A warm welcome to everyone here at the Autoliv Technical Center, and to the webcast audience, of course, as well, to the Autoliv 2023 Investor Day here in Auburn Hills, Michigan. As you know, at Autoliv, safety always comes first. First, some safety information. There are, in the very unlikely event of an emergency, we have emergency exits over there on that side, and you just go out there, take a left and take a right, and follow the hallway, and you get to the exit of the building very soon. With the safety taken care of, we can go forward. First, I should mention that all the presentations and slides that we will present here today are already available for download at autoliv.com. We have prepared a great event for you today.
We're really going to talk about our journey towards our targets, of course, and also how changes in regulations and ratings and vehicle designs are big support for our growth opportunities, both near, medium, and long term. Obviously, we are Autoliv, so we're going to talk about the cost opportunities in our operations, including the opportunities in automation. Finally, we'll also translate what all of this means in terms of financial performance and shareholder returns. We have an agenda, yes. Today's agenda is really Mikael will kick it off in a few minutes, outlining our journey since the CMD in 21, and also, of course, our journey forward towards our target. Jordi and Cecilia will talk about the growth opportunities that come from these changes in ratings, regulations, and technologies.
Megan will follow up and dive deeper into what this means in terms of commercial opportunities. After a 15-minute break, Magnus will revisit our progress in operational excellence and what we do for the future. It's time for Fredrik to sum it all up into your favorite subject, which is what this means in terms of financial performance and shareholder returns. As always, we have a Q&A. There will be opportunities to ask questions in three different ways. If you are here, of course, you can ask questions here in the room. If you are connected to the webcast, you can ask questions in the chat. If you are connected to the phone, you can, of course, ask questions on the phone lines.
Finally, we will round it off with, for you people here at ATC, we have a great product display outside here. I'm sure some of you saw it already, a little bit of it. We're also going to have a deeper dive into our research focus, and our Autoliv's Circle of Life focus. There will be a pre-recorded version of the product display that will be webcast for the web audience. Then, of course, we have my favorite slide, the safe harbor statement. It is an integrated part of all presentations today, and it includes the Q&A that follows. During the presentation, we will reference some non-U.S. GAAP measures, and the reconciliations of historical U.S. GAAP to non-U.S. GAAP measures are disclosed, in our quarterly press releases available on autoliv.com and in the 10-Qs that have been filed with the SEC.
Now, without any further ado, I hand it over to our President and Chief Executive Officer, Mikael Bratt. Welcome, Mikael.
Thank you, Anders. A warm welcome from my side as well, both to you here in the room and also for all of you, those of you that are on our webcast and our phone connections here. It's a great pleasure to give you an update on our journey towards our midterm targets. As Anders laid out here, we will have deep dives throughout the day here from the respective team members here. Let's start here and now and talk about 2023.
As you have seen, we have reconfirmed our guidance for this year, across the board here, both when it comes to our opportunity to have a strong organic growth for the year, and here we're talking about 15% on top of LVP growth of around 3% here, so an outperformance then of 12% for the year. We have also talked about a range when it comes to our adjusted operating margin of around 8.5%-9%, with a gradual improvement quarter-over-quarter throughout the year here. An operating cash flow of around $900 million. This, of course, is a stepping stone towards our midterm targets.
Also here, we have reconfirmed that we are with all the activities we are doing, and also the short-term mitigation to offset the headwinds we have been faced over the last couple of years here, heading towards our midterm targets here. We are reconfirming those as well here today, and here we see the light vehicle production plus the 4 percentage points that we have talked about up to 2024. We are looking at adjusted operating margin of 12%, around 12%, cash conversion 80% or higher, and we have then continued focus on a strong balance sheet, where we have a leverage ratio of over time of 1 time. We will, of course, come back to these different buckets throughout the day here, how we are addressing this.
