Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the PALFINGER Capital Markets Day. We will lead you through the program in a minute. I think now everybody can hear me well. On purpose, we made it here at our booth. First of all, you really get an understanding what's happening here. You know? I mean, you are usually getting it filtered by our presentations, a telephone in between. Now, that's real life. These are real customers. Yeah? Luckily, we are not in Hollywood where we have to deal with fake information or fake news, and I think this should really add to this real understanding where do we stand. Welcome to the bauma, the world's largest construction equipment show. It's bigger than the show in Vegas.
It's bigger than the shows in Asia, and you could really see with people coming here, and we had average per day 50,000 visitors to the bauma. 50,000 people coming here all across the globe, seeing us, seeing our competitors, this is well the reason why we had to do a major strong investment to show what's about products, solutions, digitalization. You can even see Truck Inspect here. Before coming to further feedback on the show, Gerhard Sturm will lead you later on, I wanted to welcome as well here Felix Strohbichler, our CFO. Big applause. I think you know him. We have here the Head of Procurement, Harald Hauser. Big applause. Not to forget about Michael Berger, HR Global. He's the guy to talk about people, to talk about our team.
If anybody want to apply for a job, he's the right person in charge. We are as well having Gerhard Sturm, Head of Global Sales here. Not to forget about Hannes Roither, but Hannes is an icon in the industry, so everybody knows him very well. We start now with our video. Yes. I did not forget.
Where some see endless desert, others see endless possibilities. Where some see no way out, others, a chance to prove themselves. What some see as an impossible task, others see as a challenge. Where some get lost in their dreams, others turn their dreams into visions, and visions into reality. We are the others.
Take your chance and you'll reach anything. Just stay up and you'll reach anything. Build tomorrow and stop the doubt. Side by side and we'll reach anything. Reach anything.
Thank you very much. I think this was inspiring. I hope this was inspiring, how to turn challenges into opportunities and further on into success. Success as a company, as a successful business model, but as well in terms of profitability, and that's why we are here together. Welcome again here, and we wanted to show you a little bit how we are navigating in this really volatile and challenging environment. As I said, this Reach Anything happened and was prepared in a time when there was still COVID around, and there were overwhelming challenges. You know, and then we had this cyberattack, and then we had COVID, too. We are having now this useless Russian war, I will call it. At the end of the day, there are always still remaining business opportunities.
When you are talking to customers here and dealers at the booth joining us, you can't get really the feeling of crisis. They were overcoming it because, you know, COVID really pushed us heavily back. Yeah. Just considering that the Lufthansa fired all the ground staff, and now they don't know any more. They cannot find any more anybody who is dealing with their luggage that you can check in, and they can be sure that your flight will take place. Huh? This was a little bit overwhelming in the crisis. Some of the people now came out stronger, like we did last year, but as well are more focusing on the opportunities instead of just what's in the air and what could be a problem in future. I think this is something where we and our dealers learned a lot.
Welcome again here. In terms of, numbers, in terms of overall information, there's nothing new. Yes, we are heavily counting on partnerships in respect of understanding each other, supporting each other, growing, but at the end of the day, making business. The good thing about PALFINGER is, about the PALFINGER brand, is that dealers, customers want to be successful and want to be with a performing partner. Therefore, it's a little bit easier even to bring customers who are not yet buying equipment from us here, because people want to be there where success, where performance, where glory is. This is currently happening here at the PALFINGER booth. I hope that you can as well take this impression back home, this impression of the booth, of the show, of the business, how we are dealing with it.
Yes, 130 countries, 5,000 business partners, very important, a very strong and solid global coverage. We have here different nations. If this is Asia, if this is LATAM, we are very well covering all these areas. Also very important that not only in timber recycling, loader cranes enjoying over 30%, over 50% on timber cranes. Clearly in this industry, when you are the leader, when you are a premium brand, you need to provide not only premium product, as well premium services, premium solutions, you need to behave as a premium business partner, and that's all about. In terms of growth, I think most of you were already following PALFINGER for a couple of years. I know ourselves, 2010, everything started with EUR 650 million. Lot of acquisitions, mergers.
We rolled out 2019, the GPO, the Global PALFINGER Organization, where we really tried to structure it in a different way in terms of product lines. Having, and we will hear later on as well from Andreas Hille about center of excellence, so to really have the technology we have in the group, to get this underlined and addressed, and that every product line can participate and can, get information, can get technology out of it. We had the tip of COVID, and then within one year we managed to have a record year. This is relates back what I mentioned earlier. We, yes, we were slowing down, we were cutting costs, whatever, but the major investments, we keep going. We kept going. We also had investments in people and in talents.
When the market came back, we were able to deal with this upcoming, with this upswing. This is the most critical one when you are too much just focusing on cutting costs, laying off people. As I said, this Lufthansa example now, you can't go to your vacation. You have to to be quite nervous about is your luggage arriving. This is really homemade. Yeah? This was just a cleanup in the industry which they did under the cover of COVID. Now we all pay the bill, and this is something which we will not accept and should not happen at PALFINGER. On the other hand, 2022, yes, it looks like we will hit, and we'll hear something more from Felix Strohbichler later on, our target of EUR 2 billion already this year. It's looking good.
We're still working on further improving as well, the profitability in terms of getting, the dynamic pricing already fully materialized within 2022 and then to further roll it out. The next two milestones, EUR 2.3 billion in 2024, and the overall target, 2030, of EUR 3 billion. This does not mean any major other acquisition needed or whatever. This is really based on the product lines we are currently having. I think, some of you saw this as well this morning in terms of product line and different business areas. We are in that this is really a quite good and strong and solid match. Megatrends. Yes, yeah, megatrends, it's social change, it's sustainability, it's digitalization. On the other hand, these major challenges need to be turned into opportunities.
As I mentioned earlier, as a joke, talking about Michael Berger yourself maybe applying for a job, over there is a little booth to join our team. There is every day one, two colleagues of an HR team talking to talents, talking to people who apply for a job, trainees, whatever, give them information. You cannot imagine which kind of strong multiplier this is. Then you go to maybe other competitors, you see the first thing is they're complaining about human capital. There is nobody. If I don't do anything, nothing will happen. Okay. That's a little bit maybe what is different here to some of the others. The same is valid here for the sustainability. Sustainability is not only important as a KPI, as it is in the reporting, it's also important that sustainability becomes and is a part of the business model.
Because as soon as it's a business model where I can save money and save resources, it's also a part of improvements inside the company and not to forget about the social change. The Vision and Strategy 2030, you'll hear later on as well here from Andreas Hille what we are planning in terms of, solutions, et cetera. It's important that one day you need to have a vision, but then you need to have, within a certain timeframe, a strategy and a plan. The two key pillars here are clearly Go for Solutions so that a customer arrives here, and we can tell him for his kind of application, he would need to have the proper solution. This goes hand in hand with digitalization. This means as well the support by artificial intelligence, automated processes.
This link together are the two key pillars here to remain and further strengthen our position as number one, as the leader for crane and lifting solutions. Not to forget about the values. This is always something when, you know, when there are new leaders arriving, as I arrived in 2018, you always look forward, everything needs to be better, different. No, but there are also basic topics which are relevant, which made the company already quite successful. This is the strong roots, the brand, and as well, the commitment to sustainability. This is something as well in terms of baseline we have, the stability we have, we can look forward. As well, we like this picture a lot between to be well linked between the different topics we are having here. This means, again, digitalization.
This, for example, when you are planning a work site, you can use the Fleet Monitor. Before you are sending the crane and the staff to a work site, you can virtually, by Google Maps, identify how to put the crane, how much space you have. This is now something as well, our customers are more and more understanding the benefit. Instead of sending a truck, let's see how it works. It's too big. Send it back, another one. By Google Maps together with the Fleet Monitor, we can do this as a planning tool. People did not believe us at the beginning. Now they can see it here. They can touch it here. This is what we see as a customer experience, as a brand experience we need to do.
