Good morning, everyone. On behalf of our entire leadership team, welcome to our 2025-2027 Strategic Action Plan Investor Day. I'm Sandy Vassiadis. I joined WSP exactly two years ago this week as our Global Chief Communications Officer, and I am absolutely delighted to have you join us. The excitement here is incredible indeed as we unveil our three-year Strategic Action Plan and introduce to all of you our refreshed, bolder brand identity. Today, you'll get an opportunity to get all the details on our Strategic Action Plan and see how we've revitalized our brand with this audacious look, and this brand refresh goes far beyond aesthetics.
It is a two-year process and a thoughtful work that went into it, and I am pleased to confirm that we have landed on something that we are so excited about, something that will ignite the value of our brand in a transformational way because the value of our brand matters. It's one of the hardest working assets we have. It has the power to unlock new opportunities, to attract clients, to stand out, and to attract talent, of course, and our exciting new direction is centered on our talented people, the most precious resource we have, and it's going to be an amazing new way for WSP to show up and leave our mark as visionaries, because visionaries are world shapers who dream big, who have audacious and innovative ideas. Visionaries are pioneers and pathfinders, and visionaries are impact makers.
At WSP, we are a united team of close to 73,000 visionaries. When we started working on this project, we wanted our new brand identity to cut through the sea of sameness, to unite our people behind one clear, single-minded conviction. We wanted to successfully promote our iconic projects, attract the next generation of leaders, and show that we are a global brand unique in our local strength. We wanted to start winning hearts and stand up, stand out, and take our place as a leading brand in the professional services universe. Our new brand aims to do all of that for us. It will live at the heart of everything we do. It will inspire a way of life for us in how we think, how we behave, how we deliver.
Our new brand will help us express the benefits of what we do for our people, for our clients, and for the people that our projects ultimately serve in the communities. This brand reflects everything about WSP, what we are at our very core and what we want to become known for, and we have big ambitions for our brand. Just as we are restless about constantly evaluating the business opportunity, we are equally restless about looking at the brand opportunity, and our ambitions for the brand include: be well known and be talked about, be recognized as the preferred home for engineers, for scientists, and for advisors, attract and keep great people, and be on everyone's pitch list. Earlier this week, we had the great pleasure of launching our brand identity, and we are happy to confirm that it was well received.
Coast to coast and the world over, our WSP employees, our clients, our partners, and all our stakeholders were invited to welcome our new brand, starting in New Zealand and moving all the way to Montreal, with stops in Dubai, in Finland, in Denmark, in Scotland, in England, and in the USA, like New Year's Eve fireworks. We orchestrated celebrations at the foot of some of our iconic projects and lit every single one of them in iconic WSP red, and this was done with the technical know-how of our global WSP lighting experts and our creative marketing teams. Together, we brightened communities in our signature red, and this was a beautiful opportunity to come together as one WSP to celebrate the company that we've become together and to fully unite as a team of WSP brand ambassadors.
The launch of our new brand is just the beginning, and we count on all of you to help us tell our story too. On that note, I am now pleased to invite Quentin Weber, the head of our investor relations and fellow visionary, up on stage. Thank you, everyone.
Good morning. Good afternoon, everyone on the webcast. So pleased to be here today. Thank you for showing up, even though the big snowstorm out there is so much appreciated. Donc, bonjour à tous, bonjour à toutes et à tous. Thank you for joining us today. Just some housekeeping items I just wanted to make sure with everybody. So today's agenda is, it's a big agenda full of content. We have two main blocks of presentations with two Q&A sessions, about 20 minutes each for the Q&A sessions. For in-person attendees, simply raise your hand in the room. We'll bring you a mic. You can ask your question, pretty straightforward. If you are a webcast attendee, just submit your question in writing on the Lumi platform. We will do our best to address as many questions as possible, but of course, we're limited on time.
Any questions that we do not get to will be addressed after the event. We will have a first break after the first block of presentations. I think you've seen the setup for in-person attendees. We have a great setup, I believe, and it's a unique opportunity for all of you to engage with our team. There's leaders, regional leaders, corporate leaders. I mean, there's quite a big roster today, so please engage, get some further understanding of the business. It's a very unique opportunity, as I said. After the second block, after the second Q&A, there will also be a lunch that will be available. So please feel free to stay with us again to interact with the leaders and the team. And as a final note, in terms of housekeeping, all the associated materials, so transcript, Investor Day replay, will be made available after today's event.
In terms of cautionary statement and non-GAAP measures, so obviously during the Investor Day, we will be making some forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ from those expressed or implied. We undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements. Relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements are listed in the latest MD&A, which can be found on SEDAR+ and on the website. Additionally, we may refer to specific non-GAAP measures during the Investor Day. These measures are also defined in the latest MD&A. Our MD&A includes reconciliations of non-GAAP measures, that you can see on the screen, to the most directly comparable GAAP measures. Management believes that these non-GAAP measures provide useful information to investors regarding the corporation's financial condition and results of operations as they provide additional critical metrics of its performance.
These non-IFRS measures are not recognized under IFRS, do not have any standardized meaning prescribed under IFRS, and may differ from similarly made measures reported by other issuers and accordingly may not be comparable. These measures should not be considered as a substitute for the related financial information prepared by IFRS. With that, I would now like to welcome our President and CEO, Alexandre L'Heureux.
Hello, everyone. Very, very pleased to welcome you all here in Toronto this morning, and also, I would like to take the opportunity to welcome everyone who are watching us virtually. Today is a great day. It's an exciting day for WSP. It's an opportunity also for us to look back very quickly on what was accomplished over the course of the last three years, I'm sorry, but also take a moment to pause and spend quality time with you this morning to really look at where we're headed as a company and where we wish to go and the direction that we want to take as an organization. Looking at the agenda, today we have, obviously, this morning, I'm sorry, disclose our long-term strategy, our three-year plan. We will go over this.
We will go over our financial ambitions, how we intend to transform the organization over the course of the next three years from a digital point of view. There's a real, real opportunity to modernize this industry, and WSP wants to lead from the front. We obviously will want to continue to leverage the platform, continue to spread our wings, and today we have assembled a group of very talented and experienced leaders who will be joining us to talk about high-growth area within the company and where we intend to spend quality time with this organization and our people to really propel the organization to new heights. Our people and our leaders this morning will share their perspective on WSP's achievement, on global megatrends, and how they will impact the organization and how this will shape the business, and our strategic positioning and how we intend to capture opportunities.
Obviously, you just heard from Sandy. This is an exciting day for us today. It's a special day as we are introducing our new brand identity reflecting the company's evolution and bold new direction. So how did we do over the course of the last three years? Reflecting on the journey and before looking to the future, the slides, sorry about that, reflect the journey and the achievement that were made over the course of the last three-year cycle. And I would say that the last three years have been transformational for us and will set the stage for the next chapter. Turning to our financial ambitions, I'm proud of our team's achievement. Looking at our significant financial achievements over the course of the last three years, we grew our net revenue by more than 30%, our EBITDA by 40%, and our EPS by more than 50%.
Obviously, in the next two weeks, we will be releasing our soon-to-be-released, obviously, Q4 numbers, but I'm highly confident that we will be exceeding those thresholds. You look at our cumulative performance and obviously what we achieved over the last three years. You look at what we were planning three years ago and where we're at today. We think that we will be exceeding our net revenue by more than 50%, our Adjusted EBITDA margin by 60, and our EPS by 55. I would argue that this has been by far our biggest cycle from a financial performance point of view. We've completed 16 acquisitions. We're now 73,000 professionals globally, an extraordinary talent pool of people. We have strengthened our foundation for future growth. We've set the stage for the next three-year plan.
Over the course of the last three years, we've raised north of CAD 2 billion of equity thanks to the support of our investors in the room and virtually, but also in the last three years, we have been able to make great strides with our employee population. We have really raised the bar, fostered an incredible working environment, and promoted more than 75%, I'm sorry, of our promotions took place internally. So we have a great bench and we have a great pool of talent and I could not be prouder to have been able to create oxygen for the young generation within the company. Obviously, we have reduced, post-pandemic, our turnover below historical levels. That's something that we're extremely proud of. We have promoted a new Chief Operating Officer. We have three new board members on our board.
Suffice to say that this has been a very, very busy period for all of us at WSP, but we feel that we have set the stage for future growth. Very proud of this. When you look at our diversification, and if I look back the last 10 years for a second, or about 10 years, and where we were post-acquisition of WSP and you compare it to where we are today, you see that we have completely transformed the organization. 10, 12 years ago, we were 15,000 employees. Today, we are close to 73,000 people. At the time, EMEA was representing by far our largest region. Today, you look at the complete transformation of the organization. We have 12,000 people in Canada, 23,000 in America, 25,000 in EMEA.
And when you look at the transformation of WSP and you look at our EMEA position, we have essentially tripled our position in EMEA, yet the contribution of our EMEA region has gone down from 49% to 26%. And we have seen a huge shift in Canada and more predominantly in the U.S., which today represents 45% of our business. So as you can see, we have changed the engine as we were flying, and that's something that I'm extremely proud of. And we have continued to diversify our platform. 10, 12 years ago, 85% of our work was mostly in design work. Today, we have a good balance between our advisory work, which represents 45%, and our engineering and design work that represents today 55%. Today, we have also a very good balance between our public sector and our private sector.
This is not done by the. This was done by design. We want to have a very, very resilient platform in good time and in bad time. So when we are going through a tougher time globally, the public sector tends to pick up, but when the market is hot and very dynamic, the private sector tends to pick up. So by design, we wanted to be absolutely certain that we had a good mix between the private and public sector, that we have a strong footprint globally from a geographical point of view, and we had a good balance between our advisory work and our design work. One thing that remains true and has been part of our DNA since our IPO in 2006 is that our strategy is clear. We believe that the return of working in OECD countries will far outweigh the risk.
So when you look at our profit and where our EBITDA is generated, north of 90% of our profit and our revenues are generated in OECD countries, and we will continue to follow that path and continue to follow that strategy. So when I'm thinking about where we're at today and leads me essentially to the catalyst of this organization and catalyst of our industry, we need to think about the driving force that will shape WSP and the megatrends that will shape WSP. So when you look at the various megatrends that are impacting our industry and impacting our company, obviously, you look at on the screen here, the various megatrends that are impacting us and are fueling demand for services. Well, I can only name a few, but climate change and resilience or emergency response is going to continue to be a great area of growth for WSP.
You only think that today, 4 billion people are living in areas that are quite threatened by climate change. And that will be a huge catalyst for WSP to really support those local communities and be in a position to help not only those communities, but help our clients making sure that they can face those climate change. Aging infrastructure today, one out of three bridges are either obsolete or need repair. So WSP is there to support those governments and making sure that we make sustainable changes again to our local communities. I haven't talked about digital and the AI revolution, which we will comment a little on this morning. And obviously, the announcement and the partnership of WSP and Microsoft, which we announced this morning, Chadi will cover that. And there's the energy transition and our recently announced acquisition of power Engineers .
Today, the world is boiling and is emerging, and the need for power is increasing by the day, and WSP is going to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of that. So again, later this afternoon, I will ask our leaders to talk about those high-growth areas and how those megatrends are impacting our industry and will be impacting WSP, which leads me now to our long-term vision. Obviously, over the course of our journey since our IPO, we always had three-year cycles and a three-year action plan, but we've always been guided by our long-term vision. We've always looked to become the undisputed leader in our industry, and that's something that has guided us throughout our journey as a company. But today, WSP is looking beyond being the undisputed leader in this industry, and we want to evolve our long-term ambition.
We also want to invest meaningfully in our digital transformation. We want to broaden our reach within the professional services universe. And that's why we believe that now is the time for WSP to not only be thinking about being a leader in our industry, but to become one of the leading brands in the professional services universe. We want to attract and retain the best people in our industry. We want to lead from a performance point of view. We want to generate top-tier organic growth in our space. We want to be a great compounder for our shareholders. And more importantly, we want to be a catalyst of change and modernizing our industry. WSP, we don't want to be the recipient of change. We want to be an impact maker, and we want to be an agent of change.
That's what will this long-term vision guide us over the course of the next while, over the course of the next strategic cycle, but for many more to come. When I'm looking as well at our long-term vision, I cannot stop but hope that we are going to meet our stakeholder expectations. That's one of our greatest ambitions. I've always believed that we can build an incredible organization. We can build a very exciting working environment for our people. We can deliver the best services to our clients, and yet we can be the most and best value creator for our shareholders. That's clear ambitions when I'm thinking about our long-term vision to clearly be the home of engineers and scientists in our space, to be the home of all that great talent that is looking to join our ranks.
And for our clients, we want to be an expert advisor. We want to be delivering transformative solutions. And as I said before, for our shareholders, we wish to be the compounder of this industry with stellar growth, with stellar financial performance, and incredible capital allocation. So what's next? What does it mean for WSP in the next three years? Well, I mentioned it before, and I'll mention it again. The last three years were quite exciting for WSP. We experienced tremendous growth. And guess what? We intend for this plan to be even more transformational than the last three-year plan. And we intend to grow at a faster rate than the way we've grown in the last three-year plan. So it's going to be by far, in my personal opinion, the most transformative plan for WSP.
That's why when I'm looking at the title of our plan, Pioneer Change for Empowered Growth , I believe that this title says it all. We are going to transform the organization. We are going to propel WSP to new heights. We are at a crossroad as an industry. As I said before, we want to modernize this industry. We want to be a catalyst of change for this industry. We want to make sure that over the course of the next three years, as we are changing the industry, as we are transforming WSP, we are growing and we are empowering growth, and we are empowering our people to continue to grow as an organization and as a business. We will be focusing on delivering leading financial performance.
We have mentioned it in our long-term vision in the past that we are set on a 20% EBITDA margin. While in the next plan, we are certainly going to make great headway to get towards that goal. That's certainly what we will be intending to do. We will also be intending to grow faster our top line. So we intend to increase our net revenue by 40%, to grow our adjusted EBITDA by 50%, to increase our adjusted net earnings by 60%. And one new metric that we will want to track in the next cycle is really to grow our free cash flow by 70%. So this is very ambitious, but I think we have all the tools in our toolbox to be in a position to achieve those goals.
I feel I have the team supporting this organization to achieve those goals. I feel we have the right mindset and the right performing culture within the company to achieve those goals. And I believe when I'm thinking about the megatrends that I just talked about and thinking about our transformation and the road that we're about to embark on, that we will be able to achieve that. Later this afternoon, I will be talking about where we intend to expand globally, both geographically and from a sector point of view. But certainly, I think that this plan is designed to, sorry, to propel WSP forward. And the way we are going to do it in the next three years is by growing, by expanding, by leveraging, and by empowering our people.
We are, as I just said a minute ago, we are going to grow our market and our services over the course of the next three years. And we will be committing to expand adjacent revenue streams to the scope of services that we are already offering to our clients. We intend to capture opportunities in a very highly fragmented market in many geographies. And we will continue to expand and work very hard in transforming the organization from a digital point of view. I know I've talked a lot about our digital transformation already, but this is going to be a key component of our transformation as we expand our scope of services this year. Obviously, growing our expertise is extremely important, but the way we are going to do it is by having a client-centric culture and making sure that we build trusted relationships with our clients.
This is going to be a critical part of our success. More importantly, not only are we going to need to build that, we will build trusted relationships with our clients, but we are going to deliver our projects just in time, on budget, and with the highest level of services and the highest standard. In order to do that, we are going to, as I said, continue to attract the best clients, work closely with them, and be an extension of their team, and really making sure that we spend quality time upstream with our clients to continue to grow our platform.
Equally, in order to do that, we are going to need to leverage this platform, and we are going to need to transform our platform and enable our operation to become more efficient, more optimal, to continue to simplify the way we do things, to unlock the full potential of this platform. I'm looking at what we've built since our IPO in 2006 and where we stand today, and I see incredible opportunities for WSP to continue to raise the bar, to continue to raise the efficiency of this platform, and really to leverage the collaboration across the network, and above all, I want our team leaders to bring simplicity and better insight in the way we do things and the way we assist our frontline employees.
Finally, and that's a word that we're using a lot within WSP, we're going to continue to empower our people for limitless opportunities and growth. I said it before, and I'll say it again. To me, creating an exciting working environment for our people and creating outstanding shareholder value for our shareholders are not mutually exclusive. We are going to continue to promote from within. We are going to continue to promote a culture of partnership and a culture of ownership. And I'm extremely proud of our ownership program. And in the next three years, we intend to become the largest employee shareholder base by headcount. In the next three years, we intend to have 30,000 of our 73,000 employees to own shares of the company. And that's something that we are extremely proud of.
And if you think about it, this is not just about having our employees having skin in the game, but it's also because we want to align our employees with the goal that we have on sites. We have a long-term vision. We have a very specific and crisp three-year plan. And we want to have all of our leaders and our employees to be aligned with where we're headed as an organization. But also, if you think about it, over the next three to five years, if we continue to promote and foster ownership within the company, at some point in time, we could have our employees owning more than CAD 1 billion of this company. And that's something as a publicly listed firm that is quite unique. It's a great differentiator.
