Welcome to the PALFINGER Capital Markets Day 2025. I think we'll mark an important milestone in our way forward, in our potential to grow, and you will hear later on something more about it. Just a couple of words about the location here. Believe it or not, 170 years ago, this was a chocolate company here, producing chocolates. This famous Schmidt company here, and they moved out, and a couple of years ago, it was taken over by Bene, and it's called today now Meeting Suites by Bene. Welcome. I think it's another important milestone, and you will hear later on something more about it in terms of how we are moving forward. It should be inspiring. It should as well be something where you will understand how the way forward looks like in terms of our plans, in terms of our commitment.
As well, have later on some breakout sessions because this is clearly a team event in terms of not only presenting, preparing the strategy, but as well our way forward, so the entire board of PALFINGER is present today to share with you the thoughts, to share with you the ideas, and the plan forward, and this is all something in the afternoon. I really want to motivate you to ask the questions, to have these discussions. We'll have four breakout sessions. On the other hand, we are talking a lot about partnership, partnership in the sense of industrial relationships. What can you get out of the system, and I'm very happy today that we have one of our most important partners as well globally, voestalpine, Herbert Eibensteiner with us.
I think some of you I have seen yesterday at the 30-year anniversary at the Stock Exchange in Vienna. So as well, welcome to you, and I can see that you were treated well last night and you enjoyed. Talking about this partnership is not only a business partnership. When we are talking about high-performing steel, we did an entire development together, an evolution together with voestalpine. I'm very thankful. On the other hand, they are a major supplier of steel to PALFINGER. So year to date, and we are talking about 65 years of cooperation, we managed to get nearly 600,000 tons of steel, annually 20,000 tons of steel, and that's also one reason why we want to listen to what Herbert will tell us, because it's all about partnership. You can't invest in everything yourself. You need to have strong and reliable partners.
I would give a warm welcome now to Herbert Eibensteiner, the CEO of voestalpine, to share with us how this looks like and as well which challenges he's facing. Herbert, the stage is yours. Welcome.
Thank you. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, good morning. Thank you for the invitation. It's really a pleasure to be here with you. And my task today is to give you only a flavor of our strategy, but what we think about partnership and what is at the moment very important for us, you know, all those things, tariffs and safeguards and whatever. And I would try to touch it in a few minutes. So what is the environment we are currently facing? You know, it's also the key pillars of the challenges when we talk about strategy. So the geopolitical uncertainty is clear. I think all these trade issues we have at the moment, it's a topic. Also, we know that the trade intensity was reduced over years now. 2016 was a break, and then trade intensity shrinks.
We got every year at least 4,000-5,000 additional trade restrictions worldwide. And it's not only, and you know, it's now the tariffs from the U.S. with 50% on steel and other materials. It's, I would say, very, very, very, very special. We'll touch it later on. We all have this demographic and sociocultural change. And when I talk with our Chinese management and the U.S. management, the first thing is always, how do you get people and how do you retain people? The war of talent worldwide is ongoing. Also, we have now in Europe with higher unemployment and maybe in the U.S. in future as well, a better time. But in fact, we have this topic to touch in our strategy. The rapid technological change is so la la, this is normal. You will find it in all those presentations.
But what we see at the moment is we are very efficient in all what we do, but AI will do additional, will give us additional efficiency gains. And you know, we have all those things in our factories with robots and intelligent digitalization. But AI, especially when it comes to this white-collar area, this is in the future a big open question. How can we get more efficiency out of that? And for us, as a CO2-intensive company, we have this topic in Europe, climate change, sustainability, and recycling. So voestalpine, our strategic priorities, we have to adapt to this environment we are in, midterm reorganization of the organization. And what's important for us is this economically sensible decarbonization. So it must be a business case at the end. And I will touch that in my presentation afterwards. And we have PAT, and that's positive.
We have this very promising business in voestalpine, railway systems, fast-growing tubes and sections, warehouse rack solutions, these hybrid warehouses for Amazons of the world and Walmarts. It's improving and growing, and aerospace business, very important for us. Now comes the relation with PALFINGER in our strategy. We have steel and metals production on one hand side and this processing and engineering parts on the other side. Our steel mills here in Austria are quality leader and focus on flat steel, and we are focused on high-quality steels. PALFINGER is one of these customers. They need only high-quality, high-quality steel. You can be sure in these 60 years, they pushed us to the limits because they want to grow with these high-quality steels in their products. We do also tool steel.
As I mentioned before, railway infrastructure. Even we are a supplier for the space programs and these hybrid warehouses you see, and there is no passenger plane without voestalpine parts. So this is a very important part for our business. So green steel, this is what we actively approach at the moment. So we have a clear plan to reduce our CO2 footprint coming from now on. We're spending EUR 1.5 billion at the moment for the first step of replacing blast furnaces against the electric arc furnaces. And we will start with production in 2027. In 2029, we have to reduce 30% of our emissions, which is 5% of the CO2 emissions of Austria. And then we have planned the next step, which is not approved so far. And then our goal, net zero, is still valid, and we are committed to that.
But we have selected this way because it's risk-reduced and we have the chance to react on new technologies and also changes in the legislation. But at the moment, we are on track. Everything is on time, on budget. What's difficult for us at the moment when it comes to steel is this phase out of the free allowances on the CO2 certificates. We see that and we think, and it's similar to the automotive industry. We have these clear goals where we should go, but the environment around is not ready. Not enough renewable energy. The grids are not there. No hydrogen is available. So this is the reason without changing the 2050 goal, we are working on that, but this would, how should I say, reduce the capability to invest in these next steps.
The discussion is now on a climate target 2040. I think nobody is aware that this is a topic because the whole industry in Europe has a plan to 2050. Now they come up with 2040 and 90% reduction. This more or less very much makes a difference. It's just to have a new target. 2040 is close to 100%. CBAM should be implemented next year. This is the carbon border adjustment, also not finally fixed. There are a lot of loopholes, let's say, in these regulations, circumvention and other topics. Then these safeguard measures should be implemented next year to protect the steel industry from these redirected flows of material coming from China. Everything in steel is about China. It's by far the biggest producer, 1 billion tons. Here in Europe, we are producing this year 120,000 tons.
So you can imagine when they have an overcapacity of 300 million tons. This is a really issue not only for Europe, for the rest of the world. And I have touched this before. Competitive green energy is still a topic, and we are not there what we can expect and what the EU Commission has expected. And this means electrical energy, grids, and also hydrogen. 65 years partnership between PALFINGER and voestalpine. It's a success story, I would say. And this is how the business model of PALFINGER is asking for high quality, and we are the exact, you're the perfect partner for that because our strategy is we concentrate on this high-quality steel. Sometimes it's a bit tricky. So just to give you an idea about this story. So 1985, PALFINGER said, "Our cranes are too heavy. We need lighter cranes." So we developed this alform 700.