On the other hand, you know, these big guys, the mobile cranes, the auto cranes here, for example, from Liebherr. Yeah. The smaller version needs also half day to get ready for the service, half day work, half day to leave the work site. With a PALFINGER crane, the bigger ones, you can do this job, you can do jobs a day because it takes half an hour to put the truck there and to get it operative. This is something now, maybe in the past, in terms of efficiency, market environment was not that much important. Becomes more and more important, this efficiency, to be even more successful in future. This is something, as I mentioned earlier, with a powerful performing brand people like to deal with. I like to have as well these premium customers.
This is now the match which we can clearly see and is underlined here, even at the show. Digitalization, what does it mean? We had, I don't know how many versions of this slide. What does it mean? I think Andreas Hille as well will reference to it later on. It's very important to have the process, the organization. You need to have the proper business models using this. Here is already, I would say, the first major challenge that not only yourself, so your engineers understand about this business model, as well your customers and dealers understand.
This is why we have this experience part over there, where you can start with the configurator, that they can see how to deal with the product, which is also cutting costs because the data in the configurator is only something which is based on a certain modularity. Yeah. The complexity is reduced. Now you need to explain the customer, the dealer, what does it mean in terms of benefit? The smart lifting solutions itself, if this is certain controls we have, et cetera, this is something quite important, which then links back to the supply chain. The base on all is the IT core and digital backbone is clearly IT. To link all these different elements together, as I tried to explain it before, I think is quite important. Not to forget about STRUCINSPECT.
I think some of you heard me already talking several times about it. It's a tool we have developed, we have engineered at PALFINGER 21st, we have here in Vienna, which manages dealing with analyzing bridges and buildings in a fully digitalized manner. You can see it as well over there. Artificial intelligence behind, so that the civil engineer does not need to deal with 40,000 pictures and then to see what needs to be done. Gets pre-analysis, gets a dataset, putting a digital twin together, and even after three years, if he has to do this building bridge again, by artificial intelligence, he sees about scratches and other stuff which might have erased or happened. I think also very important and why we are showing this again is the simple fact that we wanted to show you there's something concrete.
Digitalization is not the nice CEO topic where the CEO likes to write the book and likes to be the greatest guy on Earth because he knows a little bit more than others. You need to show it in a real business model, and this is what we have here. If you will have time later on, you are invited to see this, and you will be impressed. As I mentioned earlier, it's also about investments. Yes, we need to be careful on CapEx.
We need to be careful in terms of spending in this volatile time, but we are also having some key pillars which are relevant to us and for the further growth, sustainable manner of PALFINGER. One is the PALFINGER Campus Lengau is where we are having our training for skilled workers, and this is something which will go fully online starting with this season. Just one number maybe to remember, usually we had about 30, 36 people applying for as a trainee here, and in parentheses here. This year we had 111. This shows if you're giving clear signals, even in this environment, you can harvest something. There is an opportunity.
Not to forget about the hub in Vienna, where we'll have some engineers based there because we see now that in the urban environment, it's easier to get skilled engineers. Talking about Vienna, where we have Bratislava, Hungary, Czech Republic, and there we can get the right people. This hub then is one part of the component center, Köstendorf, which is the backbone. This means just showing a couple of elements where we are focusing on. As I said, it's about the employee, it's about the solution, the expansion of Löbau. There's another boost, and maybe some of you might wonder why there are no platforms here. Yes, the platform on the other booth is a part of the PALFINGER training program, because you need to walk in one direction 15 minutes.
This keeps everybody as well fresh here, so I invite you maybe to join us on this trip. The market environment, I think, there's a lot we can talk about. It's important that we keep ourselves in a position that we can grab opportunities into success, not just waiting what is happening like the mouse in front of snake and not knowing how to move, where to move. No, we drive it forward. We drive it proactively forward. Just a couple of elements which I wanted to show here, and I don't want to repeat everything. I mean, I think there was a lot said of this very sad situation of this Russian war which caused problems everywhere. We know how to deal with it now, but still it's a very sad element. COVID, yeah, is still here.
We have to see how China evolves. As you know, the cross-shareholding agreement we canceled and is settled now. I think as well Felix can say a couple of words about that. Then about the chips availability, also very important here that we found ways in different areas to get our chips, sometimes delayed. This is why working capital went up, because we still had some units in stock where we have a major cleanup. Yesterday, one of the board members of the German MAN company was here reassuring us which kind of equipment we will get, because then I can put the crane, and then I can sell and invoice it as a solution. I think this is also important to be understood.
Energy supply, yes, I mean, if you would have asked me two months ago, the bigger concern was generally the availability of energy. Now it's more about the costs, but it seems as long and as soon there will be energy available, as well costs will go down. I believe there was really something artificially behind the scene which happened there, a little bit further artificial reduction of supply. Prices are going up, so I'm not too sure which kind of games took place. Not to forget about inflation. The energy consumption, yes, I think 20% of it is gas. It's still something where we are having some challenges, but still we can deal with it. We did a lot in reducing our energy supply. We had here, for example, more than 10%.
I think the last couple of days, the numbers we have seen is already more than 15%. Again, here, this is then something which is a certain kind of business model and as well a certain kind of sustainable, cost reduction and reduction of output of emissions. I think this is something when you, when we play this together, this means a lot and, can really drive us forward. Yes, the order book is still, very strong. This is well something when we are having talks here to both dealers, customers, yes, construction equipment is slowing down, but the other services, maintenance, offshore is coming back now for wind cranes.
There is always something which we can have here in our pocket to turn a challenge, to turn crisis, whatever, into success, into business, and I think this is very important. What I would like to mention is as well is that we are having our own task force on energy supply like we had it on COVID, and they are always between all the functions, across all the functions of PALFINGER. They are analyzing, making suggestions, plans, how to recover, and I think it's also something based on the GPO, based on the Global PALFINGER Organization, which will be quite relevant. I think it's now the right time to hand over to some real concrete figures and concrete input here, Felix Strohbichler, our CFO, for his challenges and achievements of PALFINGER. I will be back at the end.
We can take further questions, we can take and have further conversation. Enjoy the day, and let's listen to Felix. Thank you, Felix.
Thank you, Andreas. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Warm welcome also from my side. I would like to talk about the challenges and achievements based on the Q3 figures. Some of you, especially those online, might have followed the Q3 call this morning, but I know that most of the people present here in the room didn't have the chance as they were on the way, and I also try to give some additional information to what we have mentioned this morning. Starting with the headlines, and Andreas Klauser talked about all those topics already. We have an order backlog which is still at a very high level. However, the uncertainty has increased, and of course, it's affecting demand, not all over the world, but especially in EMEA and also in APAC.
What is also a critical topic is that the supply chain, which started to improve a few weeks ago, again proves to be very unstable, and we have to assume that this is going to continue for some times, and Harald Hauser will speak about this in detail a little bit later. What does this now mean for the financial results of PALFINGER? Let me start with the segment Sales and Service. First of all, the market environment is not bad all over the world. We have obviously a very challenging geopolitical situation, which is impacting the demand in EMEA already in certain industries. I mean, there are also industries which are very well-performing. For example, in recycling, there is no need to change because this is something which continues throughout economic cycles. Of course, construction industry is impacted.
This is an important share of our business, and this leads to a certain reduction of order intake in EMEA and especially also in APAC, not as important in terms of absolute size for PALFINGER, but the Chinese market is heavily impacted, not only by the COVID lockdowns, but also by the massive downturn of construction industry. We have a high revenue growth, and I will talk about this several times. Also mainly due to price increases and inflation and also exchange rates. I talked already about the high order backlog, but this is the positive side to say we have a very good visibility despite of the volatility because of the good order book. On the other hand, this is a negative aspect from the sales point of view because we have very long delivery times.
We are competitive, so also competition has not as long, but long delivery times. This is clearly something we also have to mention here. A not so positive effect of the consequences of the instability in the supply chain is the huge stock level we have. Not only we, I think many industries at the moment have extremely high stock levels. To a certain extent, this was an intended increase of stock levels because we had to increase our minimum stock levels. We had to put more stock of components where we learned that it's critical. On the other hand, we have a very unstable situation in truck supplies, which leads to finished goods waiting for trucks. Also sometimes trucks come early, and we have trucks sitting in our yards waiting for equipment.
