners, and Uwe was mentioning that we develop in-house with our test center, our R&D facilities.
We develop solutions which are based on proprietary know-how, which is also protected from a intellectual property perspective, and allow us to really control the overall performance of the process. Those are also areas where not only we deliver the know-how, but we also deliver full engineering services. We are delivering engineered equipment, so proprietary, specialized equipment that will ensure the performance of the process overall. And we are delivering as well aftermarket services. And aftermarket services means anything from commissioning and startup services, so making sure we have a team at site that is there to start the plant, show the customer how to operate it, and ensure that the plant is gonna be running as planned. But also, in the long run, looking at maintenance, looking at spare parts, and living through the lifetime of the plant.
So we have a very strong portfolio in biochemicals. We are growing this portfolio every year, adding new products and new technologies. Two examples of technologies are PLA, so biopolymer technology, polylactic acid, which you'll see a few samples around, as well as other biopolymers, and I'll speak a little bit more about biopolymers later. And the second one is biofuel and sustainable aviation fuels. So those are two areas where we have developed our own technology and deliver technology, engineering, and equipment to customers around the globe to ensure that they're able to get the most out of the raw material that they're using. Earlier, Suzanne mentioned about how we want to become a higher quality business. That is exactly what this is about.
This is about ensuring that we develop technology that allows us also to maximize our participation throughout the lifetime of the project, being engineering, being capital goods, and being services. So the next few slides will be about how we support customers in their transition of the industry changing at the moment. So we've seen a lot that we're doing, so customers are in a, let's say, moving environment. They are. There's energy transitioning ongoing, there's a need to work on emissions. Customers are expected to do most out of raw material. They're expected to do also to bring circularity into their product portfolio, and those are examples how we support customers, two types.
First customer is a traditional oil and gas industry trying to cut down their CO2 emission, thanks to carbon capture, and the second customer is a food and agro type of business, so sugar manufacturer, that is trying to move into the chemical value chain. Carbon capture. So a few points about carbon capture. You might have heard about it in various forms in the past, but what's important to know is carbon capture is here, it's in place, it's here to stay, and it's here to grow massively. And the reason why carbon capture is growing massively is that there are numbers of industries that we call hard-to-abate industries. We heard about cement industry, we heard about fertilizer industry, but that's also true in coal-fired power generation or gas-fired power generation.
All those industries, as the rest of us are, are working hard on the energy transition, those industry, we need them to be reliant, and this more than ever, because they also need to provide the fuel, the power, that allows the transition to happen. So we need energy security while we are going through the transition. And all those industry, of course, they have their bit in term of cutting down emission, and that is... As you cannot reduce the emissions drastically that are produced by those industries, what you're doing is you're capturing the emissions where they're happening. So if I have a coal-fired power plant or a gas-fired power plant, CO2 will be produced because that's the basis of combustion, but I will capture the CO2 at the outlet and separate it, and make sure that that CO2 does not end up in the atmosphere.
That's a market that is expected to grow from 50 million tons CO2 capture per year to 250 million tons, which is a massive growth. Only seven years to go with this number, and that will continue to grow afterwards. That's also a market that we see driven, for the most part, as Uwe mentioned, by regulations and tax schemes which are being put in place, being incentives or grants. What's in it with Sulzer? Sulzer is delivering best-in-class component, mass transfer component, for the carbon capture industry.
Now, you may ask, "What does mass transfer components, that Uwe described as distillation equipment, has to do with carbon capture?" Well, carbon capture is essentially separating from a gas emission, the, for example, flue gas from the CO2, and being able to, to capture the CO2 and compress it. So that's exactly what the mass transfer component that Sulzer are delivering are about. They allow to separate gas from CO2 in the most efficient way possible, and with the less energy consumption possible. And for that, we're the best in class, and highly recognized by licensors and by operators in carbon capture. Now, let me share one example of a customer project that we operated. Earlier, I said that the carbon capture market is being driven by incentives and by regulations. This is partially true.
The example that you see here is a carbon project, a carbon capture project, that Sulzer was awarded for recently, and that's a project that is driven by voluntary, you know, decisions, you know, voluntary pledges and commitment to actually reduce emissions. And that's the interesting part, as obviously, a lot of history was about discussion that the western part of the world is driving for carbon emission reduction. Well, what we do see here, though, is not necessarily the case, and that traditional oil and gas players are participating into emission reductions. We also do see that countries like China are also drafting and developing their own agenda for emission reduction, specifically in the field of carbon capture. So this particular customer was...
is operating a gas processing plant, which has a power generation train, and that power generation train was being revamped and was a great opportunity to actually reduce emissions of this power generation train. So making sure that the CO2 that comes out of this power generation unit is not ending up in the atmosphere, is being captured, and is being sequestered. So the first phase of the project is 1.5 million tons of CO2 being sequestered. There'll be three phases in the project, but already, this 1.5 million tons of CO2 are equivalent to 300,000 cars off the road, so gasoline-powered cars off the roads.
Now, when you look at the completion of the full project, that's about reaching 5 million tons of CO2 capture per year by this unit, which altogether would represent about 3% of the total UAE emissions. Now, you might say 3%, this is not much, but 3% is a massive number. 3%, this is what you get out of one retrofitting of one facility in the Middle East. Now, if you start to do that with 5 projects, 10 projects, that is a massive, massive impact with a technology that is, has already a certain maturity, it mean it's at scale, it's ready to go. We are number one, best-in-class provider for equipment into this field, and that's something that we'll see more and more.
To give you a flavor for what's happening, there's at the moment about 500 carbon capture projects being in the planning at different parts in different places in the world. So that is becoming a massive industry, especially for those hard-to-abate industries. Now I'll go with the second case, which is about bioplastics transition. So at Sulzer, going back to the technology portfolio that was presented earlier, we are the number one supplier for polylactic acid production technology. So polylactic acid, or also called PLA, is a biopolymer, and that's a biopolymer that you produce traditionally from sugar. So you convert sugar into a plastic material that will allow you to replace polystyrene, polyethylene, and all kind of polymers. This is a technology that is aiming at supporting the feedstock transition in the plastics industry.
There's about 400 million tons of polymers produced per year, and for the most part, they are produced using conventional fossil-based material as feedstock. The idea behind is to address two challenges of the polymer industry. One is raw material supply and emissions, and the second one is about plastic waste pollution. So we all witness going to the beach, in the nature, in the cities, plastic trash lying around there. There's some that we don't even witness, so we talk about microplastics quite a lot, which are a topic for clean water as much as food safety as well. And biopolymers are trying to address both of that, meaning having a renewable feedstock for the raw material, but also having a biodegradable and compostable material at the very end of the chain.