I think it's a way for us to continue to attract talent, to reward the best in this industry, and making sure that we preserve this entrepreneurial fabric that we have within the company, and I've always wanted to preserve that as a CEO of this firm, is to make sure that we are all aligned to make sure that we deliver the goals that we have set for ourselves, so when I'm thinking about very quickly a high-level view of what we intend to do over the next three years, I mentioned that we've broadened our long-term vision. It's not different, but we are going to spread our wings. We are, in my personal opinion, one of the leading firms in this industry, and now I'm saying, why not becoming one of the leading brands in the professional services universe?
I believe we have a very, very strong and very exciting three-year plan where we are going to be an agent of change, where we are going to modernize this industry, where we are going to take the bull by the horn, and we'll lead from the front. We intend to grow at a faster rate than the last three-year plan, and that's something that we are extremely proud of. For those of you who've heard me before, I believe success attracts success. A firm that is not growing is a firm that is going backward. I can tell you that in the next three years, I'm highly confident that we are going to have a very exciting time and will have incredible opportunities to grow as an organization.
Also, all of this will be supported and we will be able to do all of that with our new brand identity that Sandy talked about earlier on. I think this is an outward representation of the future of our firm. It's different. I think it's edgy. It's dynamic. And that's who we are. We love to work in a fast-paced environment. We love to work in a dynamic environment. And I believe, as I said before, that this brand reflects who we are and what we stand for as an organization. Finally, one more time, digital is in front of us, the digital transformation and the AI transformation.
During our digital section, we'll be talking about the incredible partnership that we've announced this morning with Microsoft that I believe will allow us to, as I said before, be an impact maker in this industry and take great leap steps in the way we are going to transform WSP, but also more broadly, how we intend to support our clients going forward from a digital point of view. Also, we believe that this will enable our employees to really propel them even higher and provide them with better tools to provide more efficient design and to provide better advice for our clients, essentially. So thank you for this. This was just a high-level introduction of our long-term vision. Now I would like to move to the second section of our agenda, digital and our digital transformations.
I would like Chadi Habib to join us on the stage to talk about our plans for the next three years. Chadi.
Thank you, Alex.
Good morning, everybody. Thanks for braving the snow this morning. For those of you that are online, we've had a really wonderful last two days wading through snow. Good morning, everyone. My name is Chadi Habib. I've had the privilege and the honor of leading our digital strategy as well as our internal technology investments here at WSP. On a personal note, a long time ago, over 24 years ago, I started my career as an apprentice robotics engineer. I spent most of my time in technology. So this is coming to WSP about two and a half years ago is a little bit of a homecoming. What I'm going to do in the next 15 minutes is share with you our digital ambitions, our strategy, how we'll go to market, and make it as tangible as possible.
I might give you too many examples, but I'm a fan of examples, so you're going to hear a lot of tangible examples from us. Right after the presentation, as Alex mentioned, Alex is going to come on stage and André-Martin Bouchard . We're going to spend a little bit of time sharing with you the super exciting, in my opinion, pioneering alliance that we announced this morning with Microsoft. So we'll take some time on that. Before I kick it off, I think I need the clicker, by the way, but somebody else is going to click for me. I'll take the clicker, please. Thank you. So before I jump into digital, AI, and tech in the context of our business, I want to share with you a personal opinion as to why I think our industry is a world-shaping industry.
We hear a lot about technology and other industries, but let me take a moment to share with you why I personally think I'm in a great industry. Over the last 48 hours, everybody here in this room, everybody online has probably traveled somewhere in a car, taken a train. Those of you interacting with us online right now, our interactions are going through mission-critical facilities across all of North America. For those of you who are lucky enough to live in warm weather, you've probably taken a pet for a walk in a local municipal park. If you're really lucky in warm weather, you may have gone over a body of water. Chadi, why are you telling us all this? Because if you think about it, an engineer, a scientist, and an advisor has directly contributed to every aspect of that interaction of your last 48 hours.
This notion of our impact on the natural built environment is extremely exciting to me. What's even more exciting to me from a technology point of view is what we're seeing in our industry right now is all these natural and built environments. Not only is technology impacting how quickly, how effectively, and productively we can design, engineer, and advise on those environments, but we are connecting those environments like never before. Think about satellite data. Think about sensors. Think about subsurface data. Think about the massive amount of knowledge that we hold at WSP and that our clients hold. When you bring those two worlds together and they're coming together very fast, it's generating a spectacular amount of opportunity. And as Alex said, we are poised to be the catalyst of modernizing this industry. Now, we've set a very targeted, narrow definition of digital services in our industry.
You see the numbers here. Our preference is to focus it very much on digital services, platforms, and advisory, and not include so as not to overlap with our core business. Our ambition is to outpace the growth of the market in this space, and we believe it's going to double within five years. Let me take it a step further. So are we becoming a technology and software company? No. We will partner with the best of the best to do that. We'll talk about that momentarily. But I would suggest to you today, the advantage we have in a world-shaping industry is our core expertise. Later in the second block, you're going to hear some of the smartest people, my colleagues, talk about their expertise in the natural built environment.
I would suggest to you that if you look at the trends of technology over the last two decades, not a single technology has driven spectacular value to our world without domain expertise. And our biggest advantage is taking that domain expertise, combining it with tech, layering now extremely fast-evolving AI, and driving value. Let me give you my first example. Think about a client who wants to open up a facility on a national basis, wants to figure out where to put that facility, well, imagine taking our experience of site selection, considering biodiversity, regulation, all of our data, take platforms, technology, put that data in there, work with a client who has their own data and knowledge, combine all three of those together, and cut that cycle time from quarters and months to weeks. You don't have to imagine that.
WSP just delivered a project like this in North America. Let me zoom in a little bit further on how we'll go to market. On the screen, you'll see the eight areas that we've prioritized for our next strat plan. We already do a lot of these services, both from a digital platform and advisory point of view. We've prioritized these eight areas because of client signals telling us we need to help them solve some of these challenging issues. I'm not going to spend time to cover all of those. Sean, my colleague, will be at the booth during the breaks. Please have a chat with him. We can go through a lot more examples. But I'm going to cover two very quickly. Intelligent mobility. Now, you all know we're in the transportation space.
Let's imagine a scenario where you have an emergency vehicle that needs to cut through a city to take care of somebody, save somebody's life, to put out a fire. Imagine now that vehicle able to communicate with the same traffic systems that WSP engineers and scientists designed. Imagine it's able to interact dynamically with buildings, smart buildings, as it's passing by, pedestrians, in order for it to get through that city in a safe, effective, rapid way and get to saving lives and putting out fires. Once again, you don't have to imagine this. This is an active project today being delivered by the WSP teams in the U.S. I'd like to cover one more item on this list of eight domains, and that is this notion of life cycle digital twins. Now, you may say, we've been hearing about digital twins for a long time.
Why is that even there? If you think about a natural or built environment, it goes through briefly: plan, design, build, run, operate, and remediate. Yes, digital twins have been around in our industry in the early stages. They're quite present. But think about what can happen if, for example, electrical substations, power substations, we do the design, we take that design, yes, it's in a digital twin, but we make that design alive by putting it, in this case, into gaming engines. By the way, gaming engines turn out to be excellent physics models, and you make that digital twin alive across the entire life cycle, so what's the value for the client? Not only have we helped them design, but we've helped them optimize for outcome.
I didn't know this, by the way, but substations suffer quite a bit of physical attacks in parts of the world, and we have clients today using that platform I just explained to you to reduce the risk of those physical attacks. Those are just two examples of the areas that we're looking at. Now, of course, we cannot talk about technology and digital these days without talking about artificial intelligence. And yes, I put it under quotations because it means a lot of things to a lot of people. Just a note, engineers and scientists have been using machine learning algorithms and AI-like algorithms for a very long time to do their job. Now, of course, recently, there's a lot of convergence of technologies that have made evolutions that are incredible.
I would say to you, number one, we are convinced that the evolutions are having an impact on our clients and on the way we work. That's not a question anymore. What's important to us is to stay anchored in the value for our clients and our people. Hence, you'll hear from us in the next three years at least, this notion of All Smart, No Hype . Today at WSP, and actually for the last couple of years, we already have dozens of active projects validating value both for our clients and people. Let me give you a couple of areas where we're seeing some good traction. From a client point of view, expediting, simplifying, reducing work in the design cycle or in the advisory cycle, we're already seeing some very good traction here. Now, I have to tell you something. Back to the notion of what is our differentiator.
These models don't work if you don't have the top experts feeding them the right level of expertise and combining it with data. They don't give you the right outputs, number one, and number two, from a quality point of view, you can imagine the sectors we serve. You do not simply take the outputs of these models and deliver them to clients without quality management. So we use this notion of machine in the middle today. The other area that's really exciting in this space from a client-facing point of view is these models are able to capture phenomenal volumes of data, run thousands of simulations, and find an optimal answer for our clients in now orders of magnitude less time than before. There's a platform in the U.K. You can Google it.
DAISY does exactly that, applies large numbers of variables to scenarios that our clients are looking to solve and optimize it in a fraction of the period of time that it used to take. So those are a couple of examples. Internally, Alex mentioned as well our internal posture. Well, there are two elements that we focus on from an internal point of view. The first one is eliminate the mundane. I mentioned I started off my career as an engineer. I was an apprentice robotics engineer, and the lead engineer would give me all the crappy stuff to do. Well, imagine if very quickly we can provide our new generation of engineers and scientists the ability to quickly take some of that mundane, repetitive work, quality check, make sure the data is right, and move it so they can start focusing on high-value work, high-margin work for our clients.
Imagine if we're able to take the top experts in mining, in power, distill their knowledge, put it into a small, large language model, whatever technology you prefer, and make it available to the generations of engineers and scientists that are coming in. Not only does that allow them to have more impact on our communities, making them better today than they were yesterday, but it allows us to retain the collective knowledge of this company and multiply it, amplify this notion of collective brilliance as some of our senior engineers and scientists go on their well-earned retirements. Those are just two examples of how these solutions are already impacting our organization. I'm going to start wrapping up my presentation by giving you two last examples. I told you I have a lot of examples where we take domain expertise combined with technology and a client.
You'll hear this often from us. Our posture is really simple. To be the catalyst of modernizing this industry, as Alex said, there are three ingredients: our expertise, technology, and clients. In all of our digital offerings, all of our new digital offerings, we will partner with our clients. Glen Eira is a great example. This is a project from Australia. We partnered with the client. We partnered with two ecosystem partners. You take a tremendous amount of inputs like stakeholder management, regulation, zoning information, and you merge that with our expertise in this area with the client's data, and you create massive value. In this case, specifically, how do you create that value? Well, 2022, they had floods. This platform was being used while the floods were happening to determine where the next high-risk areas are and when to recommend movement to happen so people are safe.
They're using it today as we speak to address housing crisis shortages in terms of site assessments and rapid development to address their housing crisis. The client has already quantified, in this case, tens of millions of benefits to them. The next example I'll share with you and I'll close it off. Again, this notion of combining the natural built environment with technology. Imagine taking 90 buildings, grabbing 50,000 sources of real-time data, whether it's temperature, humidity, traffic, pedestrians, and so on, and combining all that information so that and applying a layer of technology, applying a layer of advisory and science from our teams to go after outcomes. Those outcomes could be traveler experience. In this case, it's reduce energy consumption and attain Net Zero objectives quicker.
This is a project that has won a collaboration award last year, and our U.S. teams are actually currently actively working on it. I'm going to close with reiterating, sorry for the repetition, some of the things that Alex said. We are extremely comfortable that we'll be a catalyst for change in this industry. It's one of the. I'm very optimistic. It's one of the most exciting times where you see the physical and the virtual come together with clients to drive value and make our communities much better today than they were yesterday. We will track our progress by growing faster than twice in digital services, advisory, and platforms, faster than the growth, the organic growth of our core business, and you've heard it probably multiple times in the examples I gave. We'll be focusing quite a bit on the long-term recurring revenue streams around digital.
One of our last elements is that we don't think we'll do this alone. Alex mentioned that earlier. It'll take ecosystems. It'll take strategic partnerships. We're actively discussing with many partners in the space. But very exciting for us this morning to kick off a new strat plan and accelerate this component is an announcement we made this morning with Microsoft. And for us to tell you a lot more about this, I'd like to invite André-Martin Bouchard. I'd like to invite Alex on stage, who, by the way, have been involved in structuring, shaping, in one shape or form or another, this deal over the last 18 months. And I think we're waiting for some seats. Here we go.
Thank you.
Thank you. Actually, we've got to give the boss the seat first, by the way. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being with us today. My name is André-Martin Bouchard. I'm the global director for the Earth and Environment business at WSP. I'll be moderating a quick fireside chat with Alex and Chadi, during which we'll be talking about our digital ambitions, but also, Alex would like to cover the partnership with Microsoft. Thanks, Chadi, by the way, for the great presentation. Very exciting times for WSP. Alex, maybe I can kick this off with you with a question. I'd love to know what this partnership with Microsoft means for WSP and for Microsoft.
Thank you, André-Martin. But first and foremost, we are extremely proud of this partnership because we are going to be able to combine our strong engineering and sciences expertise and combine it with Microsoft's incredible expertise in digital and AI transformation. So in a nutshell, WSP will become the go-to firm and the preferred partner for any engineering and science services to Microsoft. And Microsoft will become our go-to partner from a digital and AI transformation. So we're extremely proud because it's something that has never been done before in this industry. And as I said before and as mentioned by Chadi, if we wish to modernize this industry, if we wish to propel this industry to new heights, we believe we need a strategic partnership with someone that we trust. We've been working and have strong ties with Microsoft for more than two decades.
Certainly, the last year spending a lot of time together in Redmond and also together on this side of the Atlantic, of this side of the country, we have been able to develop a very strong agreement and strong partnership. We believe that this is going to be very positive for us, but also the industry.
Great. Thank you, Alex. And why do you think now is the right timing to enter in a partnership with Microsoft, Alex?
Yeah, I covered that a little bit this morning. I think this industry is faced with significant opportunities. And WSP, we have a choice as an organization. We can lead from the front, or we can be the recipient of change. We decided to embrace change, and we decided to find and build the right ecosystem to come up with the right solution to really assist our clients and assist this industry or transforming itself.
A long time ago, I sat down with Chadi, and I said, "Chadi, unlike everything else that we've done in the past as a company where M&A was part of our fabric and part of our DNA as an organization, and really M&A was a way for us to accelerate our strategy, I believe in this case, to really modernize WSP and the industry, we thought that the way to go about this was through an ecosystem, through partnership, finding the right partner to really propel this industry to new heights. So now I think we're going to work jointly, and we'll invest a significant amount of money together to really be in the position to provide a new offering to our clients and to provide a new offering to our respective clients together.
Thank you, Alex. I couldn't agree more. I think now is the right timing to enter into such a partnership, and I think it's going to be transformative, not just for WSP, for the whole industry. That's great. I would now like to ask that we turn our attention to the screens. We have received a video message from Judson Althoff. Judson is the Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, and he sent us a message directly from their headquarters in Seattle. Why don't we listen to Judson?
Hi, I'm Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. I'd like to thank Alexandre and Chadi for inviting me to join you today to share a few thoughts about our global strategic partnership and the opportunity ahead. As one of the world's leading engineering and professional services firms, WSP plays a critical role in developing built and natural environments in communities around the world, from buildings and transportation to water conservation and energy efficiency. And we could not be more excited to combine Microsoft's advanced AI and digital capabilities with WSP's leadership in engineering, advisory, and design to create innovative new offerings for the industry. Together, we are co-developing comprehensive solutions that will revolutionize the way organizations design and develop infrastructure. Through our collaboration, Microsoft will support WSP with world-class technology to accelerate the pace at which engineers can innovate.
As AI and digital infrastructure become increasingly vital to enable innovation, Microsoft will continue to engage WSP's expertise to support our commitment to advancing the sustainable development of our global footprint of data centers. Microsoft is proud to partner with WSP, and I look forward to the incredible value we will deliver to our customers together. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, that was a great video. And by the way, why not also acknowledge the presence of our Microsoft partners here in the room?
Chris Barry, CEO of Microsoft Canada. Thanks for being here, Chris. We really appreciate your presence and the entire Microsoft team. Welcome to our Investor Day.
Thanks very much. So quick question for you, Chadi. Judson mentioned revolutionizing the AEC industry and innovating at an unprecedented rate. So can you break down the key components of this partnership for us, please, Chadi?
Sure. First, I'd like to also say I'm extremely proud of the collective efforts on both sides to get to this really exciting partnership. The partnership has three components. The first one is this notion of WSP as a preferred partner for Microsoft. And that's exciting for the folks who run our core business. But let me just allude to it from a digital point of view. We are already in discussion with Microsoft to figure out if in that stream we can look at how we find sites, we design, eventually build, operate data centers, and figure out if we can digitize that process and where Microsoft can become potentially a client zero in that case. So again, I just come back to this notion. Can we take our expertise, the needs of our clients and technology, and apply it to that notion?
That's already one stream that we're working on together. So the first stream is preferred partner. The second stream is Microsoft. We prefer them. We already prefer Microsoft. We'll continue to invest there. I'm going to cover that a little bit later in the discussion today because there's a couple of exciting things going on. The third and really exciting area where Alex and Judson alluded to is this notion in the agreement. We've committed important investment, energy, and professionals to co-develop and co-market offerings for our industry. Streams in the offering areas that I showed you a little bit earlier. One of them, I'm happy to announce, is active with a client zero, where we're looking at risk management, applying AI, applying our expertise to help a specific client with risk management.