This is one of the drivers for a high level of finished products. Last but not least, dynamic pricing is a very important factor for the Sales and Service segment. You cannot yet see it in the results of Q1 to Q3. This was implemented a few months ago. It's now already in the order book, but will take effect starting from January. How does this work? Because the question normally comes in any case. The last price increase we did, which was about 6% after a row of previous price increases, is linked to an index which is very much reflecting the cost development of PALFINGER. If this index over the period of time is higher than the 6%, we can pass on more than 6% price increase on those orders taken.
If the index shows an increase of cost of less than 6%, it's still the 6% of price increase which will take effect. It's kind of a safety net for PALFINGER. There will be a 6% price increase taking effect from January. If there is another unexpected upturn of material cost for whatever reason, we would be covered and could pass on these increases relatively quickly. This was unfortunately not possible last time because we had a long-lasting order book, especially the price peak or the cost peak due to the war in Ukraine really came as a surprise for everybody. This led to the fact that we had a very high cost increase, which impacted our P&L quite quickly, whereas the price increases had a certain lead time due to the fact that the order book was so long-lasting.
This is why you can see in the segment Sales and Service a reduction of the EBIT margin by around 2%. The positive aspect is the external revenue went up by 14.3%. If you then go to segment Operations. We have to say that despite of the problems in the supply chain, despite of bottlenecks in terms of personnel, we were able to reach a quite good level of output, and especially also in third-party manufacturing, we had an extremely positive year. In terms of turnover, but also in terms of profitability, this was a real booster for our P&L. I already mentioned the problems in supply chain impacting our inventory levels. I mean, this is of course seen in the segment Operations, where we have a lot of unfinished goods and a lot of components.
Unfortunately, always the wrong things to really be able to finish everything, and this is a big driver here in this segment. Last but not least, we set up the task force GAS, which is mainly active in the segment Operations, and Andreas Klauser already explained this in detail. What does this mean for our KPIs? First of all, if you look at the turnover in segment Operations, this is obviously only the external turnover. This is not reflecting the turnover, which is the activity in our factories in order to produce for the segment Sales and Service, which is obviously the main activity of our factories.
This underlines that our manufacturing for third parties has really grown dramatically by almost 70%, and it also had quite a positive impact on the EBIT, which increased by almost 50% in this segment. If you then go to the holding unit, you can see that actually the cost position on paper reduced or went down by EUR 2 million. In reality, it went up because we made even more investments than in the previous year to prepare for the future, to follow our strategy. However, we had some positive exchange rate and one-off effects which in the end make this figure looking lower, than in the previous year. As I said, the investments have gone up and not down in the holding unit. Coming now to the group KPIs.
18% of revenue growth, EUR 1.58 billion of turnover is a great headline. What you also have to say that this is, of course, massively impacted by price increases, so about 8% of those 18% are coming from price increases from inflation. Another around five percent are coming from FX effects, especially the U.S. dollar and the ruble have become extremely strong over the last quarters, and this is obviously also impacting the revenue KPI. Then we have another 4% which is a mixture from output increase and price increases in manufacturing for third parties. This is so to say the deeper understanding of those 18%.
If you then go down to the EBIT margin, obviously we see this time gap we have in between of cost increases and price increases, which will be covered at the latest by the year-end. We made sure with the dynamic pricing that we will not experience such a price-cost gap in the future. Here you can see the level of investments, and this is surprisingly low and actually not what we also expected ourselves, so we have triggered a lot of investments in order to achieve our midterm target and our Strategy 2030. However, it's difficult nowadays to get investments on the ground, to get machinery to make buildings because the supply chain is completely full.
Which means that despite of the fact that we have triggered a lot of investments, this figure is not yet as high as we expect it to become in the next quarter. Do expect here a certain increase in 2023. This is a slide which shows the development of our financial liabilities net debt. This is not a picture we enjoy. However, it's just a consequence of all the inventory levels we had to build up for the reasons explained. The good thing is that we have a good financing structure, so we have now with also additional EUR 280 million of green financing bilateral loans at an average remaining term debt of 3.31 years, which is good.
The average interest rate with 1.9% is also quite good, taking into consideration that we have already seen some major increases lately, and this will of course only go up, so the interest rates will deteriorate further for reasons which are very obvious, but still PALFINGER is very well set up in this aspect. What I would also like to point out here is the equity, you can see only a slight improvement compared to last year. The reason for this is that on the one hand, we reversed the cross-shareholding with SANY, and we also acquired a minority stake in a company in France where we are producing hookloaders and skiploaders. Those two acquisitions or transactions cost a reduction in equity of about EUR 90 million.
On the other hand, we had some positive effects in equity due to FX development. In the end, this explains why the equity only went up slightly and not substantially more. Of course, also in the equity ratio, this is the effect you can see. The two transactions led to a reduction of equity ratio of about 3%, and this is the main reason why it went down. Of course, net debt/EBITDA gearing is heavily impacted also by the net debt development. This is a slide which really comes to the point of what all of this means with the supply chain and the stock levels.
You can see in line number three that we had a change in working capital of almost EUR 140 million, and this is actually even looking better than it is because we took quite some countermeasures, like expanding, factoring, et cetera, to mitigate the effect. It's really a massive situation we are in. We have put together a plan how we're to reduce inventories until year-end substantially. The plan is to reduce by around EUR 80 million in the next few weeks. This is very ambitious, but it's clearly our commitment, our target to bring this down as much as possible, always based on the assumption that we now see a certain improvement also in the supply chain.
The free cash flow -EUR 70 million is something which is not nice to show, but in the end it's just a logical consequence of the buildup of inventory. We are addressing it actively, and we will bring this down relatively quickly. Here you can see share price development. We have, in terms of price target here an average of around EUR 31, which is a figure where we still have some room, so it's an attractive share to invest in. Unfortunately, of course, our share price development is burdened by the exposure we have in Russia with our Russian setup. We have, as you know, we have ring-fenced the setup. It's acting completely autonomously, and we at the moment don't see any risks in terms of sanctions, et cetera.
All of this is well covered and well dealt with. Still, of course, the market does see the exposure and somehow takes it into consideration. This is why we have here a certain gap to the ATX and PALFINGER, but still the consensus about the share price target shows that actually PALFINGER is quite undervalued. What is the target for the end of the year? Andreas Klauser already mentioned that we have a target of EUR 2 billion we are going to reach. I mean, nothing is guaranteed in these times, but based on the order book we have, based on the actual development, we actually see a very, very high probability that we will clearly be able to exceed those EUR 2 billion threshold in 2022.
Also in terms of EBIT, we had a record year last year, you know this. Of course, we do the utmost to keep the gap to 2021 as small as possible, so most likely it will be not possible to exceed the absolute EBIT figure of 2021, but at least we want to keep the gap as small as possible. We talked already about the price increases, which are constantly taking effect, and the last one will take effect beginning of next year. Of course, as Andreas Klauser also mentioned, there are still some uncertainties, but again, we are now quite close to the year-end, so we do actually expect that not too many things should happen until end of 2022.
If we then go a little bit further in the future, and this was also mentioned before, that we have a midterm target for 2024 to reach EUR 2.3 billion. Based on the development in 2022, we will most likely update our midterm target, 2024, with the publication of the full year results, so in February. I don't want to say anything further here. Of course, we are now doing our planning. We are going into more details, but we should give you a new midterm guidance, at the latest when we publish the full year results. Of course, our vision for 2030 with the EUR 3 billion is still up, and we are very confident that we can reach this.
Well, these were the slides we wanted to present to you, and I think the best part is always the discussion, and we are very happy to take your questions, whether from the room or from the virtual participants. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you, Felix. Please use the opportunity to ask your questions based on the two presentations, because we hear afterwards from the supply chain. We hear from product innovations, but please ask now based on the presentations.