This is 700 is strength. Normal steel for building applications is 350. Just to give you an idea, it's double the strength, means lighter cranes or more load. Yeah? This 10 years, perfect, then they said, "We need lighter cranes." Yeah?, then we developed within a year, in a year, this alform 900 x-treme. This is, you know, and it's not all about strength. It's also of other requirements, weldability and how can you bend that and all those things. A very tough and a very good material, and then 2010, say, "Hey, come on, we need more." Yeah?, then we developed this alform 1100. Even lighter cranes, more load, and/or other things, so I think 2015, you had problems with supply of material, and we delivered a relevant volume within seven days. Just to we have to melt it, to pour it, to produce it, and so on.
Only to cooling down such a material is four days. It takes one day because our fire brigade helped by cooling by spraying water, two days on these coils, and then we delivered that material to PALFINGER. But only two years later, we get this supplier award. Only two years later. And now we are replacing these quarto plates with hot-rolled material. It's even this high-strength steel, but hot-rolled is easier to produce and is more cost-efficient. It's a positive aspect for PALFINGER. So this is how we think we need the customers to push us to the limits. And we have this intimacy. We have customer intimacy. We know what's necessary. This is part of our strategy.
Yeah, this was a flavor of voestalpine and the relationship PALFINGER and voestalpine. Why we have shown this? This is not the pitch of voestalpine.
It is just something to see which technology we are based on working, so this means in terms of performance, we are ahead of the others. Why? Because we have partners who are outperforming the industry, and just talking about China, for the time being, at least to my knowledge, China is not capable to produce such steel quality, so this is still something where we are ahead, still something on a premium, and still something where you can see, and we talk a lot about cranes. It's still 35% of our business here that you can really see how this foundation works, and I think this is a good starting point as well for today, but yeah, but talking about tariffs, talking about this trade impact, which you currently see in the U.S., how would you explain this? How would you tackle this? How do you feel about it?
Yeah, normally we have a strategy which is local for local, and we have a lot of our business in the U.S. and have decided for years because it's 2017. We had these first tariffs coming from the Trump administration, and we reacted, and a lot of business was going to the U.S., but we are affected. That's clear, and especially when it comes to steel tubes in particular, and now it starts this tariff engineering, yeah, to how to avoid this 50% and get this reciprocal tariff. So just an example, what the whole world is doing at the moment, and we do the same. We are delivering saw blades to the U.S., material for saw blades. This is 50%, but when you deliver the saw, then it's only 15%, and we put some preliminary operations, looks like a saw, and send it to the U.S.
We get this 15% and not the 50%, so this is possible to do it. We increase the prices, and it's digestible for the customer, so it's doing the whole world, so we will manage through to a certain extent, but there is material which we cannot anymore deliver to the U.S. because of this 50%.
And in terms of costs, I mean, we are both mostly European-based companies. How are you dealing with the cost impact on the European side? I mean, on the one hand, I can tell, he is fighting on pricing very well, so we have tough discussions on that as well. PALFINGER is therefore a part of the solution, but in terms of costs? He called me very often, "You're too expensive." Are you guys crazy? Crazy in such price? No. In terms of costs, how do you approach this?
Yeah, it's efficiency.
The normal way, efficiency is a key topic, and you may have recognized that we have these efficiency programs all over the company, and we want to save, our goal for this year, EUR 500 million. So this is part of the game. You have to do that continuously. And so we are very, how should I say, a very lean industrial company. And you know the personnel cost percentage is in such a steel mill below 20%, something about 15%-16%. It hurts, but it's not the biggest part of the cost burden. And then it's the difference in energy costs to other parts in the world. So this is a disadvantage at the moment in Europe.
Well, thank you for your insights. I think it's a really big round of applause because they were celebrating 30 years yesterday. As I said, most of you have been there.
30 years being on the Vienna Stock Exchange. This picture was taken afterwards. So we already looked maybe a little bit tired after a long day. But as well, congratulations. Thank you for your insight. And as I said, thank you as well for your performance, making sure that PALFINGER can perform on a solid foundation. Big applause here with Eibensteiner.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
So now I would hand over to Hannes Roither to tell us what's going on in terms of program of today a little bit. And then we will continue with our presentation on PALFINGER Strategy 2030 together with the entire board members. Later on, having the breakout sessions. But I think it was very inspiring seeing that it's not only, let's say, a microcosm where PALFINGER is in. It's related to partners.
The same is valid for all our hydraulic systems where we have solid and strong performing partners. So I think this is really the foundation for you as well to better understand where PALFINGER is coming from and how stable PALFINGER is. Please, Hannes.
Thank you, Andreas. So what is the agenda, today's agenda? Now the presentations of the whole Board follows. Very inspiring and really a broad insight from all Board members. After the presentations, there's a short break, 25 minutes. And then you are already divided in four groups because we continue then with the deep dives. Four Board members, four rooms, four group guides. We make this, we divide you then after the break. Then two deep sessions, short break, another two deep sessions. And the day will end up then with a get-together where we taste sweet wine and chocolate.
This is the program, today's program. The break is then one level below. After 25 minutes, it should be 11:55 A.M., 11:30 A.M., then we form the groups and you go with your group guide from one room to the other room. Each deep dive is 30 minutes where you get further insights and you can ask all relevant questions there. Thank you. Now I give a hand over to our CEO, Andreas Klauser, to start.
The real PALFINGER part starts, well, just joking. I think we might have changed the program in terms of having the energizer and sweet chocolates before, but I think there's sufficient energy in the rooms, sufficient energy level. Again, thanks for joining. The PALFINGER Capital Markets Day is not only about entertainment. It's more as well about to give you insights.
Insights, where do we come from and where we are heading to. And I think listening as well to these four presentations will give you further insights, will show you how it looks like as well approaching the future in terms of growth in a sustainable manner. Talking about this, I think it's also important to see what is PALFINGER doing in terms of brand, in terms of culture. And there I brought a brand new video with me.
What makes a company stand out? Not the size, not the numbers, but the people who show up. The ones who ask, "How can we make this smarter, stronger, safer?" The ones who don't settle. Because these are the ones who create outstanding solutions and products. And they have been for quite a while now. You see, at PALFINGER, we have always been shaping the future of our industry.