So here, quickly, I'll say... I'll share what I shared earlier, which is we are supporting the customer all along the project chain. So from licensing to engineering to key equipment, as well as commissioning services, and in this particular case of PLA production, we are the number one in the world as technology licenser. One quick example here, Uwe was sharing his experience and what he witnessed in India last week. One of those visits was for our customer Balrampur, which is the second biggest sugar manufacturer in India, and that's a company that harvests sugarcane and convert it into sugar. A highly regulated market, sugarcane price is defined, the sugar price is defined, and there's very limited room to maneuver in this market and try to produce added value.
What we're doing here with this customer is making sure that we allow them to diversify, so themselves, they also become a higher quality business, and trying to make sure that, from a very controlled market, which is the sugar industry, they have a chance now to grow into chemical and non-petrochemical, which is the bioplastic field. So this plant will be the first fully integrated from sugarcane to PLA plant in the world, producing 75,000 tons of bioplastic, which is bio-based and biodegradable, with a 70% saving compared to commercial plastics. And that is also, for us, a blueprint to address other sugar manufacturers in the world, and all the feedstock owners in the world being wheat producers or corn producers.
With this, I will let Uwe summarize a few points, and thank you very much.
Thanks, Emmanuel. So quickly summarizing what is in front of us. We do have a business that is really based on the broad application know-how in the entire process industries, and it's built on what we learned over decades in our Mass Transfer Components, products, and services business. And this business is meant to grow. It's meant to grow significantly, especially looking into these additional trends that Emmanuel highlighted, as well as I tried to illustrate with plastics recycling, carbon capture, biofuels, and the like. But for us, even more important, we are driving two different business models. So we are building this Modular Process Systems as a second growth lever, and we are having a third growth lever that is with the end-to-end solutions and actually even improving business quality with that. And all of that, as said, is built on application know-how.
It's all about the people that know about their stuff, and they know how to drive in different geographies in all these different markets. So we are very confident that we can really drive it forward and build a, what is called a high-quality profit engine with different business models. With that, I would like to conclude, and if you still want to reflect on the Chemtech business, twice a day, you have the time to do so, while you're doing your toothbrushing. With that, I would hand over now into the break. Please enjoy the lunch break, some coffee, and for sure, our exhibition. And for the Chemtech part, you will see our new MellapakEvo there in a kind of hologram. Thanks for the attention.
... We are complete, yes. We are now coming to the second part of our Capital Markets Day, focusing on the other side of the equation, and that is efficiency, effectiveness, and excellence. And then taking it all together, Thomas Zickler will then speak to you about what it means in terms of numbers. We run a little bit late. I know that there are quite some people who want to take a train at 2:00. By 2:00, the presentations will have been long since finished, don't worry. There may still be questions and answers going on, depending on how many questions you have. So please don't feel embarrassed. Anything if you want to leave before questions and answers is finished.
We will continue as long as there are questions, but feel free to go before that if you need or want to do that. So thank you for another 90 minutes, yes, maybe, of full concentrations. Let's look at Sulzer one more time. We spoke about the markets, and we spoke about the great products and services and systems and components that we have aligned with our markets, which are structurally growing. Now, to do all what we presented to you this morning, we have to be really good in execution. We have to be very efficient and very effective in the way we run our business. And we summarize that under the title of Sulzer Excellence. Sulzer Excellence is clearly there to improve our profitability, number one. But Sulzer Excellence is about more than the profitability. It's also about product quality. If you're excellent, you have less mistakes.
It's about relationship with customers. It is about getting rid of these, what we call bad complexities. You know, bad complexities are waste. They are not only waste of money, they're also waste of our time, and bad complexity take out the fun in working. And we have some bad complexities that we are in the process of removing, so that we feel also better at work because what we work has a positive result. To remove bad complexity, transparency is of importance. You will hear from my colleagues later, particularly from our CIO, about how we are working towards transparency, leading to agility. Agility is important for Sulzer. It's not our key strength, but we are on the way to go there. At the end of the day, it's about culture.
As so often, we are looking for a performance culture, but a culture that is also fun to work and that is very human, while it drives the results. And then you see this strange object on the slide. That is, one, a Bhaltis, as we would say in Swiss German. It's a little present for you, Sulzer, and then, with a, a pen. That's why I put it here, so I don't forget to mention it. Yeah, let's speak about Sulzer Excellence very quickly. In essence, Sulzer Excellence is creating the capacity for growth. We want to grow, we want to grow organically, and we don't want to build new plants to grow organically. That's why we have to debottleneck our plants. Florian Heuser is going to speak about that. We want to have an IT...
We must have an IT system that really performs, supporting our tools, our processes, and our applications that allow not only the production to be more effective and efficient, but also everything that comes before we can produce. Louise Graffner is going to speak about that. Then last, but very definitely not least, because it represents a big part of our P&L, we are going to speak about supply chain. Supply chain and SG&A. We will speak about supply chain. Dr. Alina Hallank is going to present supply chain improvements, a very important topic to you. So let's first look at what we do with production. Florian?
Thank you very much, Suzanne. Warm welcome also from my side, and I'm super happy to be here and give you an insight what we are doing for production excellence within the Flow Division. You've heard earlier from Jan that we have 19 factories in 14 countries. While this is crucial for us to deliver the value proposition to our customers and to ensure customer proximity, it, on the other hand, holds us, of course, accountable that we ensure that we have processes that are best in class, that are at least up to industry standards. Now, while we have a very deep-rooted continuous improvement mentality already in our division, we have conducted a very dedicated and focused assessment last year of our operations and of this footprint. Now, we've done that amongst, along 4 dimensions. It was, on the one hand, the processes itself.
Can we reduce waste? Can we reduce complexity? How can we further optimize within our factories? Of course, in close conjunction with how can we optimize our processes digitally, and as we said, later on, we will learn more about this topic. Also looking into how can we improve our operations by utilizing robotics or automation. And last but not least, we did not only look in the factory itself from material inflow to production process to outbound logistics, we also looked into the whole setup and structure of our factories within Flow. Now, why did we do that? What was our ambition behind this? First and foremost, increase customer satisfaction. We have to ensure that we deliver on time and in quality, and that in all the cases.
But we've also heard before, there is, of course, a competitive pressure on all of us in all the industries. And when we streamline our production, we can not only reduce lead times and enable our sales to offer competitive and fast offerings, but we can also optimize the cost and hence become more competitive. Last but not least, for the factories itself, it also means we can improve efficiency, reduce waste, and reduce complexity. Now, before I give you a very concrete example, let me give you some background information about what I'm going to talk about. In our Water and Industrial BU, our offering is characterized by standard and configured pumps. Now, what does that mean? I will take you for a moment out of the pump industry and let's go buy a car. There are numerous ways how we can buy cars.