This follows this concept of a client zero every time we develop new offerings to modernize the industry.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, Chadi. We've covered a lot already, Alex. But back to you. Can you give a little bit of additional color on what your expectations would be for this partnership in the next three years?
Well, first of all, I mentioned it before, but igniting innovation. When we speak to our employees, speak to our clients, and our clients are saying, "Look, WSP, you guys are an extension of our team, and we want you to innovate, and we want you to bring new solutions to our complex problems." Well, I believe this strategic partnership will allow us to innovate and to ignite this innovation. Because the one thing we've realized as we were working and developing our relationship together over the last 18 months is that really we have similar clients. Our client base is very similar. If we put together our strengths, we can offer a go-to-market strategy and a much better client offering to our clients.
So I believe we are going to be able to innovate over the course of the next three years and seven years with this partnership, number one. Number two, amplifying the collective brilliance of our employees. Chadi, touch base on this. One thing that a professional services firm has never been able to do is to retain the collective brilliance of its people. When a PhD in mining is retiring at the end of its career, that person or her career, that person will go home. And we will retain some of that knowledge, but we will not retain the brilliance of that individual's. So for the first time in our history, if we do this right, we are going to be able to retain the brilliance of all of our people, past and new.
That will allow us actually to really provide more efficient, better design, and better service to our clients. Again, it's never been done in the history of professional services firms. McKinsey could not do this. Deloitte cannot do it. But if we do this right, and we have tested that out already with our partners, we are now going to be able to have virtual experts really training our newcomers, but also assisting us and providing the best services possible to our clients. It's really, really exciting what's happening. I think over the next three years, we are going to continue to update you on this.
That's great, Alex. Thanks. I like the concept of being able to capture and leverage the knowledge of all those people that go to retirement. If I expand on that concept, I think the same applies also to the 200,000 projects we work on, the data, the knowledge that we've built across the world, across different expertise. We can leverage that with different tools that we'll be developing with this partnership. That's great. Back to you, Chadi. Can you give us some tangible examples of how Microsoft services will benefit WSP?
Yeah, we've covered all.
Yeah, we've covered that.
Yeah, we've covered quite a bit. I'll add one notion just to amplify. I'll use that word again, the notion of innovation. What's exciting about working with a partner like Microsoft is we're putting together innovation hubs so that our engineers and scientists can turn to a place where they can test out ideas really, really quickly. Some of them will fail, and some will succeed, and those will scale up. I'll give you a tangible example. I promise it's my last example of the day. We have a team right now on Microsoft tech that is working on taking the collective knowledge of an asset. Let me explain. So think about a building, a bridge, a mine. They have lifespans of 10 to 100 plus years. Imagine all the assessments, maintenance reports, everything that comes out around that information.
We have currently an innovation stream working with our experts, a specific client, taking that collective knowledge of about 80 years' worth of information. You still have to curate it. You still have to do the right thing from an expertise point of view. That's our key differentiator. But moving it into a scenario where the client can interact with the entire history, whether it's engineering, science, or other regulation-type history of that asset, just like interacting with another human being, asking for scenarios and understanding the history of that asset. That is a pilot we are doing today with our internal teams on Microsoft tech. Let me just André-Martin change the game on you a little bit, André-Martin. Tell us a little bit, what do you think this could have of value in your sector in terms of E&E?
Thanks, Chadi, for flipping roles around. Was that planned?
No, I like to do that.
Thank you very much. So well, I'd like to start by saying that our Earth and Environment people, they're very picky. They're very savvy. They're very sophisticated when using technology. We've been using scientific models. We've been using remote sensing, remote monitoring. We've been using AI algorithms for actually four years. And our people love using those technologies. So that's an attribute, I guess, of our people. One great example, Chadi, that we've worked on for client Port of Montreal, we've worked on a digital platform called Smart Harbour. And that platform provided the Port of Montreal the opportunity to better manage their operations. So basically, we've captured all the data that we had collected over the years for Port of Montreal. We've connected that platform with a geospatial tool. And that also connected with high-resolution satellite imagery.
For that, we've partnered with the Canadian Space Agency to actually access these high-quality imageries. That provided the Port of Montreal with a unique dashboard platform to actually optimize their operation, plan for the few days ahead, and being more efficient and stay in compliance with the regulations that they have to stay in compliance with. So that's one example. The second example would be probably GoldSET. GoldSET is a digital platform our people have developed through the years. We have applied it on a number of projects. To keep things simple, the platform provides our clients the ability to quickly assess different project alternatives, whether it's transportation, distribution, power line, whether it's a roadway, whether it's a bridge or a mine. Our clients, they really want to have the optimal solution.
But before going into design, before going into the detailed studies, they want to have a quick view on what could be optimal. So we put all the baseline data, all the technical information that we have into that GoldSET platform. And it provides the client the ability to play with the project and get a quick appreciation of what the optimal solution could be, and then move on to the next stage. Both the appreciation on the project actually can be technical, can be environmental, it can be about stakeholder engagement and social acceptability, just to name a few.
It's exciting just listening to you.
That's it for our fireside session .
Yeah, thank you both. Thank you, André-Martin , for the insight. Thank you, Chadi, as well. Really appreciate the digital piece of this agenda. Now, I would like to welcome Alain Michaud, our Global Chief Financial Officer, and Mark Naysmith, our Chief Operating Officer, to come and talk about our plans for the next three years as it relates to our transformation. Gentlemen.
Thank you.
All right. Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to see you all. Thank you for joining, and I'll be remiss not to start by just saying a big thank you to our investor base online and in person. We appreciate your support. We appreciate the trust and the vision, and we don't take this for granted. So we keep on pushing ourselves, and I hope this will come across today. So next block is, and it's the last one before Q&A session, before the break, and we're going to talk about our financial and operational highlight. So we're going to start with talking a little bit about the past, and then we're going to move on to talk about the future. Looking at the past, at the onset of 2022, we had set quite ambitious goals for us. We wanted to grow our key metrics meaningfully.
I need the click also, clicker. Sorry. Thank you so much. All right. I'll start. We had set quite ambitious targets for ourselves. We were planning to become a $10 billion business. In terms of net revenue, we wanted to grow by 5% organically or above and 10% in terms of total growth. Today, with our outlook out there, because we haven't issued our result yet, we are planning to finish the year with a $12 billion business, $2 billion above what we were planning. We will have delivered mid to high single-digit growth, which is our highest level of organic growth posted in a single strategic cycle, and delivering a total of 15-year CAGR total growth. On the margin front, we've also delivered on our ambition.
And if we look at the last three strategic cycles, the last nine years, we've delivered over 450 basis points of margin improvement, on average 50 basis points a year. M&A has been quite active, $5 billion of capital deployed, 16 strategic acquisitions. That's our highest level of capital deployed in one cycle. Cash is also trending positively. We are hitting that 100% conversion target more and more. And I'm glad to report that the billing and collection targets and rates in Canada, U.S., and U.K., our new platform under the ERP, is performing now very well and even better, actually, than before the conversion. From our capital structure standpoint, we've issued equity. We've welcomed new investors. Thank you for your trust. We've diversified our long-term debt.
We're landing at the end of the cycle in a very comfortable position from a leverage perspective, which obviously gives us a solid foundation for future growth. When I look at the past three years, all in all, very proud of our financial accomplishment. I'm especially proud of the fact that we've delivered those results in a period of great change. We have welcomed 14,000 new employees, 16 acquisitions. We have transformed so many ways of working internally. And we have made a new ERP available to 40,000 people in 13 months with no significant issues. We're very proud about that. To top it off, we've seen in that three-year period, one, our turnover go down. And two, we saw the engagement score of our people going up in such a period of change and significant performance.
Very, very proud about what we've accomplished in the last three years. On that, Mark, I'll let you cover the operational piece.
OK, thanks, Alain, and I believe you're my clicker.
I am.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody. First of all, I'm really excited to have taken on this role as a Global Chief Operating Officer. I look forward to working very closely with Alex and Alain going forward. First of all, just let me introduce myself, if I may. I'm a chartered engineer. I joined the corporation 36 years ago in 1988. I've held a number of senior positions in the organization during that tenure across the UK, but also across the EMEA region. Up until the end of last year, I was the President for the UK and EMEA. That, just to put things in context, constitutes about 30% of our revenue and our workforce.
Over these last 36 years, I've been part of the WSP incredible journey, responsible for startup business units, and also responsible for running one of our more mature regions in the U.K. I did that for the last 12 years. In addition, I've had a lot of experience with M&A, in particular on the successful integration of companies that have joined us in the U.K. Consequently, I feel I have a very good appreciation for our business and also for our client and our stakeholders' expectations. Next slide, please, Alain. Now looking at the operational accomplishments over the last three years, our goal was to continue to leverage the tremendous strength of our diverse platform and to provide an optimal environment for our employees. Operational excellence is about prioritizing and optimizing productivity.
And it's all about seamlessly sharing expertise across our global network and ultimately driving results without compromising on quality. In our last strategic cycle, we'd identified three key components to further leverage this global scale. The first one was simplification in the way that we work. Secondly, to enhance project delivery. And thirdly, to boost our digital platform and evolve our workplace to a more agile, innovative, and collaborative environment. And I'm proud to report that we achieved tremendous progress on all of these key points. Next slide, please. Firstly, on simplification, we engaged the entire workforce and fostered an environment where feedback and ideas were welcomed and celebrated to help us move forward in a collective spirit. This was of particular importance during the last period where we had significant transformation across the business. And we needed to foster a culture of agility and change.
We wanted to promote a mindset where we focused our attention on reducing hours from non-value-related activities and maximize our time when our fee earners can spend time earning fees and working with our clients. All in all, by enhancing our end-to-end project processes, I'm pleased to say that we estimated that we actually saved about a million hours of colleagues' time, and that translated into about 20 minutes per employee per week, which we're very, very pleased about. This has translated into improved Adjusted EBITDA margin, which increased by approximately 40 basis points during our last strategic cycle. We've also grown significantly the size of our expertise in our global capability centers in India, Romania, the Philippines, and more recently in South America, where we've delivered CAGR growth in these last three years ahead of our main regional growth.
These few examples, together with other initiatives, have helped us to improve our margin expansion in the last three years. And lastly, as we know and we've been talking about this morning, we've boosted our digital platform to increase productivity, largely through the rollout of our ERP. And in addition, we've maximized our workplace. And we've reduced our real estate costs and footprint by more than 30% through leases that have expired in the last three years. Back over to you, Alain.
Thank you, Mark. So now let's turn to the future. So the snapshot here gives you a target for 2027. So the first point I'd like to make is we aspire to generate even more growth. Our ambition is to reach 10% per year total growth. And we want to generate we aspire to generate mid to high single-digit organic growth across the organization. And all in all, our ambition is to increase our net revenue by $5 billion to reach $17 billion by 2027. And you'll hear this afternoon or later today our colleagues talk about a lot of high growth areas. We predict that all those areas will each generate double-digit organic growth. And you've heard about digital and our aspiration to double the level of growth in the rest of the business.
So that supports, along with the megatrend that Alex covered, this elevated level of growth similar to what we've achieved in the last three years and beyond. The second point there is margin. We aspire to reach that 30-50 basis points a year in terms of margin expansion. And yes, we see a path to get to 20%. And the third element that I'd like to mention is cash. We've introduced that 70% increase in free cash flow. That's an area of further focus. We've aligned the compensation philosophy in the organization to have our key leaders and our direct report have free cash flow as part of their metrics. So the punchline at the onset of the strategic plan in 2022, we were planning this long-term vision of doubling in size and reaching that 20% EBITDA margin.
If we deliver our 2027 plan, and we intend to, we would have reached that double in size and that 20% EBITDA margin. Turning to our 2025 outlook, which is available in the press release we've issued yesterday, we're planning organic growth in the 5%-8%. We expect Canada and the Americas to continue to be the highest growth engine with mid- to high-single-digit EMEA in the mid-single-digit organic growth and APAC in the low- to mid-single-digit organic growth. EBITDA, sorry, $2.5 billion-$2.55 billion and DSO to range between 67 and 73 days. I'd like to remind you that this outlook is aimed at assisting analysts and shareholders in refining their perspective on our performance.
Our outlook has been prepared considering the current volatility in the foreign exchange rate environment and our assessment of the full year, considering, among other things, our hedging posture. Also, a selected financial outlook does not consider any acquisition, transaction, disposal that could occur after today. Turning to capital allocation, our priorities remain unchanged. We will continue to invest in our business. You've heard about the stride that we intend to do in digital, so we will invest significant capital there. We'll finish the ERP rollout, investing capital there, and of course, our CapEx. M&A will continue to be a top priority for us. We continue to see ample room to grow. We continue to see a purpose in building a platform that continues to be even more relevant to our client base and the evolving needs in the world.
Third, we're going to continue to manage our balance sheet prudently, but with flexibility. So we're still aiming at that one to two turns of leverage. And we are comfortable exceeding the two times for the right asset, the right catalyst, and capture the right opportunities as long as we keep that investment-grade profile. And lastly, we will continue to reassess our dividend regularly. And we may consider purchasing shares if condition warrants or based on stock price, our debt level, M&A activities, interest rate, and obviously accretion level. All right, so now we'll turn into a fascinating topic of mine and of Mark. We'll talk about our productivity, our efficiency. We have our eyes set on getting to that 20% target in the current strategic cycle. And we're even pushing further in terms of ambition with another objectives ahead of us at 22% and beyond.
We're not going to reveal any secret sauce today, how we do things. But definitely has been part of our DNA. And we intend this to continue to be part of how we do things at WSP. And there's no one single solution to margin expansion. It's the power of the little thing, the small thing we need to do day in, day out, the rigor that we put in managing our business. And these little things add up. And they have a big impact. And if we call that the power of one, if we were to do these things, just increase utilization by 1%, our pricing, our project performance, cut one meeting a month, one travel a month, all of this add up. And it would give us the ability to reach our target. And there's way more leverage than that.
Let's look now at the next three years, the levers we will continue to push on to drive that increased margin. Mark will cover the first three, growth, productivity, and project performance. Let me say a few words now on business partners and the strategic investment. On business partners, this is just for context, our supporting team that are there to enable the operation to do great things in the world. Finance, HR, IT, communication, legal, and much more. The tagline of our three-year plan is Pioneering Change for Empowered Growth . This lever here is all about that. We will accelerate change in the next three years. As Alex mentioned, we think this will be probably the cycle where we see a lot much more transformation than what we've seen in the past. We will finalize the deployment of the ERP.
And at the same time, we will use this as a catalyst to transform our function to better support the operation, to build more efficiency, and provide more business insight so to run our business in a better way and even better way. So by bringing our corporate function together, we will use automation. We will increase the focus. And as Mark liked to say, our whole intention here is to let the fee earners earn fees. So a good infrastructure that supports the business and doing great things. And that's obviously a significant lever for us that we will tap in as we gradually continue to roll out the ERP, which will take place in 2025 and finalize in the first half of 2026. And that's a new lever for us in terms of margin improvement. Strategic investment, yes, we have lever to increase the margin.
But we're also investing in building a more resilient platform. You've heard Chadi talk about and Alex talk about digital. So we're obviously investing. We're planning to invest more than CAD 200 million, CAD 100 million to finish the ERP. So we will definitely continue to invest in building a better business. And the other point is the Own It program. So investing in our people, driving more alignment in the organization, even more alignment. So Own It and our Global Share Purchase Program , that's another area of investment. Mark, you want to go with the other lever.
Thank you, Alain. So back to fee earners, earning fees. So in my new role, and just to cover the operational highlights for the next three years, I mentioned earlier I'll be working very closely with Alex and Alain, but also with our regional teams and with our global sector leads, with a laser focus on growth, productivity, and project performance. By providing the glue between our back office and front office, my focus in operations will be to free up Alex and Alain to focus on equally important growth matters relating to M&A and shareholder relationships. Our regional presidents now all report directly to me. And with this strong relationship and alignment, we'll foster streamlined operations. And that will help with our alignment and the collaboration between our regions and our global business partners that Alain referred to there.
In turn, this will provide even more efficiencies to allow us to grow the business. Next slide, please. On growth, with senior leaders externally focused, together with our mature global and regional key client programs, we will look to increase our business mix, leveraging client relationships and also growing our revenues and our margins. We will increase our business mix by leveraging our global scale and through our multidisciplinary offering across our countries, but also by scaling up our service offerings and by growing our front-end advisory skills and our digital service offerings, where we look to be paid fairly for the service that we offer, the expertise that we provide. We'll be able to grow our margins ahead of inflation and to elevate our margin profile.
We'll be hearing more about our scale and the scaling up of our business mix in the next section of this morning's presentations. Next slide, please. Moving to productivity, our ambitions for improving are closely aligned with our growth and margin enhancement goals, and the evolution of our business partner model that Alain referred to plays a big part in this, which will help our fee earning capability and utilization on projects. Linked to this, and still focusing on promoting growth, I will continue to drive our simplification program, thus allowing our fee earning colleagues to spend more time with clients and as much time on fee earning work. As mentioned earlier by Alain, in our last strategic cycle, we made significant progress successfully bringing three of our largest regions onto our new ERP platform.
And this was a huge achievement and something we're very proud of, bringing again more utilization improvements to the business and simplifying the way of working in these three large regions. Digitally enabling tools, AI, technology enhancements will continue to support improvements in productivity, as we've heard already from Chadi, our CTO. And with a couple of other big regions moving on to our ERP platform in 2025 and 2026, this will be another great step forward in our global alignment, simplifying and improving our productivity and our processes, and also allowing us to work on global projects together following similar processes. In tandem, we will continue to refresh and review our operating structure to leverage our scale and to remain fit for purpose as we continue to grow. Next slide, please. Project performance.