But in order to keep doing so, to create value for our customers, to grow and to stay excellent, we need to take it a step further. We need to set ourselves ambitious targets, clear goals. We have to reach up, reach out, reach beyond. We have to be better. Actually, we're built on that mindset. Not the mindset of just doing what we're good at, but doing better. Better means listening, even when it's hard. Better means learning. Especially when we fall. It means leadership without the title, making it your mission, supporting the team, raising the bar, even when no one's watching. We believe in work that matters, in solutions that last, and in relationships that grow with time. Because excellence isn't a moment. It's a habit, a craft, a culture. And culture, that's not what you write on a T-shirt. It's how we treat each other.
Yes, we ask a lot, but we also offer a lot. It's what you feel when you walk through the door. Our culture is in the passion left after a hard day. In the nod across the room, in the spark of a new idea. Here, better isn't pressure. It's pride. We're PALFINGER, and today, like every day, better begins with us.
I hope you enjoyed it, and you enjoyed it as well in terms of being inspiring, and I want to bring this inspiration as well further on now in our today's presentations. I think one year ago, we had a couple of commitments we gave, a couple of strategies, ideas we presented, and I'm very happy to report back that in terms of turnover, EBIT in 2024, we did great.
In terms of free cash flow, I think some of you were heavily questioning this, seeing certain numbers which didn't look maybe that positive at this point in time. We achieved it, and last but not least, really strengthening our balance sheet, and I can tell you later on, you will hear a lot more when Felix Strohbichler, our CFO, is doing his presentation, and you will see really the insights, what happened so far, and as well, what's the plan forward. Being the global market leader, and I think it's also important that we are not yet at the end of the story. It's just something we started, being better, growth, and the earnings potential, and I think here, what we wanted to make you aware today in terms of our Strategy 2030, what does this mean? What is different to others in the industry?
When you look around and even amongst the board, you are talking a lot, being proud. And you should not be arrogant, but proud. And considering what's happening in the neighborhood of the industry, PALFINGER can be very proud. And I would really give the entire team as well, the part of the leadership, which is currently present in the room of PALFINGER, a round of applause. So a solid basis. We have seen even where the steel is coming from. So I think Herbert Eibensteiner wanted to sell another 10,000 tons in addition to us today, which we have to consider. But that's a solid foundation. Then as well, what's the potential? What can we say about us? What can we say in terms of PALFINGER itself? And it's not just headlines when we talk about market leadership. Market leadership means a lot.
How are you dealing with your customers? How are you perceived in the marketplace? Innovation, but not only innovation because of innovation, innovation for being close to our customers, to support them with our solutions. This is something which is very well recognized that even when you look into the premium brand PALFINGER, it's also you can talk about premium pricing. Resilience. You will see in a minute as well how are we approaching this, how we make sure that we are resilient in the marketplace itself, and these two elements together lead us then really to the growth. We have still a quite positive momentum in Europe even. As for Europe in the bigger radius, not talking about German infrastructure, we can as well talk about the Middle East, which is kicking in quite well already, and as well, the growth on the focus markets.
Yeah, for sure. North America, the tariffs as well. Herbert was currently picking on it. It has an impact, but we need to operate with it. We still need to see how to get through and as well to make sure that even we have a double-digit impact currently, how do we attract this? We will hear this later on. Talking as well about marine business. I remember when I joined PALFINGER in 2018, the first questions in 2019 was, what's about marine? Are you still suffering all the challenges? I can tell you it's a huge part of our profitability. It's a huge part of PALFINGER's success. When you have sufficient focus, when you focus and have a strong, solid plan, you can manage it and can even turn something into a cash cow, which was maybe in the past really perceived as something difficult.
And another area is service, service parts business. This is something which I learned when I came from the U.S. is we talk about TCO, we talk about uptime. And even the customer is even more interested to avoid that the equipment does not work. And all these projects are heading in this direction. In addition, it means as well profitability. When you bring your car to a service, usually you're very happy first when you buy it. When you're receiving the first service bill in terms of costs, you see there's a lot in it. And as well, the earnings potential. I think it's also something, it's not yet the end of the story. And today, we would like to further explain to show you our way forward. Talking about resilience, this is always something most of you know PALFINGER since 2010-ish.
So, 2010, yes, it was a EUR 650 million company, 85% depending on crane business. Today, if you put it together, it's roughly 35%, but it's split between private housing, building construction, infrastructure. Yes, private housing was a challenge, is a challenge, in regulations, whatever, but we can balance it out in the entire system, then as well, talking about public sector, this is, well, where our defense business is in. This is something which is really growing, then you see 12% on the marine side, so this is now really kicking in, and it's not yet the end of the story. I mean, when we think back and when we remember when there was COVID, everybody thought cruise ships will end. Nobody will fly anymore, no cruise ships. The cruise ship industry is largely growing. It's coming back. People like it.
On the other hand, we are having as well on the defense side in the shipyards, like the Italian side, a lot of ships which are built in terms of defense activities. All this is now kicking in. And since we made money in the past with lower volumes, volume is growing. We are getting there. Not to forget about rental business as well, new concepts we are having, like in the United States. So there are many elements. And I wanted to as well, why I'm staying that long on this chart is really to understand where PALFINGER is coming from in terms of resilience. Why are we different in the industry itself, but as well compared to other industries? And this is really the beauty of PALFINGER. Even some consultants would like to reduce the complexity.
But this complexity, if you play it well, and we will hear as well later on from Alexander Susanek, how he's dealing with that in terms of product lines, in terms of future evolution. What keeps us moving? What is really, let's say, in the back of our mind? I mean, it's performance, yes, EMEA doing quite well. Still, the infrastructure projects are kicking in. I mean, luckily, even when it was only announced in Germany and the money was not yet spread, I think we see already all the positive drives. We have ReArm Europe, where we are participating heavily with nearly all the European customers, with nearly all the European armies, and then as well going outside Canada, whatever. Unfortunately, and this is as well something for the breakout session, we cannot disclose.
So we legally not tell how to disclose which amount or whatever goes where for different obvious reasons. Yeah, North America. That's on one hand side a huge potential to grow, but certainly Section 232 kicking in now in terms of tariffs was costing us some money, is costing us some money, will cost us some money in the neighborhood of double digits. We can balance it out, and we will hear later on as well from Felix how the way forward looks like. LatAm, believe it or not, it's on a record level. Maybe it's not Argentina this time, it's more Brazil and Chile and Peru in these places. All the copper mines around there. We are the supplier there. So this is well something which in the current global environment is maybe a little bit out of the focus what people are seeing.