I would say two of the most prominent are, you go to a car dealership, you go to the yard, you have a look at the cars, you pick one, and you buy it. It's a standard car you bought. Has nothing to say anything about the quality. Another thing which gives you more of a customer journey and maybe the feeling you have a customized, you configure your car. You choose the basis to make a model, but then you choose color, interior, exterior, features, and it gives you a very, very unique feeling of having bought something that is truly yours. Why am I saying that? Because in the background, in manufacturing, this does not mean that these configured cars are hand-assembled.
It's still an assembly line, and in the automotive industry, the plants are really geared toward efficiency, focused on the platforms the cars are built on today. And we have taken this as best practice, not in our industry, but global best practice, and reviewed our plants we have focusing on our industrial segments. And we've realized we are not really everywhere, perfectly streamlined toward value stream approaches. So we ran a pilot in our Finland factory, which is one of the largest factories we have, catering to the industrial segments, and we have established a rigorous focus on value streams. We have clustered products on different platforms, so to say, and then put a strong focus on the delivery of these platforms we have identified.
Now, we've not only done that within the factory and the blue-collar part of it, but also the surrounding topics like engineering, supply chain, and you name it. For our small and mid-range pumps, we even fully automated the testing facility. And in the end, we've learned that in the morning, we want to grow CapEx light, and we want to grow with our existing structure. And the outcome of that one pilot in our Finland plant was that we increased the output capacity by CHF 100 million. Now, how did we do that? We reduced the throughput time significantly, up to 90%. We doubled the testing capacity, and this, for us, is clearly a sign that we have the potential.
If we roll out this value stream approach to further selected factories, we will be able to manage to grow within the existing footprint and get to our ambition. Now, I've said earlier, one of the key dimensions also we looked in manufacturing at, is digitalization. Obviously, that's not only true for manufacturing, it's true for all of us in Sulzer, for all the different functions and divisions we have. I'm now super delighted to hand over to our CEO, CIO, Louise Graffner, to tell you more about this interesting topic. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. As the CIO of Sulzer, I'm really excited to be here to talk to you specifically about how IT can support Sulzer Excellence. I'm inspired by the way that technology is transforming the way that we do business today. I'm also inspired what it is that we do for our customers and what difference that actually makes to the world today. Now, IT is a critical enabler of this. For one, supporting the business with an integrated customer experience. With the creation of information and collaboration platforms, such as our customer portal, we not only create benefits for business and for our customers, we really ensure a high-quality customer interaction. Secondly, with full, transparent, and trusted data. You know, in the data-driven world that we have today, we heavily rely on the fact of the quality and the accessibility of our data.
Focusing on data governance and quality will ensure that our data is accurate, secure, and readily accessible, really enhancing data-driven commercial excellence... creating efficient operations with automated and lean processes. Suzanne mentioned it, it's a very important part of Sulzer Excellence. Where possible, really automating repetitive tasks such as data entry, and of course, also report creation, it will save us time. Ensuring a harmonized and integrated architecture, this is key. Now, why is this last part so important for us at Sulzer? Well, we are challenged. We're challenged by the fact that we have a scattered and customized application landscape. I brought an example where I want to show how do we actually now meet these challenges. You heard from Florian in what way we actually can increase the productivity in manufacturing.
This example that I'm bringing to you is showing how can we reduce the complexity and free up capacity in regards to the engineering and design process. Once our customers have laid an order, they really want to have their designs fast. With this tool, we're actually enabling and becoming much faster with this delivery to our customers, by the fact that we're being able to take the calculations, the designs, and the drawings and automating them, actually having them also happen simultaneously. Now, of course, this does not only make us faster, it also reduces the risk of error and also potential quality costs. Looking at the outcome, an 80% reduced quotation time, 30% reduced engineering time. So what this basically means is that we can do more with the same amount of resources. This initiative is only one out of many.
We call it the One Configurator. It's actually taking 10 applications into one, and I chose it today to present it because it's a perfect example of where we, in a harmonized architecture, enhance the customer experience. We have full, transparent, and trusted data in one place. It is also where we have a lean and automated process. Now, of course, it's not only about technology, it's about people being excellent together, being able to bridge business and support functions. And yes, as one Sulzer, we are letting technology and digital solutions become a much bigger part of how we do it. Now, data-enabled insights are also critical success factors for the supply chain. Right, Alina?
Thank you, Louise. So if you look at the nature of our business, over 50% of our turnover goes into our supply chain. So that means that being actually excellent at managing is one of the key success factors. So in our approach to excellence in the supply chain, we have four main topics that we are looking into. So Louise has already spoken about the importance of data and having good transparency of what's going on in our business. So this is what's actually helping us to go for the consolidation of our supplier portfolio. We've heard it from all of the colleagues that have spoken before the break. Our business is super international. We have, what was it? 120 shops for services alone worldwide. We have plenty of locations for Chemtech and for Flow.
So having the transparency across what's going on there in terms of supplier, was a challenge in the past. We have implemented an award-winning system landscapes that now gives us the transparency to know which suppliers are we working with in Houston, which suppliers are we working with in Singapore, and what are the synergies that we can be using there? How can we pool them, and how can we consolidate our supplier portfolio as for to get better conditions and get better quality from our suppliers? So this is pretty much us, within the procurement community, being good at what we're doing alone, on our own. We don't really need other people for that. But as we've heard also from the other colleagues, excellent is being excellent together, and this is where the other three pillars are coming in.
So this first one there, innovative cross-functional approaches to product design. Yes, if you come in there, at the end of it, people tell you, "Go buy that and do it cheaply." Yes, you can do that. But if you think about it at the start, when you're designing our products and services, how can we actually design it so that the materials that go into it have lever for us to negotiate with our suppliers? Then we will be more successful. So that means it is a shift in thinking that in the automotive industry, this is normal. People have been doing that for years. In our industry, this is more and more becoming more important, and we're doing it more now, and we're implementing this within Sulzer now. Also, for this bottom topic here, advanced negotiation approaches. Once again, making the loop to Louise-...
e-auctioning, where you have a tool to connect with your suppliers that makes the interactions with your suppliers more efficient. There we leverage technology to be closer to the supplier and have the process more efficient, cheaper. Or should costing, where we use the power of data to understand, so how should our suppliers be pricing the products and services we're buying from them? And that puts us in a better position to actually negotiate for added value for us and our clients. And the last one, continuous improvement, is the absolute foundation of excellence. So without improving how we work together within Sulzer and across our supply chain, that's just a no-go. We just have to get continuously better at it. And so now I would like to use an example of patternless casting. So patternless casting, so pouring metal, that sounds very abstract.