We are as well here in the afternoon, so there is something upcoming still in the afternoon, we are still available. There's no rush. It's just intermediate, if there's anything major you would like to know and understand better now. If we do it later on as well, good, because there's still a lot to come, and a lot to come not only from the board, which is usually presenting to you, as well from the colleagues, from the fellows, more closer to the field, which should give you a more profound information what's happening. We can as well take your questions later on as you wish.
Thank you. The first question comes from Jorge.
Thank you very much. Hello, Felix, Andreas. First of all, congratulations on the results, very strong results. I have a couple of questions. The first one will be around the sales, clearly above expectations. Here it will be interesting to know if you can give us a little bit of split in terms of volume and price. Also if there was any worse evolution from the Russia business in the quarter, or if it was as usual, business as usual. Then regarding operation business, I was wondering when you comment on the strong backlog extending into next year, third quarter, do you have any visibility about the utilization of your factories next year?
I'm asking this because with the new reporting, now it is clear the importance of the levels of utilization for your profitability in your factories. Now you are selling a lot to third parties. I am curious how you see next year from that side. Thank you.
No, I think in terms of order coverage, you have seen what we are talking about. It's still very strong. Yes, it is flattening out. Yes, some of our customers are a little bit nervous about construction business overall, as I mentioned earlier, but still they are looking for more efficient solutions. As I tried to explain before, the big challenge is this volatility. That you can take volatility as a burden, as a problem, or as a challenge. We take it as a challenge. The same is applying to our customers. They are more flexible with our products, and this is clearly reflected in the order book we have. The coverage throughout August, September next year. Yes, then the order book is flattening overall. It's not anymore at this peak.
This means as well, lead time will reduce, and I can tell you, and I think as well from your own experience, if you have to wait for something more than 12, 18 months, maybe your interest is also slowing down. We will have shorter lead times. We will hear as well from the truck producers, from the chassis producers, this is flattening it out into 2023, but still not bad, covering until August, September. What we are currently doing is here, too, filling as well the gap already for next year with orders. I think, here, just in the first couple of days, and Kerstin can tell you, we had more than 200 concrete leads already. The expectation was by far smaller. This gives. We know there are uncertainties.
We have inflation, we have still the Russian war ongoing, but it's not that critical that I would say there is a major crash and a major slowdown for the overall business of PALFINGER. I think this is what we can say. About plant utilization.
Well, I think one question was also, again, the split of revenue in terms-
I mean.
... of the revenue growth, right? This is what I tried to explain before, that it's about 8% price increases, about 5% FX effects, and about 4% is a split of output growth and also price increases in the third-party manufacturing. Yeah, so this is the split. Then you also ask about Russia, I think. What about the business in Russia? It has been very successful up to now, so there was no decline in the first two quarters in terms of business volume, also not in terms of profitability. So extremely stable, actually unexpected. What we can see now is that in the timber part of the business, so we have actually two key activities. The one is the timber and recycling industry, mainly timber.
The other one is the typical loader crane in the Russian market. For the loader crane, the demand is still strong. In the timber industry, we see now a certain decline, but this is also somehow linked to the overall development, not necessarily to the Russian war.
No.
If you go to digitization in the plants, I mean, we have started several initiatives there. On the one hand, if you look at it from the bigger picture, we are implementing our ERP system, S/4HANA, globally. We have done now several steps to push this and we are expanding further. Year- by- year until end of 2025, we will implement in our factories, in our sales and service setups, S/4HANA. This is a very important milestone in terms of digitization because it allows us to use one system to have a in one system, one process across the company. In the factories, of course, we have historically grown setups, and we now work on digitizing what we have in the factories.
This is a huge effort to get the data also out of older factories, older machinery, and this would perhaps lead too far. Yes, we are investing millions of EUR per year also in digitizing processes and our internal value chain. This is an ongoing process and part of our digitization pillar in our Strategy 2030.
Are there further questions?
Now, Hannes, please, can you use your microphone?
Maybe a follow-up, please. Regarding the factories for next year, what are the potential tailwinds or headwinds for margins?
Well, the tailwinds are clearly that the dynamic pricing was agreed and was accepted by our customers, by our dealers, so they understand. I think overall, all in all together, we can already see an improvement of 13.5% whatever. I think the overall price increase was even beyond 20%. There is something in the pipeline to come, okay? Because obviously long lead times, it is a little bit pushed out, but it is accepted. This is for sure, certain kind of tailwind. Headwinds are still if there is any major supply chain issue, you know, which we cannot see now, if there would be a major slowdown in the Chinese industry providing components. Currently what we can see, it is quite well under control.
I think as well, Harald Hauser in a minute will tell us a lot how he's working on that. I mean, the only issue he had, it became a little bit more gray in these days because he had a lot of headache in getting these components. We're even talking to brokers to get chips. We were even talking to manufacturers of washing machines to get chips out of it. This is what he had to do, and this is a quite heavy impact on his personal life, I think, as well. I think he will tell us in a minute how he's dealing with that.
Thank you very much.
Okay, sorry.
Very quick. Thank you. You spoke about 10%-15% of energy consumption reduction. Do you have any? Can you tell us, like, around about, like, what are your plans and how do you want to reduce the-
No, we have.
Wait.
We did this already.
You did this already?
We did this already.
Oh, sorry.
This is by solar panels, isolation as well, setting temperatures down, new processes in the paint shop. You know, the paint shop is really heavily burning gas. As I said, this is where you need to take a challenge into an opportunity, a problem into a business plan and success. This is something which we managed in quite a big part of our activities.
Thank you.
Welcome. Good. I will hand over to Harald. Harald, tell us why your hairs became.
Empty.
Even more gray hair, and I lost mine. Big applause to Harald Hauser.
Not only gray, also empty. That's it. Yeah. A very warm welcome also from my side, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure for me to give you some insights in the world of procurement. I can tell you, this is not the easiest world today. The topic for today is stress in the chain, in the supply chain. Believe me, now not only the chain, the stress is also really in my department as well. For me personally, this was a total abnormal. The last two years was total abnormal, and I never have seen this with my experience of 25 years now in the procurement. I've never seen this before. This is unbelievable. It's good to give you some insights here. I created this into three main pillars, three main pillars.
The reasons for the supply disruption clearly the COVID, especially for 2022 now. The COVID situation still in China. Of course, everybody knows the situation, war in Ukraine. Last but not least, or followed from them, also this energy crisis, coming mainly from the gas price, which is missing from Russia. Before we start, I would like to give you an update. Maybe one or other was also in the Capital Markets Day in November last year in Vienna, and I showed this picture. This was this picture, and this is this picture now is only an update. We was in the situation.
We know when we go a little bit into history, 2019 when COVID starts, everybody was of the mind, or the main thing was clear that 2020 will be a disaster. Everything will be reduced. Lower demands. The reality was totally different. We had in 2021, 20% increase, and this was totally unexpected. This was the reason why it came to these bottlenecks. Everybody, the steel mills shut it down, the blast furnaces. Companies reduced their resources, and the reality was 20%, 20% plus, and this was the bottlenecks. The consequence of these bottlenecks was clear. Only some examples. For the steel plates, we had an increase in lead time from two months up to six months, five-six months.
Steel tubes, which we need for our cylinders, from three-six months. Semiconductors, our chips, this was a disaster. For four to 12 months, we have to order one year before we know exactly what we need. Trucks, chassis was already mentioned. We had a lead time normally between two-four months, depends from the size of the truck. We had also up to 10 or some cases 12 months. This is the update now. We see, especially in 2022, that the time is changing a little bit. The steel plates is going down to again, high, higher, but down to three months. Tubes as well. Semiconductors also from six-seven months. And as well the trucks from 10 months to five-six months.
It's a much better situation. This shows me exactly that the situation will improve in procurement a lot. This was the delivery times shortage in the electronics. What was the reason for this? These bottlenecks was coming because the industry, the computers, the electronics, 60% of the worldwide chips is used in PlayStation, handies and high tech computers. This was booming a lot with these lockdowns. All the families bought for the kids, all this equipment. This brought this extreme bottleneck in this field. This is saturated now. They have a huge reduction now with 20%, 25%. So that means we see a reduction.