You saw last week, our announcement here, where we are taking proactive steps towards our midterm targets here, and also in line with our strategic roadmaps that we have laid out since a few years back. What we addressed here in the structural cost reduction here, we are talking about a headcount reduction with 2,000 positions within our indirect workforce, and you could translate that into the white collar community, and then another 6,000 within the blue collar environment, the indirect workforce. All in all, 11% of our current workforce.
When we look at the indirect, we are, of course, addressing across the board here, so all levels of the organization are in focus here, and we are emphasizing really to identify new structured ways of working here to continue to flatten the organization, making sure that we reduce the non-added value in order to focus on the added value, meaning individuals that are on positions touching the products, the customers, and our deliverables to secure our customer commitments here. We are also focusing on reducing number of sites, and as you saw in the press release here, we are also emphasizing the European footprint here.
The reason for that is basically that that's where we see that we have bigger opportunities, as we have a legacy footprint that needs to take into the next level here of efficiency. We don't leave any stones untouched here as well, so it's really a global approach, but we will come back to that in the presentation as well. The path forward is very clear for us. We are holding on to what we have talked about before here in terms of our ambitions to reach our midterm targets. We are holding on to the activities that we have identified as enablers to get there, and we are also taking in further steps here as we need to manage the short-term headwinds that we see in the industry here.
We are also seeing great opportunities to continue to develop our business here. The future mobility that is our addressable market today provides a lot of interesting opportunities when it comes to widening the scope of addressable markets. We have talked to you in the past about the adjacent opportunities, here visualized by the two-wheelers. Today we will not focus so much on that. We will have maybe a little bit shorter perspective in time, but that in itself provides a lot of interesting opportunities here, and here we see new ratings and regulations driving content per vehicle.
We see the need for new innovations to answer to the requirements coming from the electrification of our industry, as well as potential autonomous vehicles here, as we see that going further down the road. Already today, the thinking around autonomous vehicles and the future layouts in the vehicles is already here to a large extent. That I'm really excited about to show you here today, both through the presentations from Cecilia and Jordi here, but also later on in the tech show here. Despite the headwinds we have seen over the last couple of years, we see that we have continued to strengthen our position, and we have a strong position as we move forward here.
I think it's no news for you here, the different headwinds we have faced as an industry. Of course, I would say it was all triggered by the pandemic in early 2020. We have then, unfortunately, faced the tragic war in Ukraine, also affecting lately here, the value chains in 2022 and onwards. Of course, we also have faced a number of different natural disasters in terms of severe weather, everything from the ice storms in Texas, affecting the semiconductor supply, to the typhoon in Philippines, affecting our own ability when it comes to deliver steering wheels from our plant in the Philippines, and plenty of disruptions then resulting from weather phenomenons on the supply chain during the last couple of years.
This has translated into component shortage, I would say, primarily described through the semiconductor situation, where a number of initiatives have been made to offset this, everything from redesign to working with resourcing and different types of allocations. Not short of headwinds in the last couple of years here. Despite this, we have been able to deliver off our strong order book, and we have outperformed the light vehicle productions throughout the whole period here. We have gained market shares. In 2018, when we started this journey, we were around 40%, had a market share of around 40%, and last year, we reported 43% market share.
We have gradually moved up, and as we also have said, and still valid, is that we're heading towards around 45. We also have gone through and are still working on price negotiations with our customers. 2022 was very much around raw materials. Today, it's the broader scope when it comes to other inflationary consequences, I would say, which we are discussing with our customers here. Of course, this volatile period have been shown in our financial numbers. We see already in 2019 the effects of the volatility coming from the WLTP changes in Europe. We also had social unrest in Mexico here. Of course, in 2020, the pandemic put the whole industry at a standstill in the second quarter of 2020.
We saw a strong comeback towards the second half of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, and then we started to see the consequences of the component shortages, increased volatility, et cetera. I think what the good news here is that the team has managed through in a good way, securing the value chain, and we can also see that we have worked hard to offset the negative consequences of this. We see here that we have been able to protect our industry-leading margin position here, as you can see to the right here. The main consequences of these last couple of years is really a significant lower light vehicle production globally.