We've made great progress on project performance over the last period, introducing and aligning best practice across the world and through the implementation of our project delivery initiative. This will continue throughout the next cycle, and again, this will help to optimize our project delivery. We will continue to standardize our approach to project selection, project reviews, which in turn again will continue to reduce our margin erosion. Another important area to focus on is the growth of our global capability centers, who support our regions and play a huge part in helping us to boost our optimization and project delivery. We currently have 4,500 colleagues supporting us in our GCCs, and they're dedicated to supporting on project delivery and efficiency. Some regions, likes of the UK and the Middle East, already have 20% of their headcount in the GCC support centers, but other regions are still less than 5%.
So that just goes to show the huge opportunity and focus that we'll be making in these other regions over the next three years. That's all for now. Back to you, Alain.
Thank you, Mark, so let's wrap it up. As we look at the journey ahead, we're excited. We're feeling optimistic and we're proud of our track record but there's no complacency here. It's just giving us the confidence to hang higher, so as key takeaway, we're pushing our boundaries even further as we're thinking long term for the organization. We have a clear plan for the next three years and we aspire to grow even more and while doing this, we will also transform and change this organization, building an even better WSP and I'll finish off by saying that as visionaries, we do aspire to continue to be that leading compounder delivering sustainable value to you, dear shareholders. Thank you. Alex, on that, back to you for Q&A session.
Thank you, Alain, so I would like to welcome you, Alain, actually.
Stay on stage.
Stay on stage. Mark, Chadi. Thank you. So this was the end of our first block, where we covered, as I said, high level how we intend to win in the marketplace and how we intend to grow and how we intend to raise the bars on organizations. So as mentioned by Alain, I'd like to open up for Q&A. Happy to take questions in the room, but also virtually. So the first question is for Alain. Alain, which margin efficiency lever excites you the most for the upcoming three years?
That's a tough question. For me, what excites me the most, one, is I have a partner now with Mark to help driving growth aspirations. So no pressure, Mark, but kidding aside, I think if we look at every lever we have, the new piece that we have is this business partner transformation. I'm excited about all of them, to be honest, but the business partner transformation, how we could transform the back end of our organization to, as Alex said, keep things simple and allow our fee earners, our frontline people, to be efficient in the marketplace, focus on client, focus on project. Driving the efficiency is one thing. I think this is great from just a margin lift, but having the ability to leverage our 4,000 or 5,000 people in the support function to play an active role in growing the company, that to me is quite exciting.
So that would be my answer, Alex, for the great question.
OK. Thank you. Mark, anything you would like to add on this?
I would add the simplification piece. Coming onto the new ERP, the U.K., Canada, and America are already working much, much closer together. And I think the more we can simplify our processes and allow our fee earners to fee earn, it's going to have a huge impact.
OK. Obviously, we took a question virtually. But I'd like to switch back and forth between the room. Chris.
Yeah, thanks. Chris Murray from ATB Capital Markets. I guess a couple pieces of this. You talk about in the new plan, you put out a free cash flow conversion target, which is new. So maybe a little bit of thought about why add that to the plan in this iteration. But you've also called out a conversion rate now above 100%. And historically, it's been one of those things that WSP has always been challenged to get above 100%. So can you maybe explain what's different, whether that's going to be back office functions? Is it maybe a different approach to capital spending, DSO management? So just kind of some of the moving parts to think about on that conversion cycle.
Yeah. Before I turn to Alain, just one small correction, Chris. Historically, WSP, we've always, always generated free cash flow above 100%, with the exception of the last plan, for the simple reason that we've gone through a significant transformation with the ERP conversion, where we put 45,000 of our 70,000 people on the new platform. Number one, there's been some significant changes to U.S. tax regulation that really highly impacted us as a company. But if you do take those two significant items out, I believe in the last plan, we would have delivered above 100% again. And if you look at our profile and the way we've performed, historically, you've seen that we've been running a tighter ship year-over-year for the last decade. And the reason why we've actually incorporated free cash flow, it's because we believe that it's the heart and blood of an organization.
I don't remember the old saying, like, top line is vanity and bottom line. Cash flow for us is king. At the end of the day, that's what we believe in. And cash conversion is top of mind. And we are going to continue to strive to do better in that case. So I don't know, Alain, if you wanted to add anything on that.
I think it's a rigorous answer.
And you've seen our DSO for next year, 67-73 days. So that's our aspiration, right? Now the ERP is behind us. We've significantly de-risked that project, working well in our three key regions. And we are progressing with confidence in the other region. And we have the mastermind of the ERP conversion here with Chadi and the rest of the team, obviously. So we do feel good about bringing this back into low DSO and great focus on generating great free cash flow.
I would add, when you think about it in the last three years, Chris, I mentioned that this morning in my opening address. We changed the engine as we're flying. We've never deployed so much capital. We've increased our margins significantly. And at the same time, our free cash flow, yes, suffered a little bit.
But our DSO only increased by, what, three days on average? It's pretty astonishing and something that we should all be collectively proud of. So overall, I think certainly from my position as Global CEO, the reason we incorporated that is because I believe cash is really, really important. And I only can echo what you just said, that we need to do better in the next plan. And we intend to thrive and do extremely well from a cash flow perspective.
Thank you. Other questions in the room? Yeah, there is another one from Frederic. Oh, sorry. Yuri, go ahead from Canaccord.
Yeah, Yuri Lynk from Canaccord. Can you just talk a little bit about the revenue model for the AI offering? It sounds like it might be a bit project-based. But I'm wondering if there's a more recurring or subscription nature to the AI offering.
Chadi, you want to pick this one up?
Yeah, you've already partially answered the question. Our intent is both advisory services, which will be project-based, and then platforms will have a recurring nature as well as recurring services. We already actually deliver recurring platforms and services in the digital space. Several examples I cited earlier have already recurring revenues. And we'll continue to invest in that.
Frederic from.
From Raymond James. Thank you. Your partnership with Microsoft suggests a potential investment of $1 billion over seven years. Can you unpack this a bit? Just wondering where you expect to direct the investments toward?
I think it's combined investment, obviously. I think directionally, it's fair to say that we're both jointly going to significantly invest in this relationship. Obviously, the strategic partnership is confidential, Frederic. But directionally, I think a significant portion of that investment will go in client-facing activities. We really want to digitalize our offering with the support of Microsoft. But also in return, we definitely want to support Microsoft in deploying capital in a more efficient manner with their mission-critical facilities and their mission-critical work. So it's really a joint effort to really raise the bar. And over the next seven years, what we're telling our investors is that now we're ready and prepared to dedicate a significant amount of capital to transform the organization and propel WSP to new heights in a nutshell.
Thank you.
Mike Tupholme, TD Cowen. Alexandre, you mentioned M&A is a top priority. I know that hasn't been a focus of the discussion so far this morning, really, other than the quick mention there. But wondering if you can comment a little further on M&A as it relates to both the pipeline and how you think about it over the next three years with the areas of focus.
Yeah, Michael, could we save that question a little bit later? Maybe when I address the block two of our session, we can perhaps have a discussion together on that question. But I think I'll cover a fair amount of that later on this morning.
Got it. Thanks.
Thank you. Next question.
I think I have the mic. Do I have the mic? Am I next? OK. You mentioned a few new items in this strategic plan. And I think the biggest for me was this ecosystem and this partnership approach. And alongside that, you spoke about retaining the intelligence and the brightness of some of the retirees. You spoke about digital growth. And there's a lot of newness in this kind of more proactive approach and the future-proofing behavior, actually. And I'm just wondering, what are you most worried about? Or maybe worried is not the right word. But where do you have more eyes and just ensuring the plan is going as smoothly as you intended?
Are you suggesting, just so I understand the question properly, you think in terms of our intellectual property, in terms of the expertise that we're bringing to the table, in terms of is that what you mean?
More just like this partnership with Microsoft and this ecosystem partnership approach. What could go wrong in the plan? Or what are you most worried about that has a greater risk attached to it, maybe?
I'll be honest with you. I spend a lot more time thinking about what's going to go right to start with. I think I spent a lot of time with the senior executive at Microsoft over the last year, really spending time highlighting how we wanted to develop this partnership and the strategic partnership. I think I mentioned that a little bit during the digital section in a Q&A that we should not be afraid to adjust and to be nimble and agile. I feel that since our IPO, the model that we followed was optimal and really efficient to build the platform that we have built over the course of the last 15 years.
But as I was reflecting on what's coming up in our industry and as I was reflecting on what we need to do to turn the corner and really bring WSP at the forefront of our industry, I felt that building an ecosystem with Microsoft and others was by far the best way to de-risk the transformation of WSP. So the way I would answer your question is I was quite focused on making sure that I was de-risking the value proposition by entering into a partnership and making sure that we are leveraging the strength of our partner in Microsoft, their digital capabilities and AI transformations capabilities, and yet combining their strengths with ours, which is technical excellence, collective brilliance, and making sure that when you combine our strengths together, one plus one equals three.
I think this was, in my personal opinion, a much better way to leverage the power of our platform than go and buy software companies, if that makes sense.
Totally. Thank you.
Thank you.
Ian Gillies from Stifel. Alex, the one thing that stood out from this presentation is there was a lot of focus on professional services rather than engineering. Historically, we've gone and looked in the ENR rankings and been like, oh, who may fit with what comes next? This plan seems wider, and so from a scope of M&A opportunities, would you suggest us to use a bit more imagination in thinking about what the M&A targets could be over the next three years versus history?
I don't like to say this, but I feel what I've said this morning is not necessarily new in the sense that I remember in 2010 speaking with some of you guys. And I said, in 2020, there will be 100,000 people firm in this space. In the same way, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Coopers & Lybrand in 1998 created a 100,000 people organization, 50,000 PricewaterhouseCoopers and Coopers & Lybrand combining forces together to create a global champion. I got it wrong because we're 75,000 today. We're not 100. So we're slightly trailing. But I believe that there is room in the market. And there is a hole in the market to really take our position in the world. I mean, right now, we have strategists owning the market, like Bain, McKinsey, and a few others. We have innovators owning the market with Microsoft, Google, and a few others.
We have law firms who have created global champions for lawyers. Same with the accounting firms, with the Big Four firms. But they aren't really a large, big-scale player to be the preferred home for engineers and scientists. So with different words, what I've tried to express this morning and where I'm going with this is I'm trying to take you on the journey. We started as a local player when we IPO'd our firm. We built a national platform over the years. We spreaded our wings to become an international player in our space. I'd like to think today, and I hope you concur with that, that we have become one of the leading firms in this space. And what I am saying is now it's time for us to propel WSP to new heights and continue to grow.
And not only just become a leading brand in this space, but to become a leading brand in the professional services universe. Full stop. That's the aspiration. And that should be our North Star as an organization. And we've been extremely consistent over the years. If you remember, we said we are not going to become a vertical player where we are going to be everything to everybody. So we stayed away from construction. We stayed away from operating and maintenance. We said we want to be the top-tier consultant to our clients. And we want to be in a position to resolve complex problems and bring our collective brilliance to the table. And now what I am saying is we've done that. And we are continually doing that in our industry.
But what I am saying is now let's spread our wings and do this in the broader space of consultancy.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning. Is it my turn?
Yep. Fidelity.
OK, good morning, Charles from Jarislowsky Fraser. Congrats, guy. A really impressive set of numbers and outlook. Just to double-click on the margin, OK, just to understand the thinking behind the numbers that you're putting out for 2020 and 2022. Given the difference between the regions - there's several hundred basis points difference between the regions - and the growth expectations, which are extremely attractive, is your assumption based to what extent is your assumption based on a transformation of the regional mix in the future? Have you assumed the same regional mix in those numbers or further significant changes to that? And if it's the same regional mix, to get to 2022, is it mostly concentrated in getting EMEA? Would the EMEA be the biggest component of that or spread across all regions? Just help us understand the components within that.
That's a very good question. I will let Alain and Mark talk about this just. But if I can interject for a second, I'm not sure I look like the moderator today answering a lot of those questions. But look, I've said multiple times in the past that running a global organization in a professional services space, you have to pull multiple levers to be able to raise the bar as an organization. So the plan for Australia to really raise the profitability might be different than the plan that we have for our US operation, very different than the Canadian operation for a variety of different reasons: macroeconomy, supply-demand dynamic, productivity, maturity of the organization. We talked about our complementary resource center. So I think it's a multitude of factors that will allow us to raise the bar.
It's not one single thing that will allow us to do this. In terms of the first part of your question, look, in 2013, we were significantly different than where we are when you fast forward 10, 12 years from now, and I expect, actually, that the footprint will continue to evolve. There's no doubt about it, but as I will address in the next block, I think there is room for us to significantly grow in many jurisdictions and many geographies and then many sectors where I feel we are subscale, so yes, I think it's going to be a mixture of both. I think we are going to hustle and really work on a number of streams and activities to raise the bar to 20%, but at the same time, you are right.
And I think that would only be logical that we are going in these next few years to invest in high-growth, high-profitability sectors. There's no doubt about that. And to your point, this is going to help us out raise our profit margin, for sure. Do you want to add anything, Mark and Alain?
What was going through my mind was what you were saying, Alex. It's very much a portfolio. But we've already got a good track record in some of our regions, having lifted the bar quite considerably. And we'll continue to do that through many of the things we've talked about this morning on process simplification, sharing best practice between regions. So think big. We'll get big. But it's a portfolio overall.
Okay. I think maybe one last question from you, Bobby, Fidelity. Fidelity. Yeah.
Bobby Reynolds with Fidelity. I don't know if you can hear me.
We can hear you. We hear you well. We can hear you.
Yeah. So if I could just ask on the traditional design business, as you get more efficient providing the service and presumably your competitors will as well, would you expect that to create fee deflation in that part of the business? And how do you think about offsetting that if that is the case?
No, absolutely not. That's the answer to your question. We see technology as an enabler. As I said, I think it's going to ignite innovation. I think it's going to allow us to provide a better service, more efficient design. Right, so to the contrary, I think, if any, we want to use technology in some ways to continue to raise the bar from a profit margin point of view, and it's a very, very important point that you're bringing up, Bobby. I want to be crystal clear. We have diversified our company over the last decade, not because we wanted to shy away from design, but because we wanted to expand the scope of services to our clients, and we wanted to get closer to our clients very early on in a project.
So I wouldn't want you to think that we fear the commoditization, if you want, of our design work. To the contrary. Today, you look at the work and the iconic projects that we undertake. Today, I would argue our profit margins in design have gone up versus 10 years ago. Why? Because the projects are more and more complex. And actually, this is where WSP excels. We want to work on the most complex assignment. We want to bring our technical excellence to the table. And we want to be present in the value chain of our projects. We want to be there in the planning. We want to be there in the social acceptability of these projects all the way down to the design.
Then later on, Chadi, you touched base on this, with the assistance of technology, we want to be there in the asset management cycle of the projects that we design. Actually, I'm extremely excited about the prospect going forward. I don't believe that our margin is going to go down to the contrary. I think, and I don't repeat it because I'll deny it. But I think we believe that we can continue to raise the bar from a profitability point of view. That makes sense? Yeah. Thank you. OK. That's the end of our Q&A session for block one. Thank you for your time. Coffee, and there's a break. We will reconvene in 30 minutes, I believe. OK. 30 minutes. Thank you very much.
And please take advantage. There's going to be booth people, our team ready to talk about a high-growth area. So please interact with the team. Thank you.
Okay, welcome back, everyone. I hope you enjoyed the break and had an opportunity to visit our booths in the back. Before we, I believe, start the most exciting part of our agenda today and introduce you to some of our leaders who will talk about select high-growth areas of our company, I just want to take a second to talk about growth. Michael, earlier on, asked a question about growth and growth potential, and I know that in this room and virtually, it's very much in the back of our investors' minds and analysts' minds and the investment community. So I just want to take a second to talk about this. First, we're being asked that question quite a lot.
Are we still, are we in a consolidated market? Do we operate the business in a consolidated market, or now we're still really much evolving into a fragmented market? Well, just to give you a flavor. Market at this point, and you look at our market share, WSP's market share in our various regions. Generally speaking, I think it's fair to say that despite our size, the sheer size of WSP, we have a relatively small market share in the marketplace. I think in the last three years, it's fair to say that we have increased our market share, that in my personal opinion, we are stealing some market share in the marketplace. But if there is some perception that the market is a lot more consolidated than it is, well, I believe there's tremendous room for growth.
Again, a friendly reminder, when you look at our market position and you look at the various sectors where we play, transportation infrastructure, we have the leading position, the leading franchise globally as per ENR. Property & Building as well, including mission-critical work, we have the number one position per the ENR. Earth & Environment, as you recall, not so long ago, five, six, seven years ago, we had a relatively small platform, but with the acquisition of Golder in 2020 and Wood E&I in 2022, we significantly grew our presence. Today, Earth & Environment, as per Environment Analyst , we have the leadership franchise with north or close to 20,000 strong environmental professionals. More recently, and that's what we had announced in the last three-year plan, was really to become one of the leading firms in the energy transition.