So for those of you who had not had the chance to look at our exhibits, this is one of the patterns that we have 3D printed. So there is different technologies around it. This here was 3D printed. It's plastic, so it's 3D printed. It's an impeller. You would then put a ceramic coating around it, put it into sand, and then you pour the metal into it, wait until it's dry, and then you can throw away the casting around it, and voila! You have the final, impeller. So why is this actually good? Why does that innovative technology help us? So in the past, this process of pouring hot metal into something, you used these big wooden patterns. So as you know of wood, wood changes over time. It changes in shape and form. It's getting less precise.
So when you would use it, some of these clients, they have their machines running for 40 years, so you might not need it in 20, 30 years. Then you dig it out, you have to polish it so that you get a good quality impeller or whatever other metal optic out of it. So of course, that takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of space in a warehouse, a lot of cost that gets bound there, and it's less fast. So we've heard how expensive it is from Ravin and Darayus when a client cannot operate their machine. So with this technology, doing it 3D printed and being able to ship it to the world at the tip of a finger click, it's super fast, it's super convenient for our clients to do it this way.
We have 10% improved on-time delivery. We have 90% reduction in cost of poor quality. Overall, our experience is that now we have over 1,300 times used this very innovative technique to be fast for our clients, reliable, and deliver high quality. Thank you.
Alina, thank you very much for these overwhelming results which you have showed to us. Now let me do the following: You heard for a couple of hours from, from the colleagues, from the divisions, from Suzanne, about our ambition 2028, and what I'm trying to do in the next couple of minutes is really to mirror everything which you heard into financial numbers. It is important. It is important when you see this slide, now the first time with numbers on the right side, that these numbers reflect not a guidance to the year 2028. This is really our ambition, our targets, which we strive to achieve till the year 2028. But let me reflect on this.
So sales growth above market, you heard many times, and it was confirmed by all the divisions, and this is something where we think we really have the capability over the next years, being in the structural markets, which were elaborated by all of us. Repeating again, energy security, energy transition, then natural resources and process industries. Then let me come to the next KPI. It's EBITDA growth above 17%. I will explain to you on the following slide why we came to the conclusion that we increase this margin target, because I saw this morning already in first reactions from some of you publishing that you were quite surprised about our increase in our EBITDA margin. Last but not least, our next KPI, our third KPI, is return on capital employed. Return on capital employed, we see over the next years above 22%.
So before I go in more details how we really come to our targets from our ambition 2028, I would like to give you a short, really a short history about these three KPIs, how they developed in the recent years. Let me start with sales. So that you can understand and read this, what we have done here, let me explain shortly. You see, the 2023 sales in the FX exchange rates of 2023. All the prior years, we have FX adjusted with the 2023 FX rates. So actually, the whole graph is in constant exchange rates, so that you can see the real performance over the last five years. Why five years? We are looking five years back, and when you talk about the strategy or ambition 2028, we are looking five years in advance.
You can see here that the compound annual growth rate, the CAGR, till the year 2022, was round about 1%. In 2023, it started to accelerate, where we really benefited from the market tailwinds, which we had. But also, as Suzanne said this morning, we have seen first results of our ambitions and of our initiatives, which we have started already last year. Then let me come to the next financial KPI, KPI, EBITDA. Here, I want to make you all aware, and I got already approached from some of you, we are changing in the future, but this is not valid for this year's guidance, which we give till the year-end. We change in the future to much more simplified and standardized KPIs, as we already said in the media conference in February and many times before.
So we are going away from this Op EBITDA to the standardized here in Switzerland, EBITDA. When you look at the growth rates, you see already here that we are starting to accelerate in the year 2023, already with 13.3%. And you see also the target which we have for end of this year, which is slightly above 14%. Now, let me talk about return on capital employed. Return on capital employed, we have introduced for the first time for all of you at our media conference in February. We want to take return on capital employed as one of our main KPIs in the future to really prove to you that we are working on our capital employed to make this the most efficient way working for interest and rewards in the future.
You can also see here, 2024, we are, we are thinking that we are slightly above 20% when you look at the graph. Looking at our total shareholder return, you see, we have split this whole graph into the years 2019 to end of 2022, where basically we, grew by around about 670%, still above the comparable market indices. But when you see then what happened since January 2023, you can see that we are really also accelerating here on our total shareholder return. When you look at our current valuation, which is when you take the enterprise va- value and divide it by EBITDA, we are n- 9.5-ish. Compare it to Burckhardt Compression, ITT, Flowserve, they are all around 15, 16, so we are quite attractive investment case for all of you.
Then, now let me come back to a bit more background to these three KPIs, which we want to explain to you based on the strategy which you have heard and the ambition in the morning from our side. So every division presented to you how and in which area they really want to grow in the next five years, based on the markets they are in, based on working much more together. We have seen examples from Suzanne, like in the carbon capturing area, where Chemtech and Flow, they will work much more intensively together, giving them much better solutions to our customer. We also see that in the gas turbine business, or say, in the whole turbine business, in the services industry, we have a lot of potential for the future, for future growth.
So when you take everything together and look at a group perspective, our assessment is that on a group perspective, we grow on average in all the markets between 3%-5%. What we always said is that with all what we presented, we can grow a bit above the market over the next year when you look at the whole cycle till 2028. So this means something between 1%-2% on average above the market. Then let me come to the EBITDA margin, our profitability. And here, you heard just a few minutes ago that we have supply chain, which we tackle with Alina now in a totally different way than we did it before.
To really also look into product design, make it more efficient, make it more, say, cost efficient, and also from the performing side, much more higher quality. We also heard from SG&A side, and from Luis, that with a much better IT infrastructure, we can save a lot of costs in many, many different areas. When we look at our operations, we heard, looking in our, say, setup, which we currently have in our plans, we can gain a lot over the next years in our different locations. So putting this all together, and you see that I wrote percentages on the right side, you will see the approximate impact of the work streams we are working on for our profitability. But until now, I haven't talked about the portfolio mix.
And you see the portfolio mix actually has the biggest impact, with around 30%. What do we mean with the portfolio mix? So we want to really develop from a pure equipment provider to a more solutions provider over time, as you already heard. And we also, with our solutions, where we see more the customer in the center of our portfolio, we can develop to a much more future-proof portfolio with much higher margins, which then in the end, this new portfolio mix will give us a much higher profitability over time. Then, return on capital employed. And here you see the headline, "Focus on capital lean business." I think Suzanne mentioned it a couple of times already today. What do we mean with capital lean? We are doing all these operational excellence initiatives.