APAC, you will hear later on as well about the strategy in India. So this drives the growth in India. And luckily, we already identified some areas where we can grow, not only business itself. So we are still the number one provider for cranes for the entire railway systems in India. So there is as well a clear number one position of PALFINGER. On the other hand, marine, as I said, the global environment, the requirements are supporting us at the moment in terms of growth, in terms of business opportunities. CIS, Russia, yes, it's a massive slump. It's really something which is heavily slowing down, but luckily, as I said, it's a separate part of the story. Talking about Lifetime Excellence, this is something it's not only a claim, it's really a promise to our customer. A promise to our customer that we are constantly evolving.
We are making sure that we can always provide best-in-class services, so in 2019, some of you who have been in the room already at that time might remember we rolled out the global PALFINGER organization, the GPO, the new setup, moving from a pure business unit approach to a structure in terms of product lines to a global setup. This is what happened then. 2020 as well, we had the first focus on the Strategy 2030. Today, we talk about the Strategy 2030+. This was as well laying the ground and where we heavily as a team worked for 14 months to design it, to develop it, to make sure that we have sufficient plans and as well KPIs behind that this is not just only a vision statement, which is somewhere existing in the company, which is by far more.
So this means as well in terms of record years. I think we can be really very proud of that, where we managed the crisis quite successfully. Just to remind you, year one after COVID was really the record year of PALFINGER. And we were really ready and prepared to deal with all the challenges. But since 2020, really the world changed. Whoever believed that the volatility might disappear, unfortunately, it won't work. We can talk about the Russian war, we can talk about the supply chain challenges. All this was kicking in, which did not really help us to get any kind of tailwind. But PALFINGER is ready to deal with it. And it was now time really to reevaluate our strategy and our way forward. The changes I was already talking about, it's big uncertainty, the world economy itself, we talk about digitalization, the social changes, sustainability.
But all this will be, and you will see it later on, very well reflected in our strategy. The climate change as well, something, yes, it's knocking on our door, but we need to make sure that we can properly deal with it, not just complaining about it, being upset, as well how do we deal with it, then in terms of new technologies, and I haven't mentioned it as well earlier, artificial intelligence. This is nearly everywhere, and it can really heavily support the processes. I'm not talking about when you put even speeches together, how you can get support out of it. Automation, and automation is as well something now, and I'm a little bit referencing here to U.S. This is something where Europe is clearly ahead. These guys over there are flying to the moon. They are really having high intelligence.
But in terms of automation, they're still behind. And this is as well something where I want to inspire you. There we can be quite positive from a European standpoint. So we're 3D printing all these ingredients we have. And as well the changes in the demand behavior. So yes, people, customers are looking now more for an extension of the lifecycle. So again, which is reflected in our spare parts and service strategy, looking into this to have and to make sure that PALFINGER products can do a proper job for a longer period. This is something maybe looks not that spectacular, but that's the solid foundation and the triangle between our brand, which is our identity, our commitment, and how do we deliver as an organization talking about culture.
And this is really now something which is completely different to the past because here we did not just focus on the strategy itself and a little bit about the brand and culture and people. It's a solid triangle; it's a solid foundation. And you will hear then later on from Maria Koller as well in terms of culture more. You will hear in terms of strategy, products, solutions, something more from Alexander. And last but not least as well, when Felix will present his numbers to see how does the impact look like for PALFINGER and for its investors. This is really something which is completely different maybe to the past and maybe does not look so spectacular here, but that's really a major milestone forwards. Lifetime Excellence is the claim for customers. So in terms of performance, premium.
As I said, the good thing is as well in terms of premium. I can report here that we can as well get premium pricing because the customer recognizes clearly premium as a product, premium as a service, premium in the results when he's using PALFINGER equipment. In terms of Strategy 2030+, and as I said, there was maybe some confusion at a certain point in time when you have seen the Strategy 2030 already in the past from PALFINGER. Now we talk about 2030+, which means now the years, the next years, five years to come in terms of what's the plan, how do we evolve, and how should it look like. There are three strategic directions. This is, I think, as well important. Again, it's always similar to a triangle, I would say, so that we are really having a solid foundation.
So we talk about lifting customer value, which is quite important, but as well to have the proper balance between profitability and growth. Usually, you know, when you have either profitability, then you lose market share, you lose volume, and next morning you have again market share and you lose profitability. I think this is something very important here to be recognized to the entire presentation that the focus is here on a quite balanced growth. And execution excellence, which is a part of the culture, really to make sure we walk the talk so that this is not only something which we announce today and tomorrow we change and we come back, whatever. I think that's important because we want to give stability internally, externally, but as well to our investors. And I think this is also quite important where you can count on.
Looking at the track record, I'm happy that I can report, we can report that we are doing so quite well. The focus in terms of strategy now, I think it's also something where looking to the history, to the past, but now looking forward. Very important in terms of lifting customer value, what we are talking about. Being customer-centric, not only in terms of technology, but as well being close to the customers in terms of service provider, any kind of stuff. There are as well 15 other programs, which we share later on, which are kicking in here. What does it mean? Balanced profitable growth. Very important here is the service and spare parts business. This is something where we are further evolving. The population of our products are becoming more and more. This means as well the service ratio growing.
We can really count on this somehow easily, but we can move forward. Aerial working platform, this is also something very, very important to us. It plays a major role even in disaster recovery. So every fire brigade is using it when you have power lines down, not only in Europe, especially in the U.S., a huge potential, and later on from Alexander, we will hear more about it. Execution excellence, and here something as well quite important to mention is here the supply chain optimization. This means, yes, we had and we have strong roots as well in China. We get some equipment from China and components, but still now with the Indian strategy, the strategy we have on the Balkans, we can quite well offset maybe any impact we see from China. We can produce it in the region for the region.
And again, here some of you might remember we were all talking about this. And maybe it was not that well understood at the beginning, but now when you look into the numbers, it really pays off, and especially considering as well here North America. And process system and data optimization, this is as well something where we have still a great opportunity to further improve. And as I said, we will see in total 18 programs, which will be a part of the deep dive sessions where we'll present it and as well on the other way to discuss it and to have some workshops on that. The targets, and this is, as I said, something which we already mentioned some time ago and then became a part of our strategy. That's very important. That's the goal.
And that's as well not only the goal, as well where all the plans are heading to, to achieve EUR 3 billion, 15% ROCE, 12% EBIT margin, and still the balance to profitable growth and market leadership in terms of number one. And the good thing is here that we are really talking about market share. We were just the other day, Singapore, which is only a small marketplace, cutting the trees, 65% market share. Forestry business, Europe, close to that. So this is as well something where, let's say, the volume, the market position comes, but being fully aligned here in terms of profitability and not just for the sake of growth. The key takeaways, and this is also something which you will see in the other three presentations, is what does it mean for the role of the board for this part of activity at PALFINGER?