We have still, Andreas told us before, we have still some struggles with delays, I don't know, one, two, three weeks, but this is nothing compared with one year ago. We got no confirmation from the suppliers when they will deliver. Six months, eight months, 10 months, no idea. This was really what Felix also told us. We was really lucky for this, able to buy on a broker market all our chips with ten times higher prices, but this was necessary to do that. We was able to fulfill our demands in chips, in semiconductors. Transport costs. We have some shipments coming from China. The normal price was EUR 2,500. This was increased up to EUR 16,000.
Now again, we see also an improvement with EUR 7,000-EUR 8,000 . Far over what we had in 2020, but still much better and give us a clear signal that the situation will improve. What is still high, the transportation time was before four weeks. Last year, four weeks, and we still have eight weeks. The reason I will show you in the next slide. This was the update, what we have shown also in the last meeting in Vienna. Coming back to these three pillars, that means impact COVID supply chain, especially in 2022. The problem, the lockdowns, and lockdowns means especially also in the ports.
We had a problem that in Shanghai, we was not able to bring all these materials on the ships. We had huge delays, and we was really in urgent cases, it was really necessary to change to air freight, which is much higher cost compared with the sea freight. Fortunately, what we have also seen in this year, that the COVID situation without China in the rest of the world was really no serious problem in this year. Maybe a little bit in the first two months, January, February, but this topic is disappeared completely. What means all our own companies by PALFINGER, as well, our suppliers and sub-suppliers had the full capacity free for production, free for our shipments.
This was the first, the impact of COVID still in 2022. The impact, for sure, of the Ukraine war on the supply chain. Yes, we have in Ukraine a big supplier, especially for steel pipes, as I said before, for what we're using for the hydraulic cylinders, and this supplier was stopped immediately from one day to the next with the production because you know why this was. Fortunately, they was able to restart again after three-four weeks and with this restart, they was also able to deliver now to PALFINGER on a constantly form.
Nobody knows what will happen with this war, we increased a lot our second source with for steel pipes with increased costs, we was completely able to secure our demand as well with tubes. PALFINGER was also indirectly impacted from this wiring harnesses, this Kabelbäume. We don't use this, our truck manufacturer, our OEMs was a big impacted from this, from this virus. Also here we see a big improvement because all this OEM was able to restart their production in other countries, in Poland, or around Ukraine. This was the Ukraine delivery situation.
The Russian situation invasion brings out also a huge price increase. We will see this later on in a price curve. We had additional costs, and Felix mentioned this already before in steel prices, and what we see now that the prices beginning from May, April reduce again, but we will see this later. This is the slide where we can see the price development from Kallanish or from MEPS. This is only the basis price for steel, for hot-rolled steel. Here we see there was always for many years, there was always round about EUR 500 with the basic prices in average. This was the situation with COVID. As I told you before, this was business bottlenecks.
We had the situation that every steel in every quality was increased. We see also in the last period of 2021, we see a clear reduction down with 20%-30%, and it was clear our expectation was for this year we see a further reduction, and this was our plan. Unfortunately, according to this war, the price jumped immediately up to EUR 1,450. Fortunately, we see now that this price was totally overheated, and we see now that we have a very strong reduction, and we strongly believe we come down now to EUR 750 around about.
What is also very positive, we had normally with our steel manufacturer a contract which for six months, and we was able now to reopen the contract, especially for the fourth quarter, to bring a part of this reduction also in this year as a reduction. The third thing was the energy. The energy crisis. Everybody knows from the news that we have a situation which is really very uncertain. Especially the upcoming winter will show us how the price development will be. When the consumption is very high, then the price level is also higher. When we have a good situation that we have a softer winter, then maybe it's different.
With extremely volatile markets, that means in every country we have a totally different price peaks up to 200%, 400% in different markets, as I said. What we see that we have to make different strategies. Sometimes we have to buy for a quarter, for six months, or maybe also a spot market, and this we have to negotiate in the procurement for every country differently. What is good, the last point, that the gas supply for this coming winter in Europe is secured. We will see this also in the next slide. The storages are full, and we strongly believe with this reduction what we have, we believe that we are secured with all this gas.
Except a little bit, Germany. Germany, they have also a full gas storage, but the storage is only 20% from the consumption. This shows better than it is, but fortunately for PALFINGER, our consumption in Germany is very low, and we can thus compensate with different LNGs or oil, something like this. This slide is maybe interesting as an overview how the inventory level is. The European government gave a clear target. The gas storages should be filled with 80%, and we reached this in August. Today, in October, we have an average filling rate of 92%. That means we are secured in the total Europe, as I said, with one exception. This is Germany.
There's also with 96%, but only with very small storages. 2023, we have still some challenges. This is clear. The situation of the electronic components, we heard about this, is improving, but the full relaxation we will see in middle of next year, because they have a huge backlog. They have millions on delays and to come in a normal delivery situation, this will take a time minimum six months next year. A proposal, and we discussed this also in the last meeting. We are going to have a clear strategy, double sourcing, and we push this double sourcing. We know this is very important.
The steel prices, as I said before, in the fourth quarter, we have a reduction. We strongly believe that also in the next year in the first quarter of the next year, we will see a reduction again. We see a slight recovery in the global transportation, and the availability on trucks is also easier. It's easier, the lead time is reduced because what I said before, these wiring harnesses moved in other countries, so they are also able to supply to PALFINGER. Oops. We already have a strong base, what we have to rely on. The inventory strategy is clear. We have to adjust.
It's not the wish from Felix Strohbichler here, but in critical parts with commodity parts, we have to fill up our safety stocks to be more stable. Double sourcing, as I said before, is very important. Also in different regions, we had always double sourcing. For example, we have three or four suppliers in Italy, in the Lombardy, and what COVID have shown us, when they closed the total area, Lombardy, all this double sourcing makes no sense. We have to do this in different regions. We need to go to global acting suppliers. We need to guarantee that all our suppliers are able to produce in the region for the region, that we have to. Okay. Here the screen is off. Doesn't matter.
In the region for the region or local for local. The last point here is we have to have a strong focus also with our suppliers, a long-term partnership with our strategic suppliers to give them clear contracts, to give them a rolling forecast, to have at the end a high priority that when it comes to bottleneck, that PALFINGER have always the first priority. With that, we strongly believe that we can also in 2023 to secure our customer demands. Thank you for your attention.
Hello.
Questions?
Yes. Do you have questions? Thank you very much for your insights, Harald, on the supply chain and how PALFINGER is dealing with it. Do we have first questions from the audience?
I am available the next hours when you. Oh, here.
Okay.
Yeah.
Very quickly one. I know that you are not only using a normal steel price for your products. I was wondering if the increase of energy prices is not somehow offsetting the improvement in cost. The link to the lower steel prices.
Sorry, say it again. Why is that the energy prices is not?
Is not offsetting in some way the positive impact from the steel prices going down?
I believe this is totally different because the steel prices is very connected on the demand. What we see or what we hear from the steel manufacturer, they especially the fourth quarter, they have a huge reduction coming from the automotive industry. When the demand is reduced, they have to follow with lower prices because they must fight for quantities because the blast furnace is producing, and they have to secure the demand. The gas and electricity is only the trend is only coming from this Russian war for this alternative buying with fracking from U.S. This is totally different from the price development.
Okay. I totally understood. Margins for steel producers will go down in any scenario, basically.
Yeah.
Because of the amount. Thank you.
For sure. Thank you.
Other questions?
Good. Thank you.
We will have now lunch for an hour. We will be back at 12:30 with a very exciting agenda, what makes PALFINGER unique for employees and customers. Enjoy your lunch, and see you at 12:30 in an hour. Thank you.
Before coming to the afternoon session, also wanted to remind you if there's any upcoming question even in between, just share with us. I think as we said this morning, it's quite important to talk about human capital, about HR and what's happening there, what is PALFINGER going to do? I think this will answer to many questions. I think that some of you as well had some concerns, PALFINGER being an Austrian company, having production sites in Austria, the engineering hub, technology center in Köstendorf, how does this fit when everybody's talking about labor shortage? As well to this, we do not want only to give an answer, we also want to show our plans, our ideas, and again, here, turning challenges into opportunities.