With the operational excellence, we free up capacity in our current processes and plants, and this capacity, which we have freed up, we can use in the future for this growth, which we are planning to do under our ambition, 2022. So this—2028, sorry. So this means that we don't have to invest big time in new plants. We have existing capacity, which we can leverage on over the next years. And in addition to this, when you think about what I talked just 2 minutes ago, about the product mix, the higher quality of our portfolio, which we offer to the customer, like services, solutions, we are getting more margins in the end.
This means our EBITDA margin will increase more, or say, over proportionally to the increase of the sales, and therefore, you will see that we have a capital-efficient growth over the next years. What we also will, we will have a focus on our net working capital. Maybe you remember last year, we had around CHF 140-150 million reduced our net working capital. After, I have to agree, we filled it out the year before. But what we will do is, this net working capital, this is currently the benchmark for us. So we are around about 20% net working capital of sales. This is also what we want to hold over the cycle, knowing that normally, when you are growing, you are a bit heavy on the net working capital side for the growth passes.
Then, talking about cash and our cash generation, uh, ability. So what is the best message? It is really that this whole ambition 2028 can be financed internally. So we don't need really to go out to the markets to finance this strategy. It is really a strategy which we can finance by ourselves. When you look where we start, we start with a liquidity of around CHF 600 million, and we aim in 2028 with an additional CHF 600 million liquidity in certain or under certain assumptions. And these assumptions I would like to introduce to you. So basically, when you look at our operating cash flow, and you can divide it by yourself, you see CHF 2 billion, so this equals around CHF 400 million operating cash flow per year.
When you look at our CapEx, you will find out, if you divide it, it's round about CHF 100 million CapEx, plus CapEx only or predominantly for growth investments. Yes, we will also have some maintenance CapEx, but major part is going into growth investments. Then, the next bar, which is maybe the most interesting for you, dividends. In this dividends bar, we have assumed a stable dividend for the next years until 2028. And you also see when we talk then later on about the excess cash, there is no dividend increase in, because with this additional liquidity, we actually have 3 or 4 cases, probabilities, or things which we can do. The one thing is we do very disciplined M&A. The other thing is, we can do financing. What does it mean?
For example, paying back a bond without refinancing, or, and this is the most interesting thing for you, without really setting any precedence, it can be over the next years that we have enough room, since we have a lot of financial flexibility, that we increase the dividends over the next years. Talking about M&A, I think it came through during the morning that our ambition 2028 is not focusing on big M&A transactions. We will do here and there, smaller, midterm, bolt-on M&A transactions within our existing markets, which we are focused on. You know, the three markets which we have repeated: energy, security, and transition, natural resources, and process industries. They also have to fit in our ambition itself when it comes to to reflect what the visions the vision said this morning.
We are not anymore going around like with the, I, I quote you, "With the water can principle." We focus on these areas where we think we can get the highest added value out of these businesses for you, for the shareholders, and also for our employees. Most important question for the future, because you will ask this: How do you do beside that, what you said, close to the business and so on, how will you then measure the M&A? What is your criteria? The criteria which we have introduced is economic value added. And we have said specifically, the cumulative economic value added over five years has to be positive. So what does it mean? In easy words, we as Sulzer, we can invest our money, and we have for this, say, costs like our WACC.
In the end, in every investment which we do after five years, the profit out of this investment after taxes has to be higher than if we would have invested in our own company, which is equaling the weighted average capital of return. Which I'm not disclosing to you, but it's a very high number. Financial structure. Here, I focus on balance sheet, and you will see here our liquidity. Then in 2028, we went into this. We are expecting, depending then on what we will do on a financing dividend and M&A side, more than we have today. You can guess a bit what it is. I really cannot tell you. It's depending on many, many different impacts. Net debt, EBITDA, it's very important.
We will never, during the course of the next years, aim to have a net debt EBITDA ratio of above 2.5, because we want always to stay investment grade. It can be in whatever exceptional cases, but therefore, this, it must be really an M&A target, which gives us whatever an EVA of, I don't know, XYZ% plus. But normally, we have the policy that we want to be as robust and financially sustainable as we are today, and we have, for our ambition, set us the target that not above 2.5 times net debt EBITDA. The same counts for the equity ratio. You know, currently, we are around about 25% of our equity ratio. We don't want to really go under these, 25%. I think over the time, you will see the develop, that we get a bit higher.
and also when you look at our financial debt maturity profile, you see that we are very well financed over the next years. We have more or less every year, Swiss bond, maturing of something between CHF 200 million and CHF 300 million, depending on the individual years. So overall, a very robust financial structure, which we have here in Sulzer. What are the key takeaways for you? I think when you look at the first bullet point, we are really trying to capitalize on the long-term favorable market trends over the next years. And this is where we really can benefit and can show to you in the next, whatever, presentations, half year, year end, always, that we grow in this magnitude edge as we have planned it. Then, our ambition 2028 will create really, for all of you, additional significant shareholder value.
What do I mean with this?... First of all, yes, we will grow above market, but the most important thing is our profitability will increase. Our profitability will really increase, and we will have, over time, a much better portfolio, a much better product mix, which allows us also to get higher gross margins on our business. And with this, putting this all together, you will see also the impact on the shareholder value. As I already said, and you've seen from the balance sheet data, we have a very, very robust and solid balance sheet, which gives us, for the future, really enough entrepreneurial flexibility.
The last point is that when we look at our robust balance sheet, we also have always the security, regardless what the markets will do in the future, that we have a sustainable situation where we can always ensure that we are working on our strategy, even if some time will come where we get strong headwinds. And this is, for me, a very important message to all of you as Group CFO, so that you see that we are standing on very solid ground when it comes to our ambition, 2028. Again, that you don't forget it, our 3 KPIs. First, organic market, organic market or organic growth above market. Second one, EBITDA profitability above 17%, and return on capital employed above 22% till latest the year 2028.
With this, I would like to thank you and hand back to Suzanne for her closing remarks.
Thank you very much, Thomas. Yeah, much things have been said. We're still in the doing phase, so it's not said and done, but it is said. I will make my closing remarks very short. I would like to thank the colleagues who have worked in the last weeks and months to put all this wealth of information that we have in Sulzer, all this expertise, to bring it together so it is understandable. So it is understandable for you, who have less time to analyze and study Sulzer than we have. And to bring it into the context of what is happening in our market, in our essential and growing markets, and to make clear that what we are doing in these essential and growing markets really, really counts for our customers.