Compared to where we were in 2019 and looking forward, and also I would say, in 2021, and looking forward, we had very different scenarios to what we actually are looking at today. I would say here, we are looking at a difference between 7 to 10 million vehicles on an annual basis here compared to original plan. Of course, the inflationary cost pressure is visualized here by the steel curve, but I think the magnitude and the breadth of the inflation impact is seen across the board in all the different categories we are talking about here, but the different variance.
The most challenging, I would say, really short-term challenge, is the volatility, and you see here from the graph, and Magnus will come back to this later in his presentation. The significance of the volatility and the impact it has to run an operation effectively is quite significant here. What it says here is that before the pandemic, we had around 98% pickup rate compared to what the expected volume was, and ±2 percentage points deviation, you could see. During the 2020, 2022 here, we went down to 82% of what was requested, actually, were picked up. Within this, we had up to 50% volatility between the short-term periods here.
One week, we could get the call on a Thursday saying that, next week, we don't need anything because our plant is standing still, and the call came from the customer. The following week, when we expect to restock, we expect we need 50% more than what was originally planned. That tells you a little bit about the volatility seen in the call-offs, and which we need then to make sure that we could deliver upon effectively. What have we done during this time period here is, of course, to secure the value chain, making sure that we could deliver to our customers what they expected to get from us. The customer commitment in being a reliable supplier is critical for us.
All hands on deck from the whole team here to secure the customer's delivery, even though the very volatile situation. Of course, our strategic roadmaps here, we have hold on to, and we have continued to drive digitalization and optimization in order to secure the productivity over time here and utilize the new technology. We have continued with footprint optimization, and here we have worked with optimization, both in terms of making it more effective and efficient, but also securing capacity for the future growth that we see in our order books here. We have worked hard on the capital efficiency program that we talked to you in 2021 at the Capital Markets Day there, and Fredrik will also come back and give you some details around that.
Of course, the price negotiations has been critical. We are not stopping here. We are continuing with what we already are doing, but we are also actively continuing to address our cost base and what I talked about before with the initiatives that we are building into our operations here that was announced last week. Further optimization and further cost reduction are in our agenda here. Looking forward, we see here continued potential to growth, and that is because we are working hard to make sure that we have products for the future. We are seeing also that we are filling our order books to secure the market share that we are gradually growing into. We see that we have a very strong position with the new EV platforms.
We see that our order intake are well representing our market share position. When we add it all up in the portfolio, we see actually that it's slightly stronger than what we have on the total portfolio today. Around 45%, when we look at the order intake here. A significant jump also up from previous year here. We also see that our portfolio, which is, I would say, very diversified, both across the different regions, the different geographies, but also through the different customer bases here. When we look at the new, newer OEMs coming up, especially focusing on the EV platforms, we are well represented there.
We can also see that there, the portion of newer OEMs, representing a higher portion of our order intake last year, actually jump up to 30% from previously 12% of the order intake. Very, very interesting development there, and I would say well-positioned for the transition which the industry are in. Talking about OEMs and our customers here, we have showed you before where our, you could say, market share within the respective customers are at. We quite frequently get the question, okay, is there any specific percentage points that is difficult to get to or you can't get to?
I think we can see here that in 2022, you saw that we were seeing significant market share within the top 15 OEMs that we have in our customer portfolio. Yeah, you see the percentage points here in 2022. If we then look on how this is translating into 2024, you can see here that we are strengthening the position towards the upper end of this scale. What it's all about is, of course, to deliver on the customer commitments, meaning we need to deliver superior quality to our customers. We need to make sure that we are a robust supplier when it comes to delivering on our projects leading up to the SOP date of the customer.