So again, for the sake of repeating myself, extremely pleased to welcome Power Engineers and the WSP network. Power Engineers was and is one, if not the leading brand in power in the United States. I had the pleasure of interacting with the power Leadership team for a decade. And more recently, in recent years, I had the pleasure of getting very close to some of their executives, and we have one in the room today that will be talking about our power sector, Holger Peller. I want also to spend just a moment on the power of organic growth. I know that since our IPO, we've been known and recognized as a firm that was quite successful on the M&A front. And I've always said that M&A is part of our strategy, but at the same time, I like to say that M&A is not a strategy.
M&A is a way to accelerate the deployment of our strategy. It's a means to execute on our strategy, but I also want to remind everybody that since our IPO, we've never had a negative year in organic growth, with the exception of 2020, when all construction sites shut down all at once, and yet, our top line only reduced by approximately 3%, so when you look at our performance over the last three years and you look at how we've performed and you look at what this means for WSP, when you pause and reflect on our performance, you can see that any given year now, we are essentially creating the equivalent of an ENR Top 100 engineering firm in our space every year, organically.
So when we talk about consolidation, when we talk about the fragmentation of the market, when we talk about our capabilities from an organic growth point of view, every year now, given the sheer size of WSP and our scale, we are creating an ENR top 100 firm organically. I mentioned our long-term vision this morning, mentioned the market and how the market has evolved over time. And I also mentioned that we wish to spread our wings and we want to continue to grow as an organization. Michael was asking earlier on, how do you feel about the potential for growth for WSP? If you look at our industry, obviously by headcount, we are the largest, probably by revenue and also by EBITDA. But when you compare WSP to the professional services universe, I think sky's the limit.
There's tremendous opportunities for us to continue to grow through M&A and tremendous opportunities for us to continue to grow organically. And that's what WSP will be all about in the next three years. And if there are some doubts around the fragmentation of the market, I think we've just discussed this, I do believe that the pipeline of acquisitions and the opportunities will come our way as we continue to execute on our strategy. So when you look at our focus and our strategic growth and where we wish to grow over the next three years, it would be easy to see all of the above. But really, where we are going to spend a lot of our time over the course of the next three years is certainly North America. North America is a great place for WSP to do business.
Yes, there are some challenges, but there are tremendous opportunities to scale up both in our geographies, but also from a sector point of view. I think I've mentioned it on a number of analysts' calls that our footprint in continental Europe is subscale, and in the right circumstances, we would like to continue to grow this platform and grow our network in continental Europe, so certainly, we are going to be laser-focused on that region. ANZ today, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand is probably half the size of our Canadian operation. Yet, the gross domestic product of the region is probably very similar to Canada, so I see again great opportunities for us to continue to grow through acquisitions, but also through organic growth, and then, obviously, Latin America has been a great region for us, and really, the Golder acquisition really transformed that region for WSP.
We are going to continue to thrive in the region, really to be there and continue to support our clients internationally in Australia, but in Latin America, and continue to take a cautious view on the Middle East. In recent years, we've experienced tremendous growth in the Middle East, but we've always tried to keep a good balance between UAE, between Saudi, and the work that we've been doing over the course of the last decade. I could say that actually now, when I look at our blue chip list of clients in the Middle East, we really moved in the upper quartile in terms of the quality of clients that we're working with and the services that we are offering day in, day out.
From an acquisition point of view, again, it would be easy to say that we wish to grow everywhere from an acquisition point of view, but really, the geographies that I just mentioned organically are also going to be an area of focus for us from an acquisition point of view. I think in power, for instance, there are real opportunities for us to continue to spread our wings, to develop our network. Last year, we announced an acquisition in Spain in transmission distribution. I talked about Power Engineers , but I think there is more work right now in the Power sector than we can undertake. So there will be some opportunities for us to continue to grow in power.
Certainly, Canada, United States, I believe, had you told me 10 years ago that we would be 10,000, 11,000 in Canada, and I would be sitting here or standing in front of you telling you that there's still a lot of room for us to grow. Well, guess what? The market is very buoyant, and I do feel that the Canadian market, there's room for us to consolidate the market, and equally, in the U.S., I mentioned it before, we have about 1,000 people in Texas. Texas essentially generates the GDP of Australia, and yet, we're four or five times bigger in Australia than we are in Texas.
Again, in the U.S. and Canada, we'll be laser-focused on really targeting the right markets for us to grow organically and find and be opportunistic in the marketplace to find the right brands and the right firms to join forces with us. Again, I talked briefly about ANZ, a great market for us. It's been a little bit more slow with the change in governments in recent years, but longer term, WSP, we are a big believer in the region. It was discussed this morning. I think Mark mentioned it, but we want in the next strategic cycle to continue to focus on our presence upstream in the value chain of any projects and the development of any of those projects. Obviously, we want a strong position in advisory, a strong position in planning. We will continue to capitalize on our strength in design.
Later this afternoon or this morning, we'll be talking about our Program & Project Management capabilities and how we intend to continue to grow our presence in that space. Asset management, we have a real, real opportunity with our digital expertise and what we're about to develop and our go-to market strategy to really play a great role in the asset management cycle of the projects that we design. Key takeaway, you need to stop and reflect about it, but the power of organic growth to be a compounder and to be the compounder in our industry, we believe that organic growth is the heart and blood of an organization. Every year now, we are essentially creating a top 100 ENR firm in our space. We will continue, as part of our fabric and DNA, to significantly deploy capital in M&A.
That will be the favored option from a capital allocation like it's always been. For the avoidance of doubt, that's where we want to deploy capital, M&A, and organic growth initiatives. We will continue to develop our subscale geographies and our sectors. I've talked briefly about our environment, talked about power. Today, you'll hear about water. You'll hear about PM. You'll hear about advanced manufacturing and mission-critical. There are tremendous opportunities for us, WSP, again, to really expand the scope of services that we can offer to our clients. On that note, I'd like to turn to Marie-Claude Dumas, our president for our Canadian operation, and Holger Peller, our global director for power and energy at WSP. Marie-Claude, do I give that to you?
Yeah, I'll leave it there. I think they told us they would change the slides for us, so. Good morning, everyone. As Alex said, I'm Marie-Claude Dumas, and I lead the Canadian region for WSP.
I am Holger Peller, Global Director for Power & Energy at WSP. I recently joined through the power acquisition and now lead the P&E franchise globally across WSP. A little bit about my background, my training is as an electrical engineer. I spent the first 15 years in the transmission and distribution space, and then the next 15 in management and executive leadership roles. Really passionate about the energy industry. I've been in it my entire career. Excited about the opportunities that we have in front of us, created by the challenges that we all know we have in our energy industry, and happy to be here with you today to share some of those. We're four months into our integration with WSP.
Every week, when I check in with the team, we're finding new ways to leverage the technical capabilities of WSP and power to help our clients solve their problems. We expect to keep uncovering these exciting opportunities created by the merger, and we're just starting to understand the full potential of that in the last five months that we've been together. We're truly excited to be part of WSP. It's a launching pad for our organization to do great things ahead with Alex and the rest of the team. Today, we've teamed up to highlight why energy is a strategic growth, outline our company's advantages, and review the technologies and the innovations that are powering the industry forward today.
Along the way, we'll also tell some exciting stories about the work that our teams are doing today, helping our clients, further demonstrating the expertise that will allow power and WSP combined to capitalize on the upcoming growth opportunities that we see in the market. So when it comes to global energy trends, electricity demand is expected to double by 2050. This is due to the electrification of industrialized countries, the surge in power demand that we're seeing with new industries like AI, the increase in transportation electrification, and new countries and communities that are gaining access to consistent power resources, which enables them to grow. In addition, our aging transmission and distribution infrastructure must be upgraded to meet the current and future energy demands of our system.
Demand remains high for new power plant builds that reduce carbon impact, such as natural gas, hydroelectricity, geothermal, solar, wind, nuclear. Also, significant investments on the global level continue for low-carbon solutions, including renewables, energy storage, and natural gas. We're also seeing nuclear being revisited as a solution for meeting the long-term baseload demands and powering energy-intensive industries, especially in Canada and the United States. SMRs, or small modular reactors, are also considered a long-term solution for remote communities and operations, not just cities. Our employees are engaged in the Power & Energy sector in key markets worldwide. Our expanding team spans six continents with more than 7,000 professionals dedicated to developing industry-leading solutions for our clients. This footprint positions us to seize opportunities and to be more efficient in meeting our clients' needs, much to what Mark was talking about earlier.
P&E represents approximately today 11% of WSP's net revenues. According to Engineering News-Record, as we saw earlier, we rank in the top position for power engineering firms, power design firms internationally. Throughout today, I mentioned we would be giving some presentations on highlighting some of the major projects starting, and we'd like to start that with the Great Grid Partnership. In 2024, WSP was appointed as a partner to the Great Grid Partnership. This is a unique client-supplier enterprise model, which will deliver a 12-year program to upgrade the electricity transmission network across England and Wales and support UK's Net Zero targets. WSP is well into a 12-month mobilization period, establishing the enterprise team, systems, and processes to execute that fundamentally successfully throughout the course of the project.
The initial tranche of projects will represent GBP 9 billion capital investment distributed across the entire partnership, for which WSP will provide program management, detailed design, and environmental services, as well as planning consents. I'll now turn it over to Marie-Claude for discussion on existing technologies for energy generation.
Thank you, Holger. As global energy demand continues to increase, we'll be required to utilize all available power generation solutions to provide energy security and supply. In some markets, such as the United States, natural gas resources are still vital to provide baseline power to communities. Investments in natural gas, which represented $288 billion worldwide in 2023, helped to stabilize energy availability and provide backup capacity during peak demand periods. Worldwide investments in energy transmission and distribution resources will total $600 billion per year until 2030. This includes replacing aging infrastructure to support growth and meeting increased demand for electrification, data centers, supercomputing such as AI, and projects developed to reach remote communities. In Canada, with provinces looking to increase trade between them, we might see an increase in transmission line opportunities from province to province. We also need more energy supply to meet our needs.
It's not a one-size-fits-all solution, but rather a need to leverage all available power generation solutions. Wind and solar are becoming more efficient. In 2023, each dollar invested yielded 2.5 times more energy output than a dollar spent on the same technologies a decade prior. At our Hydro, we've seen recent investment in new hydroelectric projects and refurbishments, as well as upgrades to existing plants aimed at boosting overall capacity. Nuclear is experiencing a renaissance worldwide. Projected investments in all types of nuclear projects could reach $80-$120 billion annually by 2030. We see significant market opportunities for growth across all our power service offering, from substation design to transmission, distribution, and all types of generations, which will continue to be a focus of our strategic plan. I'll now shine the spotlight on the Peace River Nuclear Project in Alberta, which exemplifies the renewed interest in nuclear.
Our client, Energy Alberta, plans to build a large-scale nuclear power plant, 4,000 MWs, in the Peace River area of northern Alberta, which is some 400 kilometers northwest of Edmonton. This new plant could provide up to 30% of Alberta's existing electricity generation. The project will reduce carbon emissions, help the province transition to cleaner energy sources, and provide energy supply. WSP is supporting Energy Alberta with advisory, regulatory, and impact assessment services to submit an initial project description in 2025. I'll turn it back over to Holger to discuss innovation in the sector.
Thank you, Marie-Claude. We continue to see a rise in global demand for low-carbon technologies. In 2022, energy transition investments jumped 31%, achieving the same level as fossil fuels. And innovation is creating better renewable energy solutions that reduce the cost per kWh . In addition, next-generation geothermal technologies promise a broader range of geothermal resources that we didn't have access to previously. Some of these designs even serve double duty as long-duration energy storage, augmenting the battery energy storage systems that we're installing today. Innovation practices are also helping energy asset owners increase the output of renewable energy resources, particularly in nuclear and hydroelectric refurbishments. In the United States, a new preliminary analysis from the Department of Energy shows the potential of boosting capacity at existing and retired nuclear power plants by 60-95 GW.
For existing hydro projects, retrofits with modern equipment can often increase generation by 8%-10% with the same capacity. The development of SMR technology has significant potential for powering small urban areas, remote communities, data centers, and mining operations. When we look at this potential, we feel confident to bring innovative solutions through our future-ready approach that creates forward-thinking solutions that generate long-term value for our clients. Now, back to Marie-Claude to speak about our competitive advantages.
The acquisition of power Engineers and the addition of its 4,000 employees strengthens our service offering and improves the caliber of expertise across our energy business. Holger and his team possess the expertise that complements and strengthens our robust energy service offering. Our global footprint allows us to share knowledge, creating a distinctive perspective when developing solutions for the energy market. The increased demand for transmission and distribution worldwide, as well as for all types of power generation, combined with WSP's existing client relationships with main utilities around the world, represent many opportunities in which we are working to share expertise on new practices, technologies, and innovation that can be utilized in energy asset development.
In all of our markets, our clients are just beginning the journey towards digital asset design and management, and we see a large opportunity to leverage our technical expertise in these markets and to provide our clients modern solutions for more efficient asset deployment and management. From concept to completion, environmental assessment to end of life, we have professionals who understand the best practices for end-to-end expertise. As we design with a future-ready mindset in mind, appreciating that the owner needs the asset to function just as well on its first day as it does on its last, we rely on digital solutions to understand the potential impact on an asset throughout its lifecycle, ensuring it has the necessary resilience to maintain service when artificial or natural threats emerge.
As you can see, our diverse group of professionals in multiple service offerings gives us an unparalleled bench strength for addressing modern energy needs in all countries where WSP is active. Our service offering provides end-to-end solutions for our clients, from advisory, design, to program management and end-of-life. I'll pass it to Holger one last time.
Thank you, Marie-Claude. We hope that you enjoyed our presentation. I'd like to conclude with three key takeaways here for you. First, worldwide investments in all energy solutions remain strong, robust, and promising. Second, with over 7,000 employees fully dedicated to Power & Energy and the energy demands expected to double by 2050, WSP is well-positioned to seize growth opportunities, and last, WSP's service offerings deliver end-to-end solutions for clients from advisory, design, and program management through site closure. Energy is a tremendous area of growth for WSP, and we will capitalize on this sector in our upcoming strategic cycle. Thank you for joining us today, and I think I pass it to the stage to Corina and Joe.
Thank you very much, Marie-Claude and Holger. It's such a pleasure for me to be here today. I actually joined WSP about a year ago, and I'm thrilled to be leading the transportation and infrastructure team at WSP in Canada. Previously to that, I was in an engineering firm and spent some time in telecom, and for the last decade, I ran a rail, passenger, and freight railway in northern Ontario, the largest short-line rail in Canada, and one of the rail, freight, and passenger services was called the Polar Bear Express, and it provides the only land link to the First Nations communities of the James Bay Coast, five hours, 200 miles into the bush, an essential service for medical supplies, food, and critical infrastructure delivery, including infrastructure to build hospitals and water treatment. It was really impactful and essential, an essential service.
And that's why I'm here and excited to share with you the water strategy, because that's what this is. It's essential and it's meaningful. It's meaningful to our employees, which helps us attract the right employees. It's critical to our clients, and it's also really financially strong for WSP. So let me get into the current state and what the opportunity looks like in this sector. I can tell you, and this is one of the reasons I joined WSP. WSP is a company that understands the market and sees when critical global factors converge to present a significant opportunity for growth. And that's exactly what we're seeing in the water sector today in the global environment. We're seeing substantial population growth. We're seeing climate change, aging infrastructure, and major deficits in the state of good repair.
With our global workforce, including 65 brilliant, and I say brilliant, these are the smartest people that I've ever worked with in my 25-year career. It's unbelievable. These are water professionals around the globe. We have a robust team that spans 50 countries and all six inhabited continents. And impressively, we deliver over 8,000 dedicated water projects annually. And it's important to note that 80% of all the projects that WSP delivers have a water component to them. Impressive. So I guess it goes without saying, but I will, that this is already an extremely impressive business for WSP. And that's why the current global water challenges provide an incredible opportunity for us to grow the market share. And certainly part of why I'm excited, water is a part of my sector in Canada, and the sky's the limit for what we see.
Even in our largest water teams in the U.K., Australia, U.S., and right here in Canada, there remains significant opportunity for growth. How are we going to do this? Well, collaboration and cross-selling are essential to this strategy. We have an unbelievable amount of long-standing clients who already know the high quality that we deliver. They already trust us, and now they're looking to us to fulfill their water needs. We will continue to drive organic growth by selling more broadly, expanding our scope into these already impressed customers, as well as executing with a business development growth mindset to secure new clients. In parallel, we will attract the brightest talent, as we continue to do. We will progress opportunistic M&As in this space, and we will also partner on large opportunities where we determine that we are better together and have synergies for success.
This will both be internally with our global community of practitioners and thought leaders, but it'll also be with external partners, aligning well with our leadership position in major project collaborative delivery. WSP has a wide range of clients around the world, including Severn Trent Water, one of the largest water services in the U.K., serving over eight million customers, a 20-year partnership in asset management and modeling, and looking to expand for geotechnical, environment, program management, construction management, digital innovation, and PFAS. Port of San Diego, our scientific dive team is performing shipwreck and debris mapping as part of their monitoring of harmful algae and kelp beds using satellite technology. I'm going to take a moment and share with you, right here in the city of Toronto, we have a CAD 700 million capital water main rehabilitation program, one of the largest in North America.