A clear strategy moving forward. So I feel as well that we are very much aligned. This means really like maybe the comparison is not that good at the moment, like an army moving forward, heading in one direction without any distraction. Strong foundation, and therefore it was again important to me even to see where we start from in terms of steel mill, from where the steel is coming from, the performance, the performance of PALFINGER in terms of achievements. Building on a strong brand, I think it's also something when you talk about PALFINGER, it's if you would have, let's say, consumer goods, it's for sure in the neighborhood of Red Bull and the others or even Coca-Cola.
I think this is something as well, even if you're not so familiar with the entire industry. PALFINGER is a premium brand and has really a premium recognition, which is as well supported being the technology leader. Last but not least, as well to understand, is this the end of the story? No. That's just a new starting point in terms of growth and where we see here the areas in terms of service or aerial work platform. Talking about this, I would like now to hand over to Maria Koller. She will give us some insight on the culture. As I said, this is a very, very important triangle. This is a very powerful cooperation between the different activities we have. Let's listen, Maria Koller, what you are bringing to the table and which kind of insights you can give us.
A warm welcome to Maria.
Thanks. Thanks, Andreas. Thank you, Hannes. Very warm welcome from my end. You heard Andreas very inspiringly talking about the famous new triangle. We have a new strategy. We are rebuilding our brand and we redo our culture. And if you're asking yourself the questions, how do they do that? I very proudly can confirm that we can transform. You could say this is a very bold statement and to say, yes, we do that because we can. We have a very resilient workforce. We have a strong culture and we're improving that even further. And we are using ESG not as a burden, but as an opportunity. So let me explain that a little bit in more detail. Why do we have a resilient workforce? We have a very international footprint. Andreas mentioned we are all over the world.
We have production sites in Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, in Asia, in North America, and in Latin America. So when we have a capacity issue due to some regional, economic, or political challenges, we can balance that very nicely out. Not only in terms of capacity, we can do the same in terms of skills. So we are heavily investing right now into R&D infrastructure and workforce. And everybody, if you know that, if you're looking for an engineer in Europe, the market is tight. So what we are doing, we are building up an engineering center in India because we can. We have a footprint there. And we're doing the same in Brazil. So our international footprint helps us enormously in terms of capacity and skill set. We also have built up already regional training centers in most of our bigger production sites. Why we are doing that?
Because it makes us more independent from skilled labor, which is or might not be available on the market. If we train the employees ourselves, we can do that and very quickly scale up our workforce for growth. And in addition to that, we continue to work to reduce our hierarchical layers. We want to be more lean. We have a program in place and we measure our progress there. We also have a very transparent, but very rigorous forecasting and planning tool in terms of headcount and FTEs. We want to know every single day how much capacity do we have and how much do we need and how we balance that out. If we need external labor on the market, we have established recruiting hubs so we can very efficiently bring external talents in in our biggest regions.
And in those countries where we are heavily regulated from a governmental point of view, we have flexible shift agreements in. So we can scale down and scale up our workforce without any noise, without any disruption, without any drama. So this setup here helps us enormously to have a very resilient workforce. So coming back to the second one, Andreas was talking about the new culture. We are building already on a very robust past. We are very proud of that. But we said we want to be even more prepared for the future. And that's the reason actually why almost two weeks ago, we just published and announced internally the new culture program. It's part of our strategy. And you see here the three new corporate core values where we will build on. Be passionate, meaning we don't settle what we have right now.
We always want to be better. Be straightforward. What does that mean? We challenge ourselves by asking feedback, providing feedback, being very bold and direct to address things in a very efficient way. And showing leadership, we are embracing the change. We are not afraid of it. We are embracing it, and you've heard Herbert today talking about partnerships. Reaching beyond means we're even increasing our collaboration with external partners, if it's on the R&D side, if it's on the supplier side, or if it's on the sales side, so this is one of our strategic pillars. I'm also happy to explore even more detail in our breakout sessions, so resilient workforce, our culture program that all fits very nicely into our social strategy, which is part of our ESG program. Two years ago, we worked out our six fields of actions.
We have a package there of actions, what we do. We have clear targets. We have clear KPIs, and we continue to work on that, so that was on the S of ESG. Let me switch a little bit to the E. What we are saying is we are embracing sustainability as an opportunity. We say it's driving our innovation and it's making us more resilient. We actually asked Ernst & Young to look a little bit into the future. So we asked them, how does climate transition change the business of our customers? How does it change our markets? How does it change the use of our products? Not now, but look more for the next 15, 20 years, and the results of those insights, we actually very nicely built into our strategy. And there are in fact two main key takeaways I want to share with you.
The one is, what's even more important is electrification, robotics, and connectivity. Customers will even more rely on that going forward. And that, of course, we need to prepare for that. And that's we do a lot for innovation. The second insight is actually that customers will reuse more our products. So you can call it circular economy. You can call it second life business, but this will be an area which will increase and we want to take part of that. And also customers want to use our products even longer. Andreas was referring to service. Yes, that's the reason why service is part of our strategy. Service business will grow and it's also driven by climate transition.
What's actually also nice is, and I can share that on the next slide when we go a little bit in more detail of innovation, we offer products from combustion to fully electric and also in between. We have already now in most of our products out there an optimized control by load sensing. We also offer hybrid products by providing a battery, also on combustion trucks to operate our products electrically. And we nicely see now this is paying off. There are two things I want to share with you. The one thing is we have nice orders in place already for the fully electric products for next year. They're already in the books. They are coming. Secondly, and this was a little bit also a surprise, this year we significantly increased our number of patents. Why? Because we are investing in innovation quite a bit.
That's actually a nice customer story I want to share with you. We have one customer here in Vienna who needed to change the electrical wires during the night in the middle of the city. How has he done that? He used our fully electric product in the middle of the night with zero emission and almost no noise. That's actually a nice story to share. Secondly, we have customers, especially on the railway side, where they ask us to refurbish their service machines. So they come to us and say, "We don't want to buy a new one. We want to refurbish it." For us, that's a nice business. For them, it helps them to reduce their investment. We're actually exploring this sort of model not only in Europe with the railways. We do the same in other regions, in more product lines.