We can still become much better, Thomas just alluded to that, in many aspects, but in the essence, what we do matters to our customers, and we will continue on that path. It matters because we are involved in very crucial processes of our customers, and we understand these processes. These 35,000 years of engineering experience are there for something, and we put them to work. Processes and the infrastructure as a whole, as we have heard from our colleagues from all three divisions, but mostly from the Services Division. It was really a pleasure to work together with the colleagues over the... I don't know, it feels like half a year, but it was not half a year. It was more like six weeks, to really boil down where Sulzer will create value, how, and that, and where. And at the end, we had something very simple.
We are going to grow organically in the markets where we are already strong, enlarging what we have to offer to our customers. In order to grow, not only organically, but to grow profitably, we have to de-bottleneck, de-bottleneck many things. Definitely the production, the supply chain. We have to do much better on SG&A. We saw the example in IT. That is where the real value comes, profitable growth in more or less, of course, in existing infrastructure, in the right markets with the right products. We do that without additional debt. We do it fully financed, which is a good spot to be in because we have room to maneuver if it is necessary. My second thanks goes to you for taking all this time to listen to our presentation, for your interest in Sulzer. We feel very honored.
And finally, I would like to thank my top international team, who have presented the essence of what we are going to do until 2028 together, so we can be excellent together. Thank you very much. Thank you.... So we almost, almost are in time again. And you have to stick what the, to what is really important. That makes life so much easier. And so we skipped one or the other slide. Now it's time for questions. We have two colleagues who will, or two, who will go around with the microscope. One? One microscope. Okay, then you will have to jog, huh? Okay. And we have here the first question, and then the second. Can somebody see that in the order of...
I will answer the question, and if it's financial, Thomas will answer, and of course, I, I may call one of my colleagues up to speak if it is a more specific question. Okay, let's start there. Please.
Hi, it's Michael from Baader. Three questions from my side. So the first question is regarding your, the current portfolio in terms of divisions. You mentioned it more a focus on bolt-on acquisitions, so nothing really structural changing there. Are you expecting any sort of trimming in terms of your current divisional portfolio, or are you happy with the way it looks currently? Second question is on your targets/ambitions for 2028, and specifically on the margin. How does that relate to the divisions? i.e., what are the divisional ambitions or targets, so to speak, on the margin side? And then the final question is more of an understanding question.
Within the water business, in pumps, whether it's desalination or water treatment, et cetera, as I understood it, in this specific business, and that's across service and equipment, this was a slightly lower margin business compared to the traditional pumps of oil and gas, mining, et cetera. Is that still the same, or has that changed?
So we will answer these three questions in the teamwork. I already asked Jan to come up for the third question. I start with the first question. We do trimming within the division. So, for example, we have a very, very huge portfolio of different pumps, and there's only a few, not a few, but about half of the pumps really generate turnover, and the other half, very little. And so we are going to trim that. Jan is in the process of doing that. And you can see similar example, although that's the most pronounced example. So we will do trimming within the division.
Mm-hmm. Let me ask, or let me answer the question related to the divisions and to the profitability in the divisions. We have chosen not to disclose the aims and the targets for the division profitability targets, but I can tentatively say you the following: You will see the biggest improvements in profitability in Flow, second in Chemtech, and third on our already highly profitable service business.
Yes, we also want to collaborate more between the divisions, and then it is very important, you know, that we look together at the profitability of Sulzer and not optimize the individual division profitability. Quite a culture change. So how about the water business?
You ask about profitability of the equipment which we're selling into the water business. We have to distinguish between standard products and configured products and then engineered products. The engineered products were the ones where the highest market pressure is on, and where we had the highest competition in the past, and I would not have—I would not say it has changed dramatically on these ones. So, the market price is what the market price is all about. What we have done is, as Suzanne said, we are focusing on not offering each and every product and solution anymore. We are focusing on these ones, but the highest lever is in the focus on excellence.
So bringing our house in order, in order to have our costs much better under control, you saw it under the excellence side. This is a bigger lever in order to increase our profitability than thinking about that the market price will dramatically change, because the market price is for everyone the same.
Thank you very much. We had one question over here.
... I'm not sure if I understood this correctly. Is your ambition to grow faster than the market is 3%-5%? You want to grow, beat this at 1%-2%. Did you say that? I'm not sure.
Yes. Yes.
Thank you very much.
Yep. Okay, we have one question here and one question here.
Thank you. Patrick Rafaisz from, UBS. Two questions, please. Maybe the first on the, capital efficient growth. The example you gave from Finland was, was quite impressive. But I'm wondering, right, once you have implemented all the debottlenecking measures, how many years of this kind of growth can you actually handle with the current setup? Maybe at the lower end, at the higher end of, of the guidance range before you do have to add more, more significant capitals.
Can I answer in a bit the funny way first, and then you do the serious stuff? So, you know, we still have a lot to debottleneck, as a matter of fact.
Yes.
You saw we have 160 or something locations around the globe. Of course, some are very, very small. We have 17, 17 plants along in, along in Flow. So we have a long way to go. And we have quite some things to do. Of course, one day we will be completely streamlined and top effective, but then we also can afford new plants.
Yes. And adding to this on a more serious way, so for example, in Flow, you saw that we have 19 plants around the globe. When we are now starting to really work on operational excellence in all these plants, there is more the risk on the other hand side, that with the growth which we have, when we calculate whatever, around about 3%-5% growth, that we come to a situation where we have not full utilization in the plant. So what I'm trying to say with this is, adding to Suzanne's comment, that it will take a long time on this side till we really reach our capacity constraints, with only one exemption, and this is on the Chemtech side.
Because Chemtech, you have seen that we have not so many plants, and it's depending on how fast this energy transition will really move on, especially when you talk about carbon capturing and so on. And here, I think this is a bit a special case, but overall, I don't think that till the end of 2028, we come to, real capacity constraints on our current portfolio.
Thank you. We have a question-
Sorry, my second question would be on pumps. And, I mean, it's clear, turbo, electromechanical, that's all third-party equipment, but you also do service on third-party equipment for the pumps, right? So I was just wondering if there's a-
We go back to Tim.
Sorry for that. I was just wondering, can you talk about the share of third-party equipment being served within pumps, and what, what's sort of the potential for you over the next five years?
Yeah, yeah. So, yes, I think I understand. So of course, the, the share on our own pumps is of course, much higher. And we think we're in the, you know, mid, mid-double digit. Maybe that's the first from our own shares. When you look at the size of the market that is out there, that is, the majority is not our pumps, of course, we are only in the single digit, market share. That's exactly one of the reasons we think there is leeway. I think Armand said that, that I think there's room to grow. Does that answer your question? Thank you.