Our solution saves 30% on construction costs, and we're also developing a $400 million basement flooding program, improving the city's sewer system and overland drainage routes, and I just want to take a moment to go back and talk about, and you'll see it on the slide here, in terms of our current ranking, and according to the Engineering News-Record, ENR, you'll see on the slide that in 2024, for international design firms, we are ranked between number two and number seven. And you'll see them listed on the last slide. Sorry.
The previous slide.
The previous slide, and so when we look at our overall footprint globally, including our home country, we estimate that WSP is currently the eighth largest water consultancy. Now you can go to the next one, so let's dig deeper into the global challenges we're seeing across the water sector. Number one, water scarcity. It's a significant challenge due to the escalating global population, and it's projected to cause a 40% shortfall in water by 2030, just five years from now. Safeguarding this vital resource is a global imperative. And furthermore, access to water and water quality will continue to be a key area of concern due to rising population, increased water consumption, climate change, and aging infrastructure, which puts a significant strain on water resources. Not only does it affect the quality and the availability of water, but it threatens our health and it hinders our growth.
Number two, resiliency. It's rapidly becoming a critical need for our clients as we are seeing increases in stormwater frequency, as well as the intensity of these storms. Poor water management impacts both organizations and the communities that we serve, really truly highlighting the need for proactive climate change mitigation measures. Next, emerging contaminants such as PFAS and microplastics. They continue to see an increasing level of regulation requirements and therefore treatment requirements. And in addition, we're looking at the impact of global greenhouse gas emissions, where the water supply sector contributes 10% overall. Our clients are looking for us to reduce the environmental impact of their infrastructure through the use of nature-based solutions for everything from filtration to stormwater retention.
At WSP, we truly have the experts and the skill sets that address all these five global challenges, ensuring we are well-positioned to deliver services across the entire water cycle, with expected growth in water processing, coastal protection, stormwater management, as well as the infrastructure part of the water cycle, which includes treatment, conveyance, and desalination. The continued growth spans all WSP sectors, and this really hits home how big of an opportunity we still have to grow this sector. We are talking about infrastructure and transportation, buildings, mining, advanced manufacturing, agriculture, environmental services, and certainly mission-critical data centers.
The size and the depth of this market opportunity, the government funding and awareness that's around the globe, our internal expertise that we currently have and are continuing to build, and the current client list that we have around the globe, we are poised for such success in this market and an extremely strong future ahead that I'm personally extremely excited about, and with that, let me turn it over to Joe Sczurko, who leads our U.S. team to talk more about our water project and to share with you the innovative technology that continues to differentiate us.
Thank you, Corinne. I appreciate that. That was an excellent summary showing the importance of our water business now globally and how we help clients solve water challenges all over the world, and I certainly share all of your enthusiasm for the growth opportunity that we have in water, so good day, everybody. My name is Joe Sczurko. I'm President of WSP USA. I took on the leadership role of the WSP US business early in 2024. I joined WSP in late 2022, coming in with the acquisition of the Wood Environment and Infrastructure business, and subsequent to joining WSP, I took on the leadership role of Earth and Environment in the United States business. Now, before WSP, I was Executive President for Wood Consulting. That was a 12,000-person multi-sector global business that served clients in power and renewables, oil and gas, digital and automation, water, and environment and infrastructure.
I really think my prior experience leading businesses across multiple end market sectors has really positioned me to differentiate the US business, bring value to our clients, and most importantly, drive our growth agenda through this 2025 through 2027 strategic cycle. Now, I'm also a civil and environmental engineer by training and practice, so our water opportunity is especially challenging and especially important for me personally at this stage in my career. Now, when I first started my career, there were two key principles relative to water management. One, get water to flow from high to low because it's really expensive and hard to get it to flow from low to high. And secondly, get water from the curb to the gutter to a discharge pipe to a receiving body of water as quick and fast as you can.
That may have worked 38 years ago, but now the challenges that our clients face in water are much more complex and much more important. Let's unpack this a little bit. Fundamentally, what drives client spend in water? What are some of the reasons? Corinne touched on them, but I want to unpack that a little bit. First, the drivers are numerous and impact the scope, complexity, and project costs for all water-related projects. That includes whether the project is what I call water as a natural resource or water in the built environment. When I use that terminology, think stormwater systems, water conveyance systems, water supply, or water treatment. What are some of those things that our clients are facing for drivers in the water space that make this attractive to us? First, stricter environmental regulations and lower contaminant levels.
We can measure now water impacts to a lower level. And more and more health studies are giving us information about the risks related to contaminants in our water. Next, water quality health risks. And when you think of that, don't think of someplace away in Asia or Africa. The week prior to the Super Bowl in the U.S., in New Orleans, there were two boil water advisories, one related to a power surge in the treatment plant and the water supply system, and another due to some line breaks. So these challenges around water quality health risks are right here, right in our backyard, including developed countries. Obviously, clients want to maintain their assets, their wastewater assets at the lowest possible cost. We've talked a lot about asset management here this morning.
There are significant constraints to building new assets in urban areas. The challenge that our team has in Toronto right now with that major project. Also, as we expand and population grows, not only in the developed world, but in the developing world, putting new population centers into new areas requires real care in how you develop and tap into water resources and how you manage the water assets. And then finally, you get into the realm of risk, risk related to water, protecting physical assets and protecting people. You get into the topic of restoration. You get into the topic of resilience. So those are some of the things that our clients are facing right now that are reasons that practically water is a high spend area and an attractive area for us.
So let's take a look at a few projects that we're currently executing to give you an even better framework and feel for our water expertise globally. And let me start in the backyard in the U.S. The U.S. is a great market to look at water as a natural resource because we have a lot of regulatory drivers and we have a lot of sensitive ecosystems and sensitive areas. So a great project we're working on right now in the U.S. is in the Everglades, the Everglades restoration with our client, the South Florida Water Management District. Now, the Everglades is a key interface between the fresh and saltwater systems of Florida, and it serves as a natural buffer for hurricanes and other storm events.
Our work for the Florida Water Management System includes monitoring, studies, and engineering on a sustaining basis to help them figure out how to maintain and improve this ecosystem to its natural state. So what are some of the things we do on a project like that? Hydraulic modeling, where our expertise helps improve the quantity, quality, and timing and distribution of water flows within the Everglades system. And that's also important as we look at how flows from the Everglades go into water bodies that are closer to residential populations. We perform water quality monitoring, looking for blue-green algae and nutrient activities. And we provide some of our very core services, like geotechnical evaluations for the stormwater treatment areas and the reservoirs. Now, I want to bring this home to key geographic markets.
Florida and California, in particular, are very attractive markets in the United States because of spend, population growth, and sensitive ecosystems. And here again, our capabilities in stormwater and coastal resilience protection are really a natural to capitalize on the funding available through clients and agencies in those states. Next, let's go across the ocean to Denmark, and this is the city of Copenhagen and the HOFOR Utility Company, where we're helping this client manage its physical assets in the face of increasingly intense rainfall events. Now, these improvements were achieved with what's called green infrastructure. It creates a more livable urban environment for the citizens while also creating a more resilient city capable of handling high water flows from high precipitation events, and this project, this example of the project in Copenhagen, is very much what we see in many urban centers across the developed world.
Unusual storm events are happening with greater frequency. And with that, there's greater impact. And you can't just put all the water into pipes anymore for some of the reasons I touched on a little bit earlier. So in our space, we think green infrastructure and green infrastructure design presents us a great opportunity. Another project example is in Australia, where we've just extended our partnership, extended our contract under the Logan Water Partnership. Now, this partnership brings together us, WSP, together with the Logan City Council and Downer, the operator and contractor for the water system. Together, we're delivering the entire water system for the city and renewing the infrastructure, bringing more sustainable and modern features to how water is managed. This project from Down Under demonstrates our capabilities in what I call the traditional water in the built environment arena.
Now, the final program I want to mention is very important to our growth prospects is in the UK, and that's AMP8. AMP8 is the most significant investment in the UK water sector since AMP2. It involves GBP 104 million allocated during the recent final business plans to be spent over the next 10- 15 years to improve water infrastructure across the UK. WSP, through our expertise in water, environmental planning, and project management, has secured positions on several significant frameworks that will support water utilities in developing this plan under AMP8. For example, for one water agency, we're designing new nature-based solutions to improve water quality, reduce stormwater overflows, and boost biodiversity, as well as bringing best practices related to hydraulic modeling, water recycling, and digital innovation.
On another contract, our specialist water and wastewater modeling expertise in the U.K. works closely with water utilities to make informed decisions about their operations and capital investment programs. We do this by monitoring rivers, catchment, land, and coastal infrastructure, enabling their services to be more efficient and to meet the supply needs for their water for the future. Now, looking to the future, I want to mention a couple of other very hot topics that are related to water and will be a catalyst for our WSP water business: PFAS, so-called forever chemicals. We have an excellent network globally of subject matter experts supporting our clients with PFAS issues, both in terms of groundwater and in water supplies.
A great example of that work is a project that we're doing and have done over the last six years in Minnesota, where we've been working with a regional water utility that supplies water to 14 different municipalities and helps them with their supply plans and treatment options for both public water systems and private wells. With everything going on in the world today, tariffs, trade, Middle East, today's Wall Street Journal, page A3, has a story about PFAS regulations in the state of Minnesota. So that, I think, really drives home the relevance of what we do, the importance of what we do, the currency of what we do, and the opportunity behind what we do. Another area that I want to touch on as a future opportunity, and you heard André-Martin Bouchard reference it just a little while ago, is ports, shipyards, and marine infrastructure.
Within WSP, we have some really differentiated capability in coastal and marine engineering, and our clients are recognizing the sensitive nature of their assets in ports, harbors, and nearshore areas. We're differentiated in our ability to help these clients with those port assets, considering the future impacts of coastal resiliency and the impacts that storms may have on their docks, their shipyards, their port infrastructure, sediment transport, and sensitive species in and around coastal ecosystems. Now, water presents a huge opportunity in digital, and as you heard from Chadi earlier, digital solutions and digital services are a really key part of where we see the opportunity for our water practice. Digital services and solutions are important in solving these client water challenges, and we've developed some really innovative specific solutions in the water space.
Let me tell you a little bit about those digital technologies and digital applications in the water space. First, water projects are hugely data intensive. We're collecting data over many years. We're looking at water data, water level data, water quality data, weather data, and other forms of environmental data that need to be analyzed to come up with the proposed solutions for some of these water challenges. Secondly, our digital capability allows us to model future conditions under various scenarios, and that's where we get into problem-solving for our clients. Our digital toolkit helps our clients understand the what-if in water challenges with extensive analytical modeling and visualization capability, so what are these what-ifs that our clients want to know? Well, they may want to know what if precipitation events double in severity in the future. Is my water system capable of handling that water flow? What will flood?
And if it does flood, what's the economic impact? Another client may be asking, what if we spend $200 million to fix our stormwater system? Will water quality in our harbor improve such that the conditions in the harbor allow swimming every single day of the year? Another client may ask, what if we raise existing roadway one meter? Will we then be above flood stage, even a four-meter future storm surge event? And then lastly, a client may ask, what if areas impacted by the recent California fires experience rainfall? And in fact, on that project, we're currently performing post-runoff modeling, post-fire runoff modeling study in the community of Altadena, which was impacted by the Eaton Fire . These digital tools we've developed are not for technocrats. We don't do this just because we're geeky, pointy-headed engineers.
The value of these models and the power of digital that Chadi shared with you earlier is it helps explain to stakeholders future conditions. It helps them visualize what's going to happen in future conditions, and then it helps project owners make incredibly important capital investment and cost-benefit trade-off decisions related to water, so our solutions using artificial intelligence to classify and count fish, visualize potential flood impacts, look at future case scenarios, and quantify asset damage costs are all part of an important element to inform our clients and inform stakeholders going forward. These tools, developed in-house by our WSP experts, allow us to be differentiated and provide differentiated information to our clients, and a point that Chadi really well emphasized that I'll emphasize again, the combination of our domain knowledge in water together with our digital expertise really brings this distinct value to clients.
So, summary takeaway on water. I really, truly believe it presents a hugely attractive global growth opportunity for WSP through this 2025 through 2027 strategic cycle, and I would offer for many years thereafter. So I see this as a truly sustaining business and sustaining opportunity for us. The key growth opportunities for us match what Alex just shared with you on our key geographies for growth: the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia. These are the regions that have a pressing need with aging water infrastructure. These are the regions that have the regulatory structure to implement water programs, and these are the regions that have consistently shown a willingness to fund these kinds of programs. So the vast majority of WSP's project work in water is done in OECD countries, and most of those places, most of those water networks were built during World War II.
They have come to their useful life, and we can really help them improve it. Currently, forecasts suggest that by 2030, of all infrastructure spend, so consider roads, bridges, rail, airports, 15%-20% of all infrastructure spend will be water-related spend. That's why we're very confident that this particular water opportunity supports between a high single-digit to low double-digit growth opportunity for us annually through at least 2030. Also, a final point that's really important, we are already working for many of the cities and municipalities and agencies that have water needs. We may already be doing roadwork for them, transit system work for them, airport work for them, bridge work for them. This provides us already client relationships, brand awareness, contracts, cross-selling opportunities, relationships, and an opportunity to further leverage our water services.
Many of the services that are our core capabilities in WSP, the consulting studies, owner-engineer services, construction management, program management, inspection, all of these exactly are the kinds of scopes of work that water clients demand when they're looking at their water supply, their wastewater systems, their stormwater systems, or management of floods, and in addition, water resource presents a significant growth opportunity through resiliency projects, the flood analysis and mitigation I've described, ecosystem preservation, and biodiversity. We're an expert in local conditions. We're an expert in regulations. We know the different options, and we know how to protect assets. We intend to capture more than our market share of the water opportunity across the entire water lifecycle over this strategic cycle. Hopefully, you can absolutely sense my enthusiasm for growth in water in WSP globally and certainly within the US business.
I very much look forward to entertaining your questions later on. Thank you. Let me pass it on to Tom.
Thank you, Corinne and Joe. Let me introduce myself first. I'm Tom Smith. I've been with WSP for 31 years, and I oversee our Property & Buildings business. That covers real estate, places, buildings, and a lot of manufacturing facilities. Our P&B franchise represents around about 16,500 experts, which is around about 21% of our sort of global revenues. I thought I'd start off with this piece of critical infrastructure. This is the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile. When it's completed at the end of this decade, it will be one of the most Powerful and largest telescopes on Earth. We're providing construction management, technical inspection, and health and safety services.
When it's commissioned at the end of this decade, hopefully, it will track that meteor that's out there that we've all read about, that's got a 1% chance of hitting the Earth, and maybe it can do something to mitigate that. So when you think about it in that context, it's a pretty powerful piece of critical infrastructure that we're involved in. So if I talk about the building construction market, the building construction market has seen robust growth over the last few years. It is forecast to grow at 5.5% to the end of the decade and is currently valued at $7.5 trillion. One of the macro trends that we're seeing is we're experiencing deglobalization as countries and corporations look to become more resilient in a post-pandemic and discontinuous world.
There is a growing demand for critical infrastructure, and my presentation covers three particular sectors: healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and data centers. So let's start with a glance of WSP's capabilities in those three sectors. The global sector is undergoing, so the global healthcare sector is undergoing unprecedented transformation. It's driven through digital advancements, particularly AI, medical treatments, evolving patient care, and, of course, changing demographics. We are the number two firm in the healthcare sector. We have over 1,400 experts. We have our centers of expertise in the U.S., Canada, Sweden, the U.K., and Hong Kong. We have a particular expertise around smart and green healthcare building design. Let's go to manufacturing. Manufacturing covers many segments. So we can talk about batteries, pharmaceutical, semiconductors, but it also includes what I call sort of smart industry.
We can define that as industry projects which are using digitization to improve the way they manufacture and distribute their products. With over 2,100 experts, with our main focus areas being the U.S., Canada, Sweden, and the U.K., we aim to be a top three player in that market by the end of this strategic cycle. As for data centers, well, the race is on to build sufficient data center capacity to deal with the acceleration of AI. We are already well placed in this market as a number one player with over 800 experts across the globe. We are particularly proud of our long-term association with seven of the top 10 global data center companies in the world, including the hyperscalers. If I look at some of the growth opportunities, okay, the global healthcare market currently has been really good growth in recent years.
It's expected to grow from $301 billion in 2024 by 3.4% to the end of the decade. If you also include the expenditure on healthcare services, particularly around digital. In terms of the advanced manufacturing sector, in potential growth of 16% a year to the end of the decade. Non-residential construction market, and it is driven by the increasing demand for semiconductor chips, batteries, but also, importantly, the reshoring of critical supply chains. Healthcare and manufacturing growth will be driven by the increased usage of AI, and AI relies on data centers to run. Consequently, data centers have exploded in size and power consumption over the last few years. Now, let me give you a bit of background to this. Five years ago, a 30-MW data center would be considered very large and would be a single building. Today, 300 MWs is considered the norm.
To put that into perspective, you can probably tell from my accent. I'm from England, but I live in a lovely little town called Letchworth Garden City. It's a population of 34,000 people, and it has a power demand of 30 GWs. Therefore, one of these new campuses actually is equivalent to 10 Letchworth Garden Cities. Very excited, Holger, that you're part of our business now because you're going to help us provide all that power infrastructure. I think what that also leads on to is data centers are much, much more than a building. They are a campus. Campuses require master planning. They require permitting. They require civil engineering. They require power, water infrastructure. We can provide all those services and expertise to our clients.