We're very optimistic that there's more business to come. Another story to share on this end is that customers are asking more for preventive maintenance. We have a nice product to offer. We offer a PALFINGER Oil Check. The customer is benefiting from that because he's not automatically regularly changing the oil. He's first testing it with our service. By doing so, he can save up to 1,500 liters of oil for a period of five years, which is a nice saving. What we are saying is sustainability pays off if you do it wisely. We continue, yes, and we continue to lower our own carbon emission. We work on that and you see it's reducing year by year. It's goal one and two. We do that. No question about that. The S part, the social, is the core of this company.
We get nice feedback because when we measure our voluntary attrition, it's going now down even below the 5%. We also do everything to reduce our exit and transfers to employees. That, of course, all based on a very robust compliance and governance system. Let me do the summary here. Our transformation. We are ready for the future now. We have a very resilient workforce, which is the base for the growth which lays ahead of us. Yes, we continue to work on ourselves by launching this culture transformation program. Sustainability for us, it's an opportunity to increase our innovation and also to even make us more resilient. By saying so, I'm very happy to hand over to my colleague and to our Chief Operating Officer, Alexander Susanek.
Thank you, Maria. Yeah, thank you, Maria. Welcome, everybody. It's a pleasure to meet you.
It's always many familiar faces. It's always a pleasure to talk to our investors and analysts. For us, it's a great moment to talk about our achievements, but even more important to share with you our ideas about the future of our company. Yeah, we have already heard from Andreas Klauser about our new strategy, 2030+. We call it Reach Higher, which also should explain our ambition, which is based on the three strategic dimensions which we see here. So the first one is lifting customer value. PALFINGER has always been a customer-centric organization. Lifetime Excellence is our claim. We're positioned with our premium brand and providing value to our customer is in the key of what we are doing. And we want to continue this success story with this strategic direction. The second direction is about balanced profitable growth.
PALFINGER has a unique setup in the industry with our broad presence across industry segments, with our broad and innovative product portfolio, and with our worldwide presence, and our strategy of operating in different industry segments with different product categories across the regions gives the company a lot of resilience. And we want to drive the growth opportunities across all segments and all regions. And we have seen that this strategy already has delivered excellent results in the last years. Yeah, and finally, our third direction, we will continue to drive our execution excellence in all areas of the company. This is an important foundation not only for winning against competition, but also for creating strong financial performance, and in the next few minutes, I want to share with you what we do to bring our strategy to life. And let me start with lifting customer value.
We have shaped the industry over the last decades. And this is due to our customer centricity. We heard a lot about partnerships already today. We have long-term partnerships with our customers. We are considered to be a very reliable partner. And we can do this because we are close to our customer. We have a comprehensive sales and service network which spans around the globe. We think in long-term partnerships. And we can provide to our customers not only excellent products, but also keep uptime high, help him to be more successful in his business. And we have a lot of people who are passionate about doing this on our side, supporting our customer, listening to our customer, and developing solutions which make him stronger and more profitable. Yeah, and at the same time, we have a high-performance R&D.
This is something which sets us apart from many of our competitors. We invest a lot in R&D, more than 4% of our revenues. We have a global R&D network, which we are currently even expanding. Yeah, and we constantly work on improving our R&D processes. We develop a new digital toolchain so that we get more efficient, that we get faster. We apply AI in many parts of our R&D processes already. And all of this helps us to bring down our time to market. And we aim to bring it down by 20% over the next years. Yeah, and last but not least, we are a solution provider. It is important that we understand the business of our customers and do not only sell products, but really understand what is his need, what is his requirement to deliver a solution which helps our customers to be successful.
In this regard, we are seen as the benchmark in the industry and in performance and in quality. We just heard from Herbert Eibensteiner that high-quality steel plays a very important part for our products. We do have the best weight performance or lifting performance ratio in the market. This is something which sets us apart. That's something where we are very happy to have such strong partners as voestalpine, as we have heard earlier this morning. Yeah, at the same time, digital services, connected applications become more and more important for our customers. Our equipment becomes part of the digital ecosystems of our customers because that's one of the levers for customers to be more efficient, to have more transparency how their equipment is used, how it is applied, if there's any problem with the equipment.
At the same time, it's a door opener also for us to provide more service because if we are connected and we also know about the state of our equipment, we can offer predictive service. We can also guarantee longer maintenance windows and so on. Yeah, and all of this transforms into 95 go-to-market projects currently. This is not all completely new products, of course, but this is new applications, new products going into new segments or new countries. And out of this, we will see around 20 new product launches alone in 2026. And let me add one thing. I'm absolutely convinced that technology will play an increasingly important role to be successful in our business. As I said, digital applications become more important. Being able to scale technology across regions, across product lines will be something which will be more important to stay competitive.
And this is something where we really stand out against our competition because many of our competitors who are smaller, who operate only in one segment or in one region, will not be able to do so. And at the same time, we see that we invest much more in R&D than others. And that makes us very confident that we will stay ahead of competition. Yeah, let's look at the next strategic direction. It's balanced profitable growth. We build on our strength. And this is a broad and innovative product portfolio, as you have seen here. You know that PALFINGER grew up a lot with a loader crane, also with timber and recycling cranes, where we have a very strong market position. We are a clear market and technology leader. But there are a lot of other areas, as Andreas already mentioned, which are the base for our resilience.
We see a strong growth potential in aerial work platforms. We are convinced that with our existing products, but even more with the products we are currently developing and we are bringing to the market, we can do much more than what we do today, and it's a huge market with many applications all around the world. We have just presented the new TEC range in Europe at the Bauma trade show in April this year. It was very, very well received. We have a lot of positive customer feedback, which gives us a lot of, yeah, confidence and confirmation that we are on the right track, and there will be much more products to come. We already heard that our marine business is developing very well. We are very happy with the development, also with the profitability, and this still has a huge growth potential.
We already heard about cruise ships, where we are providing boats and davits, but it's also about windmills, growing business. Still, offshore platforms of all kinds require respective solutions. Yeah, and also on the military side, this offers some growth potential. And let me add, even if it's not on this slide, we are currently investing significant amounts also in defense applications and projects, which is, of course, an interesting field to be part of and to increase our business. And at the same time, that's a part of our business where the customer has especially high requirements and needs advanced technologies. And this also helps us to develop new technologies, which then later on we can transfer to other civil and commercial applications. So from several perspectives, this is a very important field of our business, and we want to grow this.
And again, let me repeat 95 go-to-market projects, 20 new product launches alone in 2026. Speak a clear language, and we will keep our product portfolio fresh. And with a short time to market, we will also be able to react quickly to what the customer demands. Behind the different regions, behind the different product lines, we have set up clear growth initiatives. So we have a clear plan how we want to grow. And as I said, AWP, so the aerial work platform business, is one of our top growth initiatives together with the service and spare parts area, which Andreas already mentioned. Yeah, and to make growth happen, we will strategically invest. We have set clear investment priorities. And I want just to share a highlight of them with you. I do not want to go in all the details.