Thank you. So now over there, please.
It's Christian Arnold from Stifel, and two questions from my side. First question, then one for, for Uwe. On Chemtech, if I look today, your, your portfolio, you have 70% Mass Transfer Components, 15% Modular Process Systems, and then 15% E2E process technology. And then, you gave us your addressable market size, your, your growth, and actually, the, the 70% are having the smallest market and lowest growth, and the other two has much higher growth. So when we come back here in 2028, how does your division look like?
As you're rightly anticipating, I think it will look much different. I think it's, let's say, unfair to really predict the shares of the, the, the different business, models. I think what you need to consider is, especially on the Modular Process Systems and the end-to-end technologies, this is really project-driven business. And even within a year, there might be, let's say, some conclusion of project, or they might slip into the different business year. So sometimes it's a little bit difficult to compare, let's say, how you, how you really execute on these projects, compared to a product business that has much more continuity in it. And secondly, yes, the clear intention is to grow the share of the Modular Process Systems and the end-to-end technology significantly.
That's for sure, the intent, but I think I will not disclose you any kind of shares for the different business models.
It will be more balanced, right?
It will be a little bit more balanced. It depends, you know, we are—when we speak about the end-to-end products, for example, bioethanol or carbon capture, these are right now nascent technology, and how fast they will be adopted in the market, we can influence by the power of our technology, but it's not, it's not our decision. What we definitely see is that this have also a growth in the components business. So, my way to answer this question would have been, Chemtech is going to be bigger. MTCs is still going to be very important, but the other two areas will have grown comparatively in significance. How much? And that's how Uwe said, it's way premature to say that.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Second question would be on your comment that Sulzer is not a conglomerate, or you want to have it at least or less conglomerate in the future. That, of course, has something to do with, with, with culture, with mindset, but I think it can also be steered by financial incentives. If I look today at your financial incentives, I still see that, let's say, divisional targets are more important than the group target for the divisional heads, much more. So is that something you are planning to change? Do you need to change or, yeah, a little bit of your thoughts on that.
Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, that is a good question. Number one, yeah, we are not a conglomerate because we serve the same markets, and we very often actually serve the same customers. That is, by definition, not a conglomerate. It is true that in the past, the divisions were run quite independently, and we have to strike a balance between the entrepreneurship that comes with running the division, not independently, but in themselves, and the responsibility that every member of the executive committee, including the enlarged executive committee, have for the whole company. And so we have this 30%. We also have our expectation that the people in charge of this company and responsible for 13,000 employees, will go also a little bit beyond their immediate financial interest, and that is our culture. We can do that to grow Sulzer as a whole.
We are all incentivized by shares, and that's on the share price, nothing else. So we have the counterbalance there. But yes, should we go to 60/40? We could. It would have advantages and disadvantages. Did I answer your question? Thank you. Yeah, we have a gentleman here. Thank you.
Thank you. Arben Hasanaj from Vontobel. I would have two questions. The first one, I was wondering, how do you think about the cycle and what does this mean for the trajectory until your, 2028 targets? So do you see maybe a cooling off in between, which would be reflected in your performance, or do you expect really to improve on your metrics year by year? And the second question, maybe, just to clarify on your CapEx. So I think you showed that on average, you expect CapEx of, CHF 130 million per year. So just to clarify if that is, the right number, which would be around 4% of your sales. Thank you.
Okay, we have many indications that there is, I think you call it super cycle, that there's some structural change happening in our market. And we are sure. Whether or not within that structural change, there will be some ups and downs, that is certainly possible. But all in all, although we cannot promise it now, but we would expect definitely for this year and for next year, to further improve our matrix, and we'll do everything that it goes on like that.
Mm-hmm. Maybe if I, if I add. The current growth rates which you see in our company, like we had last year up to now this year, please do not expect that this is happening for the next five years. It will normalize the growth since we are in structurally growing markets, but as Susan said, in these markets, we really don't expect a bigger downturn.
That's right, Franco?
Yeah.
What was your second question?
CapEx.
Ah, CapEx.
Yes. CapEx, you, you're aiming for the 4% or more. Currently, when you see our structure, how we are set up, yeah, when we look, for example, in services, and Tim mentioned it, that we are opening up two more service shops in India, one in Malaysia, and the other one was in? Thailand. In Thailand. So you see, these are, say, smaller investments, which we can do to, in parallel, also increase our share in the market in these regions, especially in Asia, but overall, also talking about pumps, or say, Pump Services and pumps equipment, which we have a quite large installed base.
We don't think that we really need here, as answered in one of the other questions, much CapEx for the future to reflect the future growth. The only exception is Chemtech, and for Chemtech, really, it's depending on how fast this movement into, say, the biopolymers, the renewables, the e-fuels, the sustainable aviation fuels, and so on, will go.
I would like to add that we are aiming for quite a substantial increase in profitability, and part of that comes from excellence. There are some investments associated with excellence, with automation, with handling the flow of goods in the plants better. Often the excellence measures that really have an impact, they require some investment in the beginning, but they are included here. They are included in the figure that we give. Now, we had a question back here. Yes?
Freddy Aslar from Octavian in Zurich. You know, there's one thing I believe in, in life, it's a very high quality of information for the managers, and you seem to have put in a platform. I was impressed by what was said today. In other words, you're controlling your costs, you're controlling your sales. Sorry, there's nowhere left for anybody to hide. How is that processed? How is that processed?
Thank you.
Now?
Did you hire, did you ramp up on, on software staff? You know, I get the impression that quality reporting internally is much, much better. Maybe just talk us through what, how long that has been going on for, and then the deep bottlenecking will occur automatically. I'm convinced of it.
Now, now, now I finally understand why one sometimes meets with some resistance when you want to improve the data quality. Because, of course, you have transparency afterwards. We are at the beginning of this journey. We are not there yet, but we have started very, very seriously working on data quality. And this will be a major driver for productivity, which is not included in the figures, because somebody would ask us, how many percentage does it represent? We couldn't say. And we are investing in a better, more relevant reporting. We have way too much reporting in Sulzer, and we are getting kind of confused, I would say, about all these figures. Now, of course, you can put data analytics on it, and then...
But we want to really run our company with information that matters and leave the rest alone.
Mm-hmm. And, and when it comes to all these initiatives, like the 40 excellence initiatives and 60 growth initiatives, we have installed a PMO so that we are tracking all the results on a regular basis, so that we have full transparency where we stand, what we have to maybe adjust or adapt. So the transparency of data, I think, is the key for the future, that we achieve this, what we presented, under the Ambition 2028.