The growth in the data center capacity is driven by cyber, the Internet of Things, and of course, AI. The global investment in AI over the next three years alone is forecast at $2 trillion. Global demand for data center capacity could rise at an annual rate of 22% a year so that by the end of the decade, we have a capacity requirement of 219 GWs. The current data center capacity is 55 GWs. So that means we're going to have to build in the next six years what we built in the last 24 years. This is why hyperscalers are spending huge amounts of money on their sort of state-of-the-art AI facilities.
What we're seeing is that that spend, and we've seen it in the press over the last couple of weeks, I think that combined spend from the hyperscalers is just in 2025 is $320 billion. However, because of the supply constraints, they're doing a lot of partnering teaming with colo developers who are equally increasing their AI sort of digital infrastructure. And the good news is we also work with many of those sort of colo developers as well. With all these demands, opportunities, and sort of critical infrastructure requirements, we're extremely well positioned to grow across all those four market regions. But I think the U.S. offers the biggest potential. When it comes to healthcare, considering our deep technical knowledge and capacity, we're in a super strong position to actually help healthcare providers with their decarbonization, digitization strategies for both existing buildings and new developments.
In terms of smart hospitals, AI is pivotal in the way it is streamlining administration, medical treatments, diagnosis, and patient care. This is best illustrated by one of our projects in Hong Kong. It's for the Hospital Authority . We were the digital advisor for the creation of a new service center, which actually provided full automation, full operational technologies for all the laundry, catering, and pharmacy requirements for the whole portfolio across Hong Kong. A really great example of actually how we're expanding our services from design and project management into that sort of digital type role. With manufacturing, the scale of these projects is enormous. There is significant opportunity for WSP to secure many more of these projects. And we have a great opportunity because many of our most important industry and manufacturing clients are the clients of our Earth and Environment business.
I see a lot of collaboration with André-Martin Bouchard and his team in actually how we grow with those particular clients. Furthermore, often the sites that are chosen for these huge facilities are in areas where we already have a local presence and we have deep, strong relationships. So we can help with all the sort of stakeholder engagement and all the community support. Our activities in the data center market are much more than facility design. We're supporting data center companies with probably their three biggest challenges. The first challenge is power. It's great that now we've got power Engineers on board, and we can actually support our data center clients with all their needs in terms of substations, transmission, but also new energy sources.
It was great that you mentioned, Holger and Marie-Claude, small modular reactors because I think that's going to be a big play in data centers of the future. The second area is around land acquisition. We are supporting many of our clients in terms of seeking and securing new sites for their data center developments and then being involved in all of the planning permissions and associated environmental permitting. The third area of support is data centers aren't really seen as a good neighbor in respect of water, power, jobs. But what we're doing is we're using our sort of stakeholder engagement experts, our sort of science experts, and really helping them deal with the local communities. In some cases, coming up with really great sustainability solutions like using waste heat from the cooling systems to actually serve local communities.
So a really good example of how we're trying to support our clients in making them better neighbors and address some of the challenges that they're facing in that market. The global potential in this market is palpable. And what we're seeing is many of our U.S. clients are beginning to expand in the Middle East, in Europe, and Asia. And I think our extensive global footprint and the support that we can provide in terms of all the civil engineering, all the permitting, et cetera, is really helping us grow outside of the U.S. And I think from the earlier slide, of those 800 people, about 40% of that staff is actually outside of the U.S., and we're seeing significant growth in those areas as well. So going on to the next slide, I think you've seen some of these sort of slides before in previous presentations.
I like my wavy slide, okay? Really, it's our end-to-end service offering, okay, and we support our clients in all aspects of that life cycle. We're right at the front end providing strategic consulting, and you're going to hear a lot more of that from Kathleen and André-Martin Bouchard in a moment, all the way through to engineering design, into sort of project management, the delivery of projects. What we're finding ourselves involved in now is we're increasingly more involved in things like the asset optimization. We're increasingly involved in the repurposing of existing facilities to improve overall performance and also extend the economic life of those particular assets, okay, so we support clients across that life cycle, and that is a particularly important way of entering different markets, different examples.
And a fitting example is probably the work we're doing on three of the largest semiconductor factories in the U.S., okay? Engineering services on the second. Services. And on the third project, we're actually providing the whole environmental impact assessment and then downstream probably all of the environmental permitting. So. Projects, but where we're providing different services to different areas. So now I'd like to sort of give you a little bit of a glimpse of some of the projects we have in this portfolio. So we have so many fantastic sort of healthcare projects. It's really difficult to choose one, but the one that I've chosen is the new Arthur Blank Children's Hospital in Atlanta. It's a multi-billion-dollar investment, 446 patient beds, 19 operating theaters, and it really truly demonstrates our sort of engineering multidisciplinary expertise, but also our sustainability credentials. These hospitals are complex projects.
They are multi-billion-dollar projects, so when you look at all the services we can provide, they are significant in terms of the growth opportunity. The second project is the Volkswagen PowerCo electric gigafactory in Ontario, not far from here. Our Canadian office is providing full architectural multidisciplinary engineering services, but at the same time leveraging our subject matter experts in Sweden, the U.K., and South Africa. This battery plant will house the latest innovative cell technology, and when complete, the 6.5 million sq ft facility will be one of the largest gigafactories in the world. Lastly, we collaborate with many data center clients, and due to confidentiality, it's very difficult to show many sort of images, but we have had permission to show this particular project, which is Meta Platforms' first project in Asia.
It's an 11-story data center, and we're providing a number of services on that project, but we also provide many services and different areas of expertise for Meta Platforms, not just in the USA, but across Europe. So the key takeaways, well, hopefully I've described three mission-critical sectors that underpin our growth ambitions, namely healthcare, advanced manufacturing, and data centers. Much of this growth that we're seeing is influenced by, as I mentioned, deglobalization as countries and corporations become more resilient to withstand sort of economic shocks and just the challenges that we've got in this world. And I think that trend's going to continue. So I see a lot of growth in that sort of critical infrastructure, which we've just described. As we know, the race is certainly on to build sufficient data center capacity to sort out AI. We're already at the forefront of that investment, okay?
We are providing services from land acquisition to power infrastructure to engineering design and sustainability services. Probably the final takeaway is we are in a great position with our four world-class platforms. Our unparalleled range of services, our global footprint means that we can touch that life cycle at many points for clients, and we have many different go-to-market strategies. It's that sort of diversity that is going to create significant growth in those three sectors of healthcare, manufacturing, and data centers. Thank you for listening. I'd like to hand over to Kathleen. No, no. Mark and Marie-Claude, okay? Right. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Tom, for that handover. Hello to me again, Mark Naysmith, CEO, and this time I'm joined by Marie-Claude, our Canadian president.
It gives us great pleasure to present to you the growth opportunities that we see in WSP for project and program management, or more commonly known and easier to say, PPM. In addition to talking about growth, we're also going to provide you with an overview of our current global footprint in this area, the activities that we undertake, and we're also going to give you an insight to the potential service offerings that we can offer our clients in PPM, showing project examples along the way. Then we'll wrap up with the three key takeaways. Firstly, though, who's working? Yep, the slides, great. Firstly, though, we thought it would be very useful just to give you our definition of PPM because sometimes this means different things to different people.
Project management is the process that involves planning, organizing, and controlling resources to accomplish project objectives, namely delivering projects on time to budget and to the satisfaction of the client and stakeholders. Program management involves overseeing a collection of dependent activities organized around a common or connected goal to ensure that the sequence of activities is aligned throughout the project life cycle, so PPM consultancy skills can be sold separately or as an integral activity dependent on the project and the client's needs, and this is the advantage that we see as WSP because both skills have the advantage of being client-side in a client advisor capacity, and this includes delivery partners or owner-engineer commissions acting as independent client representatives. As projects turn larger, mega projects, and become more complex, many global and regional clients look at WSP to provide PPM services.
In addition to WSP, we have many global master service agreements and framework commissions where clients require our services to manage the portfolio of projects both nationally and globally. In such MSA commissions, there's also the opportunity to sell in other skills that we have in design and advisory, providing a one-stop-shop service. PPM is a service we already provide in our mature regions, but still there's tremendous opportunity to increase our presence globally and to achieve a market-leading position. In a moment, Marie-Claude will present her global footprint, indicating where we are already strong in PPM together with the skills that we offer, and she'll also share some of our current projects and just demonstrate to the audience the addressable market opportunities that we see in this area.
Our aspiration is to double our revenues and become a market leader in established regions and matching our position in design and advisory services. We see this as a tremendous opportunity to provide sustainable growth opportunities to complement the skills that we already provide and to further diversify our service offering. I'll now hand over to Marie-Claude, who's going to take us through her skill sets and opportunities.
Thank you, Mark. WSP currently provides PPM services across five market sectors: Transport and Infrastructure, Property & Buildings, Power & Energy, Earth and Environment, and Mining and Metals, with levels of expertise varying in each region. We have five established regions with a robust PPM offering. You see them on the map: Canada, the U.S., Sweden, the Middle East, and Australia.
With approximately 7,000 professionals around the globe dedicated to offering PPM services to our clients, WSP is well positioned to continue growing in this market, even in the regions where we are currently less mature. PPM requires true collaboration with our clients to ensure that project planning, delivery, operations are effective, cost-efficient, and innovative from an overarching perspective. As project and program managers, we support our clients from the very early stages of projects and programs, so from pre-feasibility studies to full asset operations. As Mark mentioned earlier, the projects and mega projects are really becoming increasingly complex, which makes them unique in terms of requirements, scopes, but also in terms of challenges and priorities needed. WSP's comprehensive offering can vary based on the client needs.
So whether they require a tailor-made approach, staff additions, an integrated team, a delivery partner, or an independent project management office, WSP's approach considers each project as a distinct entity integrated into a program with a holistic perspective. Programs also need to consider the needs and concerns of various stakeholders, such as governments, cities, local and indigenous communities, and they also need to consider regulations and requirements around designing more resilient and sustainable assets that can withstand climate change. Allow me to share some examples of recent programs we manage in three of our primary sectors. In the Power sector, you see them on the slide now. So in the Power sector, we supported Propel New York Energy, an electric transmission project jointly developed by New York Transco and the New York Power Authority.
The project aims to facilitate the integration of renewable energy into the New York State's electric grid, focusing on reliability and resilience across the greater New York City metropolitan area. WSP's scope of work includes program management, engineering, environmental planning, permitting, and construction management. In Sweden, in the property & building sector, our client, City of Stockholm Real Estate Office , wanted to create an open and flexible office space that required rebuilding, renovation, and the addition of 40,000 square meters. All of this while preserving the building's historical character and meeting the city's objectives in terms of climate, economy, and democracy. The scope of this project includes all aspects of project management, from project controls, design and construction management, to installation and commercial and environmental management.
For the Transport and Infrastructure sector, we moved to Saudi Arabia, where the Riyadh Metro is redefining how millions of people move, live, and experience the capital city with state-of-the-art technology, including driverless metro trains. WSP, as the lead firm, provided program and construction management services for Package 3, which had a combined length of 67 km and 29 stations. The Riyadh Metro connects the capital's most densely populated residential, governmental, educational, medical, and commercial districts. Our scope of work includes project management, design management, cost management, construction management, and contract management. WSP is among the top players in the industry. We have the global platform to expand and grow our PPM services in all our regions globally and across our market sectors.
With less than 10% of our global workforce currently selling these dedicated services to our clients, with market presence in only five of our main countries, we see good opportunity to at least double our revenues in PPM. I'll now pass it back to Mark for our key takeaways.
Thanks, Marie-Claude. So, as you can tell, we're excited by this opportunity. We see huge potential to grow our skill sets in PPM and become a market leader in our regions. The three key takeaways for us, as I alluded to earlier, are the first one is to double our revenue in PPM, and we'll do this by growing these services across all of our end markets. The second one is growing PPM service offerings will bring more commissions that are directly with clients, client-side commissions, which again is a great area for us to grow into.
Thirdly, we will grow PPM services to allow us to broaden and diversify our service offering, providing more opportunities across our end market portfolio. So that concludes our presentation on PPM, and I would now like to hand over to Kathleen and André-Martin, who are going to talk about advisory services.
Thank you. Thank you. Hello again, everyone. I think we're the last one ending between now and lunch, right? So we'll be efficient. So my name is still André-Martin Bouchard, and I'm still the global director of the Earth and Environment business. It's a pleasure to be here today together with Kathleen to talk to you about our advisory growth opportunity. Let me just start off by introducing you to Kathleen. Kathleen is our newly appointed global advisory director. Kathleen recently joined WSP in 2021 as the managing director of our advisory services in the Middle East.
And before that, she established, developed, and oversaw advisory businesses at Big Four consultancies and at international design and engineering firms in the Middle East and in the UK. We're super happy to have you with us, Kathleen. Thank you. So we are here today to talk to you about what we think is a fantastic growth opportunity for WSP, our advisory services. WSP is so much more than a design and engineering firm. WSP advisory services account for almost half of the revenues we generate. In other words, it means that about half of our revenues comes from non-design services. It includes consulting work such as strategic planning, permitting, compliance, advising clients on their new developments, providing due diligence on transactions, or simply making sure that each project, each client is digitally enabled. WSP can deliver innovative and future-ready solutions and strategies before even going into design and execution.
Talking to you all today about WSP's advisory services couldn't be more appropriate because if you look out the window, maybe there will be some buildings on the way. But if you look out the window, you could actually see Waterfront Toronto . We have been advising Waterfront Toronto for a number of years to address challenges such as balancing truck activity with pedestrians and cyclists, and also the area's transit needs. We've also been implementing advanced stormwater management as part of the Port Lands Flood Protection Project and so much more in Waterfront Toronto . In fact, our advisory capabilities today can be found across all of our end market sectors: Earth and Environment , Transport and Infrastructure , Property & Buildings, Power & Energy, and within the majority of our operating regions.
Thanks to this global footprint, we at WSP, we can say we're a proud service provider to a cross-section of blue-chip Fortune 500 global clients across the world. With clients across all sectors from Advanced Manufacturing, we've talked about that, industry, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, tech, through to mining, energy, food and beverage, and finance. These clients have complex operations, often spanning multiple regions. They need help modernizing, automating, and streamlining their operation, and of course, decarbonizing their activities. They need best advisors to support them in deploying their capital allocation and prioritizing their asset portfolios. They also need to stay in compliance with complex and changing regulations across jurisdictions. At the broadest level, our client base numbers are tens of thousands of clients worldwide operating in all sectors of the economy and split equally between public and private sector.
We are helping them not just with their engineering requirements, but also by solving problems and bringing solutions through our advisory capabilities. So back to you, Kathleen, what do you think our unique value proposition is?
Well, very good question, André-Martin Bouchard. And hello, everyone. I'm absolutely delighted to be here today. So what does make our WSP advisory platform unique? Well, we actually believe it's our ability to connect with our clients and support them at the very, very early stages of their projects. Basically, then become their trusted advisor and stay with them throughout the whole development life cycle, across the project or ongoing operation. And that's because we also deeply understand the technical aspects of each project. So what's our unique differentiator, you might ask? Well, basically, it's our ability to blend strategic thinking with technical substance.
Management consultancies, of course, can provide very valuable support at the front end, at the high level, but we can actually partner with our clients throughout that entire development journey. Our technical teams can help us to validate and also implement the strategies that we create. This is important. Let me give you some examples. Take for example, a renewable project or an energy project or even a mining project. These huge projects take years and years before they get into design and construction. During that period, our clients call upon us to help them to validate and assess the feasibility of those projects. And we can do that because we can look at these projects through multiple lenses: environmental, organizational, technical, commercial, and strategic.
Now, this is only possible, though, and you'll have heard a lot about this today, is because we can draw down upon our unparalleled scope and scale of 73,000 people, expertise across multiple disciplines across the development life cycle, and we also have the right global platform to do this because we can seamlessly pull down on those experts whenever and wherever needed. What do you think, André-Martin Bouchard?
Have I got it right? I think that's great, Kathleen. Absolutely. By coupling our advisory capabilities with our design and engineering power house, we can serve our clients in ways that create synergies, efficiencies, and value. From the ideation of a project, the feasibility studies, the environmental permitting, and the design before moving into construction operations, and finally through to decommissioning and cleanup, our service offering is end-to-end, as we said many times today.
One great project that demonstrates the type of multidimensional specialized advisory services we provide is our work for Rare Earths Norway AS. We've been assisting this Nordic client with mapping of the mineral deposits, assessing technical, environmental, and social feasibility at its Fen Complex. Those minerals are green energy transition technologies. In fact, the mineral resource estimate indicates that it could provide a sustainable supply of rare earth elements for Europe as a whole for the coming decades. This is a great example of our market-leading advisory for mining clients across the world. Only WSP can assemble the multidisciplinary team of experts composed of geologists, economists, biologists, water specialists, and engineers that are necessary to help clients with mining projects of this complexity. It's on projects like this that we are often engaged to provide multidisciplinary advisory services simultaneously.
For example, it could be the economic feasibility, highest and best use, technical feasibility, site selection, pre-concept design and planning, and then there's environmental permitting, stakeholder engagement, climate risk, the availability of the supply chain, goods and labor, etc. In fact, our ability to offer such a comprehensive range of services leads us to believe that there's huge potential for us to grow our advisory services further alongside and beyond our traditional design and engineering project management services. Demand for those services is growing across the board. Another great example of this is the support we have provided National Highways in the U.K. to develop a net-zero carbon plan. For the past three years, we've been assisting with the implementation of the plan across corporate maintenance, construction, and road user emissions.