We already heard R&D is one of our key success drivers. So we will continue to invest and we are expanding our R&D network. We have our R&D center, our technology center in Austria in Köstendorf, which is the heart of what we do. Some of you have already been there and know it, but we are expanding currently with a new R&D center, which we are setting up in India. We are currently investing in India to set up a production as well, so we will also set up an R&D center there to make use of the talent which is available in India, and Indian engineers have an excellent quality level. Many companies do engineering out of India very successful.
And we want to do the same to make use of this qualification, also of the cost position that engineering in India has, but also to be close to the market and to understand the local requirement because experience shows, and I've experienced this by myself in my previous companies. It's not that easy to conquer a market like India with a mindset of Austrian or German engineers. So it's important also to be close to the market to understand the requirements. And we do the same in Brazil, in Caxias do Sul, which is already an existing location for us. And yeah, we have local engineering also in the U.S. for the local applications. Service plays an increasingly important role and is a strong pillar of our growth strategy. We just recently opened our new spare parts hub in Huntley in the U.S..
We have a central spare parts hub there, which will help us to serve our customers quicker, better. And service is a key success factor in our business. And this is just one of the major investments that we are doing. But at the same time, we are also investing in strengthening our sales and service network in our core markets. For example, we are investing currently in additional locations in Germany or in Spain. Yeah, and I already mentioned it. We are currently preparing the project where we start a new plant in India. Also in India, buy Indian is a very big topic, as in many other regions of the world. You know that India today, in terms of population, is the biggest country in the world. There's strong growth to be expected also for the years to come.
A lot of infrastructure, which is supposed to be built, and a lot of need for our products. So we are very optimistic about this. We will invest roughly EUR 30 million. We are just about to finalize the purchase of the land, and we will start with our assembly activities and then by the year 2027. Yeah, and last but not least, the third strategic direction, execution excellence. Of course, we have to deliver results today to be able to make our growth strategy happen and optimizing our processes and our activities always stays on top of our agenda. In the last years, we talked about footprint optimization and value stream optimization. This goes on. We optimize our production network. We shift fabrication, especially from higher cost countries to lower cost countries or outsource. That's why it's also important to work with strategic partners on the supplier side.
And secondly, we have a very strong ongoing focus on management of current capital. We've already seen that the cash flow improved a lot in the last year, that we are seeing very good results in our cash flow improvement. And there's a lot of activities behind throughout the whole value chain, starting with our suppliers, talking about our own inventories in operations and also in the sales channels up to management of accounts receivables. And we see the results already. Bringing costs down, of course, is a task which never ends. And we have a lot of activities, a lot of cost down initiatives on the product side. So in a good cooperation between product development and procurement, we managed to bring product costs down.
Herbert Eibensteiner just showed a very good example in his speech when we are able to develop with our partners like a steel, which is giving the same performance but less costly to produce. Of course, this is an excellent example of how to bring costs down because it's not all the supplier wins or we win. It's not just a bargaining topic, but it's something where both partners win, and I think this is an excellent example of what we do. We have lean initiatives in all the plants, which show very good results. I'm very happy how this is taken by the whole team, and step by step, we manage to increase efficiency, reduce lead time, and by this also increase our profitability, and last but not least, we work on modular product architecture.
You know that we are coming from the past where a lot of acquisitions took place, where we brought different products and brands together, and step by step now, we come to a situation where we manage to really make use of modular architectures, use similar components across or in single product lines, but especially also across product lines, and if you think about electronics and control systems or assistance systems, these are features which you can develop once, and then, of course, we try to spread this not only within one product line, but also across product lines, and again, this is an advantage which clearly sets us apart from our competitors. Yeah, to sum it up, we are well prepared to strengthen our position as market and technology leader. The strategic programs we have defined will enable us to serve our customer even better in the future.
We are building on our strengths. That is the customer centricity, that is our high performance R&D and our strong and broad product portfolio, and our worldwide presence. We have defined strategic investment priorities. I mentioned just some of them, but they will allow us to drive growth opportunities and to improve the performance of our company. That will be to the benefit of our customers. It will also be to the benefit of our shareholders. With that, I want to hand over to my colleague and our CFO, Felix Strohbichler, who now will show you how this strategy will translate into financial results. Thank you.
Thank you, Alexander. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I would like to thank you. The share price of PALFINGER has increased by 80% this year.
Of course, one foundation of a share price development like this is performance. But we all know the stock market is more about future and about expectation. So it's about your trust in the management team, your trust in the equity story. So again, a big thank you for having trust in us. Let me remind you of the financial targets for the year 2027. I think you all know about them. We want to reach EUR 2.7 billion of revenue through organic growth at a 10% EBIT margin and a ROCE of more than 12%. And on top, we also said that we want to reach a cash flow of more than EUR 100 million, which we have already delivered last year and where we are also on track to deliver it this year. But with our new Strategy 2030+, we are going really one step further.
Of course, also the tailwind is needed to reach the 2027 targets, but the ingredients are there. So we're still committed to these targets, but we all know that the potential for PALFINGER is much more than this. So we are committed that we can reach more than EUR 3 billion of revenue until 2030. And please do not forget the more sign. I will come to this later. A 12% EBIT margin and a 15% return on capital employed. And what is even more important also for the valuation of analysts, for your models, the free cash flow should be higher than EUR 150 million every year on average. So where does this growth to more than EUR 3 billion come from?
First of all, I would like to start with the footnote at the bottom because even if we talk about saturated markets, even if we talk about Europe as a market with a very high market share for PALFINGER already, there is a continuous growth based on the fact that our products are getting more and more complex. They have more and more features, autonomous features, safety features, etc. Our customers need more flexibility. So this means even in a saturated market, there is a constant growth in terms of average price per unit, even in saturated markets. But then, of course, our strategy is not based on what we expect in any case, but it's based on our initiatives and what we expect from those. And I would like to start with service. It's obviously the biggest part.
And you must not now just take the delta of today and 3 billion because, of course, all the initiatives we have defined actually have a potential which goes beyond 3 billion. But we all know that the world is volatile. Not always everything's working out according to plan, but in total, those potentials are more than 3 billion. So don't just use the delta and allocate it to those segments, but this is how you can allocate the growth potentials of PALFINGER to the individual levels. And obviously, the biggest lever is service business. And I think we have heard about this already several times today, and I don't need to repeat this once more. And then if we go to another big part, it's our work platforms, AWP. So a very important driver because today we are not profitable.