The person who will now really explain how this works and how PALFINGER is doing on that is Michael Berger. Invite Michael on stage, and afterwards we will hear something more about solutions from Andreas Hille. Please pay attention. I think this will give to many of your questions you might have in your mind the right answer. Michael, the turn is yours. Big applause for Michael.
Well, welcome everybody at PALFINGER's Capital Markets Day 2022, also from my side. In the sessions before lunch, I think the one underlying theme was that the world is changing in every aspect everywhere, and this is also true for my small little world when we talk about people management and human capital. Let's start with some figures. Along the growth of PALFINGER in terms of top line, which Andreas and Felix have talked about, also the organization has grown from less than 1,300 people back in 1998 to more than 12,000 today, so in about 25 years, x 10.
What this graph also shows is that with all the efforts we have taken, and Andreas pointed out the importance of stability, we were able to actually smoothen out some of the highs and lows and have a really stable and consistent development of our workforce. Also, when we have a look at the age pyramid, over the last six, seven years, basically globally, no change. Even today, our percentage of people above 60 years is less than 5%. It's less than 550 people. Some of you are interested also in costs. Obviously people cause costs, and people are an investment.
The good news is that over the last five-six years, despite all the volatility in the world and in the markets, we have been able to have very stable and solid personnel costs in terms of roughly 29%-30% of sales. This was true or this is true despite all the investments we are making towards our Strategy 2030 and the transformation of PALFINGER. This was also true back in 2020 with COVID, and this is also true in 2022, where we deal with inflation on the one hand and geopolitical uncertainty on the other. In order to achieve this, we have to use the entire toolbox that we have available to make sure we have the people when we need them and where we need them.
That's why my hair technically is as gray as Harald's, because between not enough and too many, it's a very thin line to walk. When we look at the geographic split, it's overall very similar to where we achieve our top line, so a strategy in the region for the region kind of can clearly be seen here. EMEA accounts for 56% of our people. On the blue collar side, even a little bit more at 59% because EMEA is still the stronghold of our operations footprint. Also on the engineering side, a lot of our engineering capability is concentrated in the region EMEA. Marine and NAM both account for ±10% of our overall staff.
In North America with that, we achieve more than 22% of our sales, because in North America, we still benefit from components and sub-assembly deliveries out of Europe. LATAM, with the very strong growth in the last couple of years, now already accounts for almost 7% of our staffing. APAC, which here shows only 300, seems to be quite low because it does not include our 50/50 joint venture because it's not fully consolidated. Also what has changed quite significantly with the implementation of the GPO back in 2019, even with implementing the integrated organization, the headquarters still accounts for less than 5% of our people. Even there, we try to make sure we have the people where we need them.
For obvious reasons, when I look at numbers, I have a special focus on where we need to grow the most. Luckily, we are growing in engineering. We are growing in ICT, so information and communication technology. We are growing in our Global Business Services Center in Sofia, which we launched two years ago. That's the one good news. The other good news is that in all three functions, also the fluctuation is significantly lower than on average with between 8% and 12%, whereas the average overall is between 15% and 17%, depending on the year. This number includes all exits, no matter whether it's maternity leave or retirement or an intern or fixed-term employment or resignations and terminations. Let's turn to some of the challenges because that's the word which is used quite a lot these days.
My very first comment is that I have not come across one mega trend yet which doesn't directly impact the presence and future of work. Sustainability, yes, this is about reducing CO2 emissions. It is about saving energy costs. It is about building up a circular economy. It's also about understanding what mankind has to do to become more sustainable in the way we live. It has to do with how can we create the awareness that sustainability is not only compliance and regulations, but it's also many, many opportunities for businesses. For us at PALFINGER, this means in order to make Go for Solutions happen, which Andreas Hille will talk a little bit later, we need to completely change our mindset from an engineering-driven organization to true customer centricity, not only in sales, service and marketing, but throughout the entire organization.
As sustainability is not something which any of us can achieve alone, but sustainability is the outcome of many doing the right thing together. It is about how can we create the ability to orchestrate and build the right ecosystem of partners and understand where does PALFINGER as an organization end and where does a partner kick in? How can we coordinate and orchestrate collaboration not only within PALFINGER across countries and cultures, but also with other companies in other entities. Pretty similarly, when we talk about digitalization, yes, this is about new technologies. This is about automation. This is about standardization. This is also about how we can use data mining to earn money with data. It's also about how can we achieve and feed the need for digital natives? What does it take to attract, retain, and develop them in our organization?
At the same time, what do we have to do to retrain all the rest of the organization to learn new digital skills? Because we also need them to improve the way we work, use new technology in the way we work together. It doesn't matter if this is on site, remotely or in a hybrid setting. As important as digitalization is, as PALFINGER is the combination of hardware and software out of one hand, we also need to make sure that we have enough skilled workers at our plants when we need them, where we need them, because despite all automation, they will still be the core of our organization. Last but not least, social change. Aging population, demographics. We all know there will be less people available for the labor market. There will be less skilled people available.
The ones who enter the labor market tend to have a new expectation towards work, a new understanding of work-life balance, a new set of values in terms of what meaning and purpose do you provide if I join you as an organization. We as a company need to further develop our leadership culture and the work environment, balancing the strong culture and strong roots which has made PALFINGER successful for 90 years with this new set of values of Generation Z, and we need to orchestrate the collaboration also amongst generations. Last but not least on this mega trend slide, if there is less people in the workforce, if there's less skilled people and we can't find the people we need in the labor market, we have to put much more effort behind educating and training them by ourselves.
Make and buy is not only something for procurement and operations, but it's also a key topic in my world. In order to uphold our success as an employer, we have to change, we have to develop. For me this can be summarized in three very simple basic principles. The first one is retain first, then hire. We have to start with the people who work for us today. That's not only cheaper and faster, but if we can convince them that what we offer as an employer is attractive, we also have for free the best brand ambassadors we can wish for. In order to achieve this, we have to do the right thing and then talk about it.
More than ever before, doing what you say you will do, walking the talk is the basic law of retention on the one hand and of hiring on the other hand. If you promise somebody something in an interview and after joining they found out that it was all bullshit, we know the outcome. Doing the right thing starts with the expectation of leadership on eye level, servant leadership, not strong and strict hierarchies. It continues with providing jobs which give meaning and purpose, which allow people to make a meaningful contribution to make the world a better place. All of that in parallel with developing and growing quickly if they want to do so. To sum it up, all of this, the entire package has to be right, including compensation and benefits.
Last but not least, if what we did in the past and what we do today is not enough, then we have to go down different paths. That's the third simple principle. For us, one thing we have learned is if we can find the people where we are. If they don't automatically come to our offices, to our plants, to our locations, maybe we have to go where we can find them. The innovation hub in Vienna is one example. The expansion of Löbau as the EMEA hub for access platforms is another, and I think in the future we'll see more and more of this. When we make an investment decision, one key question is: Can we find there the people and the talents and the skills we need to be successful?
A second key topic, ecosystem of partners is not only about dealers and distributors or suppliers, it's also about partnerships all the way from kindergarten to universities. We have to find ways to connect with target groups much sooner and in a much more structured and formalized way. In a nutshell, whatever we do in HR has to start with the company strategy. What goals do we have? What do we try to achieve? How can HR support sustainable, profitable growth? In my world, a strong employer brand is nothing magic. It is simply doing the right thing again, and again. Out of the many things we are doing, I would like to pick out two examples. One is the pilot of a digital masterclass. Obviously, like every other company, we have opened our doors for interns, students, master thesis always in the past.
This year, in 2022, in Austria alone, we will employ more than 140 interns in one year. With the digital masterclass, we'll go one step further. We try to combine a normal internship working on a real-world project with expert trainings over a 12-week period. The combination of learning on the job and learning from the best internal experts as well as external experts. The idea is to create with that a win-win for the participants and for PALFINGER. The simple KPI, because our CFO loves KPIs, is if we can hire 30% of the participants afterwards for PALFINGER, then this initiative has worked. Assuming that it will work, we'll then expand this into engineering operations and all the other functions, because if a format works, then obviously we can scale it.