This is a cultural change that we are going through in Sulzer right now. We are really tracking whether what we said we will do, we are also going to do, down to the point of impact. Not saying we're yet completely there, but we're certainly on the way to go there.
If I were to suggest you'll be there in about 2 years, I guess you would agree with me. It's gonna take 24 months to have the quality of the reporting that you want. Would that be a fair suggestion?
Yes, but there will be a development where more comes first, and then to go to the optimal, that will take a bit longer.
Thank you.
Now, my head of IT and my CIO is probably going to become nervous when I say that. So for me, things are always easy, you know? Just, let's just do it. So it will take some time and some very serious work. We have a question here. You know, this reminds me a little bit of this saying that we hear that, you know, 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration, and we are moving towards the transpiration side very, very fast right now. Please.
Yeah. Patrick from UBS . You stressed service, potentially natural resources, but looking at your graph, it's only 5% of services. So do you have potential there?
We have potential for service, but it's not necessary in the Services Division. It's not the same. I would ask Jan to come back up to explain that point a bit better.
When we're talking about the natural resources, we're talking about water.
All right.
We're talking about water treatment. We're talking about industrial applications, and this is, I hope Gilbert explained a lot on these ones, which is part of the Flow Equipment, where we are currently having a massive push in order to focus and grow specifically in a joint approach, cross-industries, where we are in and where we are relevant, plus also in the water arena. So it's we're talking about pumps, but we're talking about specifically also about the treatment area, and we're talking about the transportation area.
How about mining? Service and mining.
This is the industrial side of it. Yeah, it's really something which is also super exciting. Giving you an example on Chile, and we had the lithium there. We have a service center in Antofagasta, so in the center of where mining is all about. And this one, we are currently ramping up in order to stay close to our customers, specifically in the area where mining grows.
Thank you. Yes, please.
On your equity ratio, I mean, you are generating... Well, maybe I have to rephrase it. You wanna grow asset light, so you're not investing a lot in your production sites. You're growing 5%. You have your ambition to increase leverage profitability a lot. So when I put that all things together, there is no reason why your equity ratio should not grow in the same way as we have seen from 2022 to 2023, I mean, 3% on an annual basis. If I think about that, then you keep your dividend stable and you don't do much M&A, that blue bar on that slide, with the equity ratio in 2028, should be much higher.
I do not contradict, yes. But we want to have the flexibility in the next five years. As I said, the flexibility to for M&A, to increase possibly the dividends or to replace whatever a bond which we are not refinancing. Because of all this, we try to really come up with a conservative estimate of our equity ratio, which is clearly above the current equity ratio in the future, but not really predicting and forecasting it too much for 2028. But yes, in principle, you are right.
... Okay, thanks. Hi, Ingo from UBS here. Regarding your net debt to EBITDA, during the full year results presentation, you mentioned you'd probably remain under one times on a run rate. Does that still stand?
See, this is a difficult question. When you look what we have shown today, you will see that our profitability goes up. So with, say, an increasing profitability over time, yes, this is something which we can sustain over the longer term. But I don't want to exclude anything which can happen, because when you look at our net debt EBITDA ratio, it has more potentials for influence. But in principle, also here, yes, you are absolutely right. Yeah.
Following up on that, if I can extrapolate the numbers out, with a still positive net debt to EBITDA ratio in 2028, higher liquidity and a higher EBITDA, does that mean your level of total debt will remain similar to now, so you'll continue refinancing bonds, or should that at some point come down quite a bit?
Our current goal is to refinance the outstanding bonds, yes. To basically still have this financial flexibility, which I addressed so much in my presentation. Yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you. Any other questions? Am I overlooking somebody? Yes, please. We have a question here.
Only a quick one about tendering. You say in tendering will become important. Can you give us a little bit a feeling about how long does it take to tender in Chemtech or Flow? What's the iterate, and what's about the cost of the tenders in Flow or Chemtech? I'm saying that, would you also reduce tendering currently in Flow in favor to Chemtech?
Oi, yoi, yoi. Okay, so whether tendering goes fast or not, depends mainly on the customers. We have project that we are in the phase for nine months, particularly from the beginning to until we have the order. We recently had in Chemtech a case where it was done in two months. We have something similar in the pumps, that just pumps in the Flow business. That was very, very similar. So we cannot give... What we want to do is reduce the time that we have to work on the tendering, because if we reduce that time, we can do something else while the customer is figuring out what he wants.
But this is the, this is the philosophy behind it, and I don't believe that you can completely, you know, steer a company like you can steer a car. But what you can do is make one thing more, more attractive than the other. So as you know, we have greatly improved the margin in the Flow business. That came because some things... And did still grow, but that came also because some things we didn't go for, because it was not worthwhile. And this is what we say, we want to be there where we really make a difference. And so this comes from, from project to project.
So in that case, how important is to transform the order book to reach the targets? So when we say on average, it takes nine months for every division, as you mentioned, now explain to me, so first results can be seen by mid-2025. This is how I read it.
Okay, the 9 months as average is not correct because I was relating to large projects. I mean, all in service, we heard the average order size there is below $500,000. So these are not $20 billion orders normally. So the math doesn't work right there. And I don't know if I can answer the question. Go ahead.
Yeah, and when you see our, say, bigger projects, like for example, the Qingdao project, which we received last year for Chemtech, this is a project really going on far more than whatever 18 months, maybe 18, 24 months. And these are projects having a lead time of kind of this magnitude. Then we have other projects, for example, also in energy, they are close to 24 months till full delivery or even longer. And then you have in, say, services, whatever, lead times of 3, 6 months, depending, depending really on the order. It's in the end, a mix, and this makes it also so difficult, really, to answer your question, because we have this mix of projects in our portfolio, more for sure in Chemtech and in Flow than we have in the services division.
One rule that we do have, however, is that no project can be cash flow negative. We always want to have cash flow positive, so we're not going to work for two years and then collect the money. That's maybe the background of the question.
Thank you.
Thank you. We have a question here.
Matthias Holz from Hauck. What is, in your view, the biggest risk that could stand in your way of achieving the 2028 ambition?
Assuming that the world economic development stays same, then the biggest risk is implementation. That we really, really do the knochen work, the real work, and that is why we are putting so much focus on it right now.
Thank you.
Any more questions, ladies and gentlemen? If not, I would really like to thank you once again for your interest in Sulzer. It's a great honor. It's a great pleasure. I'd like to thank my colleagues. I would like to thank everybody who worked so hard to prepare and to organize. I wish you a very good continuation of the day, and I wish you a great week. Thank you very much.