And thanks to this type of work in the UK, we've since been appointed to advise on net zero roads work and climate resiliency at the national level in Spain and Chile. Of course, inherently linked with climate change is biodiversity. Our clients are increasingly asking us for support with emerging nature-related reporting frameworks. We worked for Meridiam to apply the LEAP methodology, which involves locating, evaluating, assessing, and preparing across a portfolio of 100 assets to understand its nature-related risks and opportunities. We also helped this client prepare for its inaugural TNFD report. This project provided Meridiam not just with a strategic roadmap and a long-term vision for managing nature-related risks, but it has enhanced its reputational standing as a pioneer in biodiversity management.
In fact, in a recent collaboration with the United Nations Global Compact Network Canada, WSP compiled the Beginner's Guide to Nature-Related Financial Disclosures precisely to help businesses navigate the complexities of nature-related reporting, and that's another example of our advisory and thought leadership work that we provide across the world, so having created that incredible advisory offering at the heart of WSP, Kathleen, what do you think is next?
Well, this is the bit that I'm really, really excited about because this is where we're going to start talking about the potential of the market, so as Alex mentioned at the very start, we have intentionally diversified our mix of revenue across our services, the blend between design and engineering in the past. We will continue to do so, going through our next strategic cycle.
But we will also start with the deployment of a number of new global strategic advisory initiatives. Why do we need these? Well, because we can see that growth potential overall. What are we going to do? Well, one of the first things is we're going to set up a global advisory operating platform for all our teams to operate from, which will be more robust. It will encourage greater collaboration across the regions, allow us to set up new centers of excellence that's going forward, and also drive synergies overall. So again, very, very exciting opportunity for us because it really is time for us to take advantage of this global platform, look at significant growth, whether organic or acquisition-based, to really unlock all those future opportunities that we see in this space.
You've heard a lot of different growth sectors coming through the presentations earlier, but particularly for advisory, we will definitely be looking further into water scarcity, energy transition, digital, AI, and of course, decarbonization. Currently, it's quite interesting because the global advisory services market is sitting at around approximately some of the sources saying about CAD 450 billion US dollars. Sorry, Canadian dollars, apologies. Our share of that today is relatively small. We also know that the global market for the environmental consulting space, of which we are positioned as number one, is also sitting around CAD 62 billion. Now, these are substantive markets, and right now our share is relatively small. That means there's a huge potential growth within this space overall. And if we look at how fragmented the market is, if we use our scope and our scale, this is something that we can significantly target going forward.
What's very interesting as well is if we look at firms like Verdantix, they are placing us now in the top tier of the market positioning and segmentation alongside the Big Four and also other global management consultancies. That speaks absolute volumes about our rise as a credible player in this space over the last few years. Ultimately, it is our goal to be seen as the market leader for advisory services globally in the built and natural environment. We want to be recognized for our unique combined offering, something which our clients currently procure from both the management consultancies and also the other international design engineering firms. Now they can procure these services directly from us. So in closing, I would just like to share the top three takeaways and where we think this growth is going to come from and what our advantage is.
As I mentioned earlier, first of all, it's our unique value proposition, strategic thinking combined with technical substance early on with our clients before design and execution, and ultimately help them to achieve their desired outcomes. I have to note here that it's incredibly important that we leverage our digital advisory capabilities to do this because our clients expect this. They expect our services digitally enabled and automated. Secondly, as I mentioned before, we know this is a big market. We have a small market share currently, but we need to push into this space further. And thirdly, we do believe, though, that no other international design engineering firm has an advisory services business currently of this size and scale offering such a wide, diverse range of services. Clearly, this has got to be a big opportunity for us.
So we know we've got the brand, we know we've got the platform, we know we've got the capabilities, and we know we're committed to making this happen. So we're very, very passionate about this definitely being a high potential growth area for us. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you, Kathleen. This is moved to Alex. Yeah, no, that's fine. Thank you so much.
All right. We're about to wrap this up, but I just wanted to open up our second Q&A session before we wrap up today. So I'd like to invite our colleagues, Joe, Olga, Kathleen, Marie-Claude, and Tom, to answer any questions that the audience may have. All right. So let me start with a question for Corinne and with Joe. Water has been a high focus. Could you clarify your position in the market versus peers?
I think some of Corinne's presentation shared that we're certainly in the top 10, probably around number eight, depending on how different surveys are taken. I really think the water resources part of our water capability is strong, and where we'd like to strengthen is in the water treatment, water conveyance arena. It presents a real strong opportunity for us to grow on the back of what we got with the UK, with the AMP program especially.
Yeah, and we should also add that in the last cycle, we significantly grew our platform, and we're going to continue to significantly accelerate the growth of our water sector in years to come. Marie-Claude, could you comment on the momentum of the Power & Energy market in Canada? Thanks.
Yes. Power, I think Canada as a country, we are extremely well positioned in terms of power.
We see investments in hydro, we see investments in nuclear, we see investments in transmission distribution, really in all types of power generation, but also in transmission and distribution. And as a proud Canadian, I'm really proud of the, I tell this to Olga all the time, of the Canadian electric system. We're really well set up. So momentum positive. Good.
May I use the opportunity, Olga, to ask you the position in the US?
I think it's as good or better. We have massive load growth in regions of our country. We've got population moving and like the ERCOT needs to grow. I think somebody mentioned it today already, areas that need to grow twice as much energy in the next eight years that they've developed in the last 25. So ERCOT's a great example of that. But so are other areas in the US.
So we'll be looking at using every type of energy, whether it's hydro or nuclear or renewables or gas thermal generation with carbon capture. They'll all be on the docket to help us meet our energy needs in the U.S.
You know, because I like practical examples, Joe, could you, for instance, give a glimpse of the work that we do around SMR and the investment that is being poured into SMR right now in the U.S. and our position in the marketplace? Sure, absolutely, Alex.
Any kind of major scale project, like a small modular reactor, that's the acronym SMR, requires a lot of upfront permitting, planning, environmental studies, geotechnical studies. And that's where we really carved a very strong position early on on the back of our NQA-1 certification, which is a certification that allows us to do some of the studies there.
We've really gotten an early on position now at five or six candidate SMR sites in the United States, working with some partners. And that front end is really allowing us also to determine where is this overall market going to go for us in the future and pull in a lot of the resources that were part of the nuclear renaissance going back into the 1970s and 1980s. So really a great mix of capability. I'm really so happy in the U.S. that we got the early on position in so many SMR developments that are going on.
I was asked during the break around deregulation, potential deregulation in the U.S.
You know, if we think about that sector and the work that we've been doing and are doing in advisory, but also in an ERT environment, do you have the slight concern around this or do you see so many opportunities that will outweigh essentially the potential deregulation in the U.S.? Right.
So in the U.S. market, what I would encourage you all to walk away from as a theme is the U.S. right now is looking for energy security and reliability. And that's in our generation sources, and that's in the delivery and distribution that Olga has talked about.
Regardless of what happens with the investor-owned utilities, with independent power producers, new developers, some of the new relationships that are being developed between companies, striking relationships between data center providers and power , it's really an unprecedented time of modernization of our grid and modernization of how we generate electricity, both those things together. I see that being a very strong growth market over the coming years.
Thank you, Marie-Claude, Olga, and Joe. Next question for Tom. Tom, are you working with all the hyperscalers for data center design? And could you, and I love that question because we're being asked this question quite often, could you clarify what is WSP's role and scope?
If you'd asked three years ago, I would have said that a lot of our work would have been around the actual facility itself, the mechanical, electrical, cooling, electrics, etc .
That's obviously had a step change over the last three years. But where we're seeing the biggest growth is in probably sort of three areas. First, I alluded to in my presentation, everything around land acquisition. So all of the environmental due diligence, and then once we find the sites, undertaking the planning permissions, getting the environmental permits in place, huge, huge amount of work there. And then going on to the power infrastructure. Many of these sites don't have the power or they have sufficient power for maybe the first phases, but then how you plan to bring that power into the site, what the interim solutions might be before you get to the final solution. So that whole piece around power infrastructure. Then a third area, which is really growing, is there's a lot of existing data centers here that need to be refurbished.
They need to be developed in a net zero carbon way. So we're providing a lot of advisory services around the decarbonization of the existing assets and how we retrofit them, not only in terms of a sustainability point of view, but also increased power demands for AI. So the whole, when you talked about that platform for organic growth, when we had the small acquisition kW, they were sort of mainly mechanical, electrical, but we've grown that from an organic point of view to provide a range of services for our clients in many different parts of the world.
And we are seeing land identification moving east as well. It's not just in North America. Now the Middle East, and can you talk briefly about that?
Yeah, sure. I mean, all of the hyperscalers and the main sort of cloud providers are expanding globally.
What's interesting, when you go into Europe, it's far more of a challenge in terms of the environmental legislation and the regulatory framework. So that requires more of our expertise, a lot more NIMBYism, shall we say, in Europe. And then when you go sort of like Asia, I sort of see that that is a massive area of expansion at the moment for the sort of hyperscalers. And a lot of that is less so much about the sustainability aspects, but a lot more about the power infrastructure and actually how they deal with that. And that's another great thing about our platform is we've been able to piggyback on the back of many of our hyperscaler cloud provider clients into global destinations where we've got strong presence and a full range of services.
Thank you, Tom. I hope this addressed the question.
I'd like to open up the question in the room as well. I know I've been taking a lot of questions in the virtual. Yes, go ahead, Benoit.
Yes, Benoit Poirier from Desjardins. Thank you very much for the great presentation. My question is maybe for Kathleen. You made some great insights about strategic advisory, and obviously WSP has been very successful and been able to prove the value and the complement to the engineering work. So obviously M&A, it's part of WSP DNA. I understand that it's also a potential growth vector for strategic advisory. So I would be curious just to learn a little bit more about the criteria, whether it's different. And also we understand that the engineering market is still very fragmented despite the consolidation efforts.
So I would be curious also to get a little bit more color about how we should see the M&A opportunities for strategic advisory.
Before I turn to Kathleen, maybe I can take this one up just at least to cover that. Look, we have been quite active on the advisory front on M&A in recent years. We'll continue to be active. Today, Kathleen and André-Martin described the area where we wish to have an increased focus on advisory. So clearly, Benoit, again, that's an expression I like to use quite a lot. Growing advisory is not mutually exclusive to what we do in engineering. Essentially, we're going to continue to consolidate the market and capitalize on our strength.
Kathleen described and André-Martin described an untapped opportunity for WSP to really grow a presence in that space and really play into that market where we have historically been seen like the big four firms, the strategists that I described this morning, the McKinsey, the Bain, and others, the BCG. WSP given the depth of expertise that we have, the technical expertise that we have can really provide top-tier level of services, some that our competitors are unable to provide, frankly. I don't know, Kathleen, if you wanted to add on to this.
Our strategic advisory has to sit with our technical advisory. They're one and the same. That's our unique differentiator. Our strategic advisors are sitting within and integrated within those teams.
As I mentioned before, it gives us the opportunity to really validate any strategies or roadmaps that we're coming up with and making sure they're implementable, which is a key, again, key differentiator for us.
Yeah, and I'm glad you're bringing this up. If you look at our position in the marketplace, you know that we're always trying to have a strategic position in the marketplace, and you compare WSP to others, irrespective of the names, in our industry or outside, what differentiates us is that we have our strategic advisory sitting next to our technical advisory, technical excellence, and I believe, and we believe collectively as a team that nobody else can offer that, so that's where we see the value, and that's why we will invest extensively in that space in the years to come.
On that note, Kathleen, did you want to expand also on perhaps the sectors or the more sub-sectors where you think we could spend more time on?
Yes, of course, so I think it's got to be Transport and Infrastructure. Clearly, we have some very, very strong Transport and Infrastructure advisory teams already in our core, our bigger regions, but certainly, we want to get to the point where actually across the globe now, we reach that same positioning in all of our regions, and there's plenty of potential. We have fantastic talent. We have fantastic project references, which you've heard of today, and there's definitely more inroads that we can make, particularly in the development and planning and economic space.
We're already seeing our move into pre-concept feasibility studies, design competition management as very, very powerful, again, because we've got those technical teams that can support and help us with that. So it is a really exciting space to get into. Another area I'd just like to comment on is also transaction advisory, providing technical due diligence, environmental due diligence, commercial due diligence for huge transaction opportunities. Again, this is a very, very strong growth space for us going forward.
Thank you, Kathleen. Additional questions in the room? We have time.
Yuri with Canaccord Genuity. Just as it pertains to your plan to double program management revenues, I don't know who wants to take this one, but how do we think about managing some of the conflicts that might come with that? I'm thinking about maybe hiring yourself as a designer or an architect.
I'm not sure how that works or how that might look to the client, so how do you manage that?
Well, we've been doing it for 25 years, to be honest with you. I mean, that's a conflict. And I'm not sure I would no longer call it a conflict. I see this more as an opportunity than a conflict. The industry has evolved quite a bit and has changed quite a bit. Yes, 20 years ago, we needed to manage our position in the marketplace on any given projects. Did we want to advise the client or we wanted to work on the design? I think now the industry and our client base got used to the fact that we are in a position to offer different services to them.
We have, over time, developed such a deep expertise in each of those service levels that they're no longer seeing that as a conflict. They are actually not surprised should we decide to play the angle of project program management rather than the design. I don't know, Marie-Claude, if there's anything else you'd like to offer.
I think I totally agree, Alex. I think that we're a very collaborative industry. Sometimes we're going to be owner's side, and our competition is going to be delivery side. Sometimes we're going to JV with another firm to be delivery side, and the third one is going to be owner's side. We're an industry where you're not always on the delivery side or always on the owner's side because you kind of need both to have your credibility to really advise the client in program and project management.
You need to have delivered it as well. So we're so used to this. This is our industry. We're on both sides all the time.
Yes. Could you talk about maybe more specifically around the Property & Buildings?
Well, maybe just on what I was speaking about earlier about Advanced Manufacturing, healthcare, data centers. These are very complex projects. And we are seeing a bit of a trend where owners are beginning to sort of combine the engineering and the project management together because actually many traditional project management firms wouldn't have the technical depth of being able to understand some of the challenges. So we're just seeing a little bit of a trend now where actually we are employed as the lead consultant, but doing both the design and the project management.
That's very good because we're very used to doing our own project management for these big mandates anyway from a design point of view. But now we're actually sitting with the owner and doing both the project management, program management, and also the full design. So that's a trend that we're definitely seeing in larger complex projects.
Thank you, Tom. I'm conscious we're running a little bit over time, and I'm also conscious you have a full day ahead, and you took precious time off your agenda to attend our Investor Day today. So may not be in a position to answer all of the questions. I know, Michael, earlier on, I said that we will address the notion of organic growth and, more importantly, M&A growth. I really believe it's a fragmented market. I believe that WSP is well positioned.
We're clearly open for business in the next cycle. We have a very robust balance sheet at this point in time with a low leverage. And I'm confident that with discipline and care, that we will find the right opportunities to continue to grow our platform through M&A. So hopefully, Michael, this answers your questions. And hopefully, given our market share and our position in the marketplace, you can see that there's definite room for us to continue to grow. So apologies, I see there are many more questions, but during lunch, assuming you wish to stay with us for a few more minutes, we'll be more than happy to take those questions offline. So thank you very much. Key takeaways of today, I'm going to try to make it short. We have a brand new or renewed long-term vision for the company, not one that is different.
It's only an evolution, not a revolution. We wanted to acquire one of the leadership status, one of the leading firm status in our industry. We are going to continue to thrive, but we want to spread our wings. Kathleen and André-Martin talked about the work that we want to do in other spaces, and we believe there's tremendous room for us to continue to grow. So certainly, we're very excited about our long-term vision to double in size, to continue to thrive from a performance point of view, and really becoming and to be the home of engineers and scientists in our space, but also outside of our space. I think we have a very exciting three-year strategy, one that we hope will grow at a faster pace than the last one.
We're raising the bar, and we're raising the bar not because we wish to raise the bar. We're raising it because we feel it in the marketplace, the demand is there. I really believe we have a very powerful platform, and we can really extract the value of the WSP platform. And as I just mentioned, tremendous opportunities to also accelerate the execution of our strategy through M&A. I talked about the four pillars where we will be growing. You heard about our expertise. You heard about our client-centric culture. You heard about our people. And you also heard about digital and where we intend to significantly grow and play a major role in the industry. That bodes well. You heard about our select high-growth area. In three hours, it was impossible to cover all of the opportunities that we see in the marketplace.
Today, we didn't spend a whole lot of time talking about our global sectors or our geographies per se because we feel you're quite aware of where we play in the marketplace, where we win in the marketplace. But today, we wanted to take a different angle and come to you with niche examples of where we believe we can grow as an organization. So all in all, I think it's an exciting time. The rebranding or the new branding identity, I think, is a real reflection of what we intend to achieve in the next three years. And I could not end this Investor Day without thanking you, our investors, thanking you, the investment community, for your continued support. We've been blessed with an investor base that understands our strategy, believes in our board, believes in our leadership team.
And you can rest assured that we are going to work extremely hard in the coming years to create a shareholder value for you. So thank you for entrusting us, and I would like to wish you a good day. Thank you very much.