The second example, Andreas Klauser touched on it a little bit, is the topic of apprentices. Today, like in many companies, our focus is on EMEA, especially the DACH region and on operations. Only in that scope, we have almost 250 active interns today. The core of this is the campus in Lengau, where we not only train apprentices, but where we also train contract workers and where we also train people for new professions. At the campus, we try to combine different kinds of training.
We also operate a learning school in Russia, but in the next five years, we want to take this to the next level, meaning increasing the number to 500 by, one, going to more countries all over the world, and two, expanding the content scope in terms of not only training for operations, but also training for ICT or training for engineering or training for wherever there's a demand. Combining this all in a simple five-year HR strategy, it's all about attracting, retaining, and developing the people we need to be successful in our business. We do this along four major initiatives. I already talked about apprentices and doubling the number of apprentices. That's number one.
Number two is that we are in the process of setting up a dedicated center of excellence for organizational development and change management to make sure we can upskill our organization in the transformation towards 2030. The main focus there is to provide our more than 1,000 managers with the skills and capabilities they need to manage the transformation in their part of the world of PALFINGER and, in parallel, setting the right impulses to develop our leadership and work culture overall. Number three, we need to and we want to expand and formalize our talent management with a more structured way of harmonized job titles, career path, and aligned learning and development curricula.
Last but not least, as almost everything in this world today is about communication, the fourth key initiative is to expand our efforts in orchestrating global communication and positioning PALFINGER as a premier employer brand. Coming to the end, I would like to add one very last aspect, which I think is very important, because the challenges I talked about are true for PALFINGER, but they are also true for our customers and partners. Our challenges as employers are also theirs, and when we think about how we can support them and make our customers more successful, it's not only about satisfying their lifting needs and providing premier service from cradle to grave, it's also about what can we do to help them with their people issues.
On the one hand, operating a PALFINGER solution in many cases requires a completely different skill set than the past. Innovative mechatronics, smart functions. Technical service based on computer-based diagnostics require completely different skills and people, operators, technicians must learn new skills through the job. This makes jobs more attractive, boosting their career and becoming true experts with a strong perspective in the future. On the other hand, the exact opposite, many of our products provide many assistance systems, and when you tour the booth later on, you'll see some of them. Assistance systems makes jobs easier, more reliable, and safer. This, as a side effect, opens up these jobs for less qualified people, making the filling of open positions easier and helping our customers and partners to make sure they have the people they need and opening new jobs up for these target groups.
Last but not least, our solutions include good innovative technology and smart functions. This increases the effectiveness of our customers. Whether it is with preventive and predictive service to enable a more efficient resource planning, whether it is with virtual reality to open up remote operation, whether it is with eco-efficient solutions which allow our customers to become more attractive employers. With everything we do, we have our customer in mind, our customer, their needs and pains, their employees, and this does include their people challenges. Because as an HR guy, I'm 100% sure that at PALFINGER, but also at every other organization, the people are the pulse of an organization. It's people who make things happen. This is true today, but it also will be true in 10, 20 or 30 years, and only together we can master the challenges of the time.
The good news is that together we can reach anything. Thank you.
Thank you, Michael. Are there any questions? It's a very interesting topic. The first time a topic also of the capital markets, they have your questions. Or was it such a good presentation, a self-explanatory presentation?
It's after lunchtime, Hannes.
Maybe-
Can I?
Thank you.
Hello. Thank you very much for the presentation. Two questions. One more about the environment and regarding the salary increases and I was thinking how you put that in the mix, no? It's obviously good to recruit in advance, no? How you manage expectations of I mean of all the talents now that are ending university or studies. I was also interested why you are focusing in Austria and in China. Is not your idea to also increase the brand and your products especially in U.S. Do you have any plan there?
To answer the first question, I think obviously every country when it comes to compensation is differently. In some countries, it's strictly regulated by governments or social partners, in others, it's more voluntary. Long story short, the rules of the market are true everywhere. At the end of the day, we need to understand in every country, what does it take to be attractive as an employer. If we try to only get people to work for us because we pay the most and everything else is shitty, it's not gonna work. What we try to do is provide the right package or the right combination in terms of the jobs we offer, the culture and the work environment we offer, the development and career opportunities we offer, because we want our people to take all of this into consideration.
Still compensation has to be realistic. Although in many countries today, it's actually less about the salary, and it becomes more and more about the benefits. Whether it's in the U.S., where benefits are more critical than salaries, but the same is true in Portugal. In every country with our experts on site, we look what does it take to offer the right package. So far in terms of how the costs develop or the personnel costs, it has been in line with how our top line develops. We are able to maintain a certain very small corridor and still have the people we need. That would be my answer to the first question. The second question, I think it was mainly about apprentices because that is where we had the focus so far.
In order to implement an apprenticeship program, I need enough similar jobs at a site. I need a management who is committed to collaborate with us because I cannot orchestrate it out of the headquarters. Three, if we as a company are too small for a standalone program, I need partners. In a combination of those three, today we have our answer in many countries in EMEA. We have an answer for Russia, we have an answer for China, and we are working with the team in North America to try to find an opportunity for North America. As our locations are quite spread out between California and Niagara Falls and Oklahoma City, it is quite difficult to find one answer for such a big geography, but it's on the list.
Are there any further questions? No, then thank you, Michael. A big applause for Michael Berger. Next one and last one, Andreas Klauser already, yeah, told a few words about Andreas Hille. He's our global R&D boss and also responsible for the product line management. Andreas Hille, it's your stage.
Okay. Yeah, also very warm welcome from my side. I'm really happy to give you a few insights into our, you know, how we translate actually our Strategy 2030 into a product strategy and in a value proposition for our customer. We heard a lot about our Strategy 2030 and the two pillars which are included, Go for Solutions and Go Digital. It's what's really behind this? If we look at those two pillars, we actually can see that at the end, both pillars are highly integrated with each other. Because what we want to achieve is that we can provide to our customer integrated, smart lifting solutions, which actually are not isolated. They are embedded into the ecosystem of our customers, and mainly the digital ecosystem, because this is what's really growing.
At the end, the value is created by integrating this solution into the ecosystem. Whoops. What's really behind this, and what's really happening with us? At the end, PALFINGER, with the implementation of the strategy, is really turning from a producer of a lifting system to a solution provider. This is really a change. It is not just, you know, designing something new. This is. The key thing here is that we have to change our perspective. We have to look at our customer holistically at his end-to-end value creation process. How does our customer generate value for their customer?
If we understand this, then we can design the right lifting system, we can select the right vehicle, we can define all the accessories he needs, and we design or we develop the right digital services which allow him to embed this solution into the ecosystem. It's really how we look at our customer, how we understand his application, his problems, his pain points, and then translate this into a solution. For engineering, it's of course really critical to get the right requirements, because we can spend lots of money in designing the wrong products or features and function nobody needs. This is something I think we all have experienced, in our daily life, that there are a lot of products out there which are not really make a difference. They're just products.
Being a solution provider means really understanding the customer and translating that into real good product offering. Moving forward with our strategy, we have defined eight key areas we need to focus on. Number one, as I said, maximum customer focus. Getting close to the customer, understand what he really needs, and then selecting or defining the right product. Digital customer journey. We are standing next to our customer from start to end, from cradle to grave, from when he defines his problem, we provide him with the solution during the whole life cycle until he is recycling or phasing out his products. We are next to him, and we are really at his side. We are one stop shop.
Instead that our customer needs to go to the truck OEM, to the lifting system provider like PALFINGER, and to dealers or installers, he can come to us, we understand what he needs, and he get everything out of one hand. Hardware and software out of one hand. You know, developing physical products, and you can see when you look at the cranes outside, at the end, lifting weight, you still need steel, hydraulics, and physical things. But the real value and the real performance is today mainly driven out of the control system, out of sensoric systems, out of, you know, intelligent system. Of course, the real value then is generated by linking and integrating this solution into the application of our customer. This is really where software and hardware needs to come together.