It's a very big market with a big volume potential, but also a big profitability potential. So a major contributor. Then TMF in North America, also an important part of our growth story. APAC, we heard about the new plant in India. We want to add EUR 100 million out of India until 2032. Latin America, also not to forget, and marine and defense. If you look at marine and defense, it looks actually relatively small, but in terms of profitability, it's interesting. And don't forget that marine and defense really play into the service part as well. So you see a major part in the service revenue increase potential also coming from marine and defense. In marine today, 40% of our revenue is actually service revenue now, and this will increase further in the future. And last but not least, we should not forget about the recovery of EMEA.
It's not only EMEA. We also have potentials in other parts of the world, but EMEA probably is outstanding today. We have the fiscal package in Germany with 500 billion. We all know that nothing has materialized now, but every other week we get some indications that they will start moving and there will be something. We do expect that in 2026, we will see first impacts. But of course, this tailwind also from Europe is a major part of the story, also supported by ReArm Europe, where we talk about EUR 800 billion of budget for this initiative. Then there is the InvestEU initiative for infrastructure, another EUR 372 billion. REPowerEU, EUR 210 billion. In the U.S., we talk about the Stargate project, infrastructure for artificial intelligence, $500 billion.
And reconstruction of Ukraine with the EUR 50 billion is probably by far not the end of the story in terms of potential. Of course, this does not mean that this would be the revenue for PALFINGER, but all those initiatives will drive our potential and support our potential. And this is what we address also with recovery of EMEA and also the growth in some other regions like the U.S. Of course, growth revenue is important, but even more important is the bottom line and the profitability. And the obvious question is, where does the profitability come from? And you find now, of course, similar drivers for profitability as for growth, but there is one more lever, which is footprint and efficiency optimization, which comes on top because this is also a very important part of our program to increase the profitability. So it's on the one hand, growth driven.
It's service driven, but it's also driven by internal potentials we can address. And if you look at both slides, the key message is actually we are not depending on one or two levers. There are a lot of levers, multiple levers we are touching, we are addressing in order to make PALFINGER even more resilient. And this is really the beauty of the equity story of PALFINGER, that we have so many things we can build on and we can address. I also would like to add some achievements. Andreas has already mentioned some key achievements, but it's important also to bring across that we talk about the future, that we make commitments, but that we also deliver on commitments. And that we want to underline with this that you can count on us.
So first of all, we have placed the treasury shares as announced one year ago, increased with this as the free float and reduced the debt by several measures. Let me start with the sale of treasury shares. So this was clearly a measure which has substantially increased the attractiveness for investors. At the moment, we are the number 20 on the list for the inclusion in the ATX, and the number 21 is quite far away. So we are very confident that we will see PALFINGER in the ATX as of March, which will then also force index investors to buy into PALFINGER and to acquire shares. We had proceeds of more than EUR 100 million. And of course, if you look at the balance sheet, this means an improvement in the equity ratio of more than 3%, gearing improved by more than 15%.
PALFINGER is extremely solid in terms of balance sheet structure. If you look now at the free float of 43.5%, this is now really a level which makes it possible also to attract investors which up to now said there is not enough liquidity. We cannot go into this share because we don't know how to exit again if we want to. This has now really changed the picture completely for a lot of investors. Below you see where those shares have gone to. Interestingly, it's really international. U.K. investors account for more than 50%, France 26%, U.S. 16%. This was also our target to internationalize our investor base. I think here we have been very successful. On the left side, you also see the investment horizon of our investors.
So mainly not only with 76%, but we can already see with the volumes traded on the stock market every single day that liquidity has increased dramatically. We also communicated what we want to do with the proceeds. Let me be a little bit more specific. If you add up those numbers, it's more than EUR 100 million. But of course, money is not dedicated to something specific. It just underlines that we have a good use for those proceeds. So we are expanding our service locations in North America. We are adding service vans in North America. Mobile service is very important there. We will invest here around EUR 40 million. We will also expand our service locations in EMEA with EUR 30 million of investment. We are going to invest heavily in defense projects and in development of solutions for defense customers, which will be around EUR 20 million.
We have opened now the spare parts hub in North America for EUR 10 million, where we already counted on the fact that we would sell our treasury shares. And you have also already heard about the new plant in India, which will cost around EUR 30 million. So these proceeds help us to fund these strategic investments, but also to pull them forward and do them even quicker than we originally had planned. Another topic we promised at the last Capital Markets Day was that we want to reach a net financial debt below EUR 500 million until the end of 2026, mainly coming from free cash flow. And we have delivered on this. You have seen the free cash flow development last year, and we are also on track to reach our free cash flow target of more than EUR 100 million in 2025.
Divestment of non-core assets: we have done some smaller steps, a few millions, but not yet the full potential has been realized, so there is more to come, and the treasury share sale has brought us proceeds of EUR 100 million instead of more than EUR 90 million, so you can expect that we will get close to this target of EUR 500 million already at the end of 2025, and I'm very confident that 2026, there will be a four, the first number in our net financial debt KPI, so my key takeaways, what I want you to take with you from my presentation, we have a high potential for growth and for profit improvement, and it's not based on a few or one pillar. It's actually based on a broad portfolio of potentials.
And these potentials also strengthen our resilience because it makes us even broader in terms of contributors to our bottom line. We have an increased attractiveness to our investors due to the sale of our treasury shares and a very, very strong balance sheet. So in the end, coming back again to a slide you have seen before our equity story, everything what you have heard now in the last hour actually pays into those topics. We will strengthen our market leadership in terms of volume, in terms of innovation, in terms of customer proximity. Our resilience, which is already outstanding today, will be strengthened even further. The growth potentials of PALFINGER are huge. We are present everywhere. We are in many industries, so we can benefit from a lot of opportunities. And we have seen the slide, what is ahead of us.
And last but not least, this is a huge earnings potential, but not only from growth, also from internal potentials. Thank you. With this, I hand over for the conclusion to Andreas.
Thank you very much, Felix. And as well to all my colleagues from the board, I think it's not only an amazing story, it's really a clear plan for our way forward. And I'm sure I'm looking as well into the faces now. You might have some questions. We will not answer this now. We have four breakout sessions where you can address it. I think the way forward, the plan, Reach Higher has clearly shown the growth potential as well, how we are approaching it, as well our plan behind being better every day, being more successful every day, and being more profitable. Thank you for your attention, and I wish you a good remaining day.