You know, that's a key focus area for engineering to bring those two worlds together. Integrating with the vehicle. You know, we are seeing a trend now from a combustion engine truck to electrification. Suddenly, we have high voltage power available. Working, you know, instead of connecting systems, just screwing things together, designing it together as one system, together with the OEM. You know, being close to Mercedes-Benz, MAN, Volvo, Scania, and all the OEMs in the development of our system to really have the solution in mind and bring it together. Autonomous operation. You know, like autonomous driving, it's of course a long roadmap to get there. When you look at our products we have here on our booth, there are really assisting functions which are really moving towards, you know, remote semi-automatic systems.
We have really started the journey to, in, I don't know, 10, 15 years, when also the regulatory requirements are there, that cranes are really run and operated remotely and autonomously. Thank you. Eco-efficiency, electrification, sustainability. You know, providing systems which have low emission, low energy consumption, use the availability of electricity of the trucks, a key factor for us. At the end, how can we do this? Not alone. You know, we are really strong in PALFINGER, we are building up great capabilities in engineering. Without partners, development partners, suppliers, dealers, the OEMs, the vehicle OEMs, integrating them all together, it will not work.
No company by themselves can deal with the, and I don't really like the word challenge, with the opportunities we have in front of us, because this is really exciting times, but it only works if we build a network of partners. Summarizing all this, what does this really mean? Providing a solution means that we are combining a vehicle, the lifting systems, and a lot of digital services to provide one solution. That's one thing. On the other side, we need to move away from connecting to integration. A connection is a one to one connect point. Integration means designing a solution, a system, as one system together. Looking at the customer, understanding what he needs, and really designing the interacting solution as one system.
Now a little, you know, outlook and, you know, an overview in regards to autonomous operation. We have really started the journey to define kind of what are the steps, because such a big thing, such a functionality cannot be developed in one big step. This is. We need a lot of intermediate steps to build. During the path, we also create value for our customers. We have defined where we have started, like manual operation, non-assisted. You know, we give our operator additional information so he can do a better job. While he's operating, he gets information about the performance of the system. We introduce more automated assisted functions where certain functions the system does by themselves.
Moving to remote and semi-autonomous, and then all the way up to fully autonomous operation. This is of course a long path, but when you look at the products we have currently on our booth, Smart Control, Memory Function, Stabilizer Assist, and Smart Loading Assist, these are all functionalities which are in this level one to level two at the moment. This is really where we are really proud and excited about, in our marine business, specifically in the offshore industry, where we have a very favorable environment, it is dangerous, and it is somehow protected. You do not really have outsiders in this environment. We are now developing together with our customer a so-called offshore cyber crane, where for the first time we are developing a remote and autonomous operated crane. Here is a little overview.
Rough seas and gale force winds. The work must be done even under the toughest conditions. Safety is the first priority here. The safety of the employees, the safety of the load. PALFINGER offers new perspectives with remote control steering. The operator controls the system from a secure remote control center. Sensors and cameras provide him with all essential information in real time in order to carry out every job precisely and cost effectively, even in rough seas, in safety. Your challenge is our challenge. PALFINGER.
Here you can really see, you know, why are we doing this? Because it's dangerous for the operator to be on an oil rig, to get there, be flown in by a helicopter. You sit in your offshore crane, and you look down 50 m below you, there's a vessel moving in the waves, and you need to hook a container there. Really dangerous work, and very unproductive because it takes a lot of time. With our system, we are able to accelerate this. We make it a lot safer, and that's this is exactly why we are pushing forward on this and, you know, in the environment of course in the marine, but also on the land side because we have the same situation there. Electricity, really, key for us from a sustainability perspective.
We are really moving from a combustion engine driven world to an electrified world. Automotive industry, but also in the commercial vehicle industry. Really moving from a mechanical PTO, where the power's taking off the gearbox, drive directly a central hydraulic system, we move towards electric, electrical interfaces. We can use different type of actuation. We can use different type of load balancing. Electricity allows us to really do a lot of things completely different. This is really also exciting for us that, you know, the architecture of our lifting systems will change in the future because we have electricity available. How we do all this? At the end, as Andreas has pointed out, we have introduced 2018, 2019, our GPO organization, and embedded in the GPO organization is the function Global Product Line Management Engineering.
It's essentially a matrix structure where we have on one side seven product, global product lines which really serve their customer, their market segments. They try to differentiate. They really need to be different to compete with their competitors. On the other side, really important for us to create synergies. That's why we have across those seven global product lines so-called center of excellence, where we use common processes, the same tools, same methods. We share capabilities. We share parts and technologies. This is really how we get really from a very diversified structure to a global structure where in engineering, in our product architecture, we can create synergies. We have 24 R&D sites globally, more than 700 engineers.
We spend more than 4% of our structural costs as an R&D ratio in 13 countries. We are focusing on really on the most important modern engineering capabilities like systems engineering, model-based systems engineering. We verify and validate every product, and as I said, really focusing on standard process and tools. With this is the outlook of the product development organization. I'm really happy to get your question.
Thank you, Andreas. Are there any questions to Andreas Hille?
As we know, PALFINGER has quite a diversified client base. Is there any industry which you would identify as the most challenging for you in the R&D department in terms of innovative solution demand?
I think for us, the most challenging markets are really where we are more moving towards commodity.
Mm-hmm.
Where, you know, volume and cost and those kind of things are important.
Mm-hmm.
Because we are typically really focused on, let's say, to differentiate, you know, on our functionality and performance. We also see that there are segments where this technology leadership position is more going into a commodity, and there, of course, we need to reduce complexity, focus on cost and operational efficiency and those kind of things. This is really something which we are investing a lot in.
Thank you.
Are there further questions? If not, I handle the microphone to Andreas Klauser. Please, the last slide.
Thank you very much for the conclusion and this big applause first for Andreas. You know, I know it's a hot topic on a hot afternoon, so that's understood. Thank you to you guys for sweating. I promise in three years' time we will do certain improvement here on the cooling system. It seems maybe climate warming as well as incoming outdoor heat. Thank you for all the presentations. I think it's important now to conclude. To conclude in the sense of what's the conclusion output you've seen. We will go then later on together with Gerhard Sturm, Head of Global Sales. We'll make a tour here as well as some competitors. I think that's important that you clearly can see what's going on in the industry, that you can paint your own picture.
For us, for PALFINGER, there's one element which is important, is in terms of customers, being customer-centric. That's also a little bit the reason why we are a little bit ahead of schedule today, because we have many customers who are still touring around, which we will come back for further business discussions in the meeting room. We said we will free this space up a bit earlier to them, so this is one adjustment. On the other hand, I think it's important that we are shaping the industry in terms of as a solution provider. We are premium brand, we need to behave premium-wise. We are well-positioned. I think you saw about the history, you saw where we are going to. As well that this flexibility we have secures stability.
This image here, the crane with the stabilizers, should always remind you if you need to have an image on your mind about PALFINGER, flexible but stability. I think we mentioned it now several times, this is really about challenges to be turned into opportunities, into business, into success. Success internally, so increase as well stability for our employees, for our business, for our customers, but as well and to improve the finance capabilities for us, for you as our customers, for our profitability. I wish all of us a great, successful time, good profits everybody needs. Thank you for coming. Thank you for joining. As I said, now the turn is with Gerhard Sturm, and he will lead you through our booth, some competition sites. Maybe, Felix, we will make the closure together here.
Because that's the gentleman who's really making the numbers.
There's not a lot to add, Andreas, so thank you very much for coming here. I think the best part is coming now. Of course we tried to make a good presentation, but the reality is much better than a PowerPoint slide can be. Really looking now forward also to your reaction of the ladies and gentlemen here in the room when you see our stand, our products, and then you see competition and their products, and this is really saying everything. Thank you very much. Have a good day.
Thank you for coming. Enjoy the afternoon. Stay healthy, and we hope to see each other in the near future. Thank you.
Thank you, Andreas. Thank you, Felix. Now we have prepared headsets for you. Andreas Hille will start with a product show, but you find the headsets over here. The lady, Mona, will hand out the headsets.