Of course, in our daily deliveries, as I mentioned before, making sure that we fulfill the orders that has, order volumes that has been given, and of course, also be price competitive. I think this shows that we are doing our job in that regard. With that said, we are not leaning back here. We are really leaning forward here, making sure that we have new innovative products at a cost-effective price from the OEM's perspective and the robustness in our deliveries. When we look at the sales increases going forward, or the organic growth, I should say, we have talked then about the light vehicle production, + 4% leading up to 2024.
When we look at the first years in that period here, 2021 to 2022, 2022 to 2023, we have been above that. Of course, here, we also have the price increases included. Also, if you exclude the price increases, we see here that we have a good traction to over-deliver on this target. We also see that content in the vehicles, but also our addressable market here has a great opportunity to grow. This is just a overview of ratings and regulations coming into play in the next couple of years. Cecilia will take you through this in greater detail later on.
What it says here is really, which I just would like to highlight here, it is very important that the vulnerable road users that we are addressing and have been emphasizing on since we met at the Capital Markets Day in 2019, is also becoming very visible here in, from a society point of view. It is, for example, both in Europe, where variables and protection for motorcyclists is on the map, to also higher requirements in China, for example. Looking at India, also a market that's growing rapidly on the airbag side, for example. And here you may know that we have also invested in more capacity to meet this current demand, but also future demand.
A lot of emphasis from the Indian government here to make traffic safer in their country. Also in the mature markets, and here we see a constant evolution where we need to have more sophisticated products in our vehicles, but also we see additional functionalities coming in. We have talked about the far side airbags, for example, in the last couple of years here as one example, and that is really getting traction. The more personalized safety solutions on the seatbelt side is one area where we now can consider height, weight, age, gender, for example, in the solutions going forward. A lot of exciting development in this area.
This in combination with the industry trends, where we're talking about connectivity, sustainability, EVs, and autonomous, as I mentioned before, driven both by regulations, but also as the markets are growing in terms of economic capabilities. We have talked to you about in the past about the how the economic wealth in a country also correlates very well with the development of new components. For us, it's all about making sure that we have the right products for our customers, meeting these mega trends that we see happening here.
You see some examples down here at the bottom end of the slide, but you will see it more in detail later on, so I will not dive into any details here and now. Of course, the margin progression, more again, towards our mid-term targets is critical here, and we are working broadly on that. A lot of things are happening when it comes to optimizing our capacity across the globe here. Magnus will, in his presentation, talk to you more about the different steps that we are making. As you can see from this slide, we have added capacity in Mexico for our steering wheel operation as we're growing.
We have India here as one example, with also additional capacity, talking about the airbags I did before. We are investing in Vietnam for more textiles capacity. At the same time, we are also optimizing our footprint in Japan, and we're making significant investment there to get closer to the customers. We are closing one plant and building a new one to have the right type of processes close to the customers for as one example. Of course, we also here working very much with getting from high cost to best cost countries when it comes to for example our engineering capacity. A lot of things going on when it comes to the geographical footprint.
Optimization, digitalization, as I mentioned before, we are holding on to the strategic roadmaps that we laid out in 2019, making progress, and you will see later on also here how our coverage or utilizing this new technology inside our own processes here are increasing. You can see from this chart here also the direct labor efficiency moving in the right direction. Of course, we would like to have seen a little bit higher number, but the volatility I'm talked about before, and of course, the significant lower volumes here, is of course, putting its mark on this. We are clearly moving in the right direction, and as we get stability, we expect to see, significant leverage coming from that.
In summary, looking at the financials here, adding up the headwind that we have had, and the consequences in our P&L coming from that, is well matched with short-term activity, as well as our activities on our strategic roadmaps, is healing that position. Fredrik will also give you the bridge from where we are today to our targets later on. Our focus here is to be a shareholder-friendly company, as you know, and as such, we are focusing a lot on making sure that we can and will return liquidity to our shareholders through the different levers that we have, and that is mainly the direct dividend, as well as with buybacks.
As you can see from this chart, we have throughout the last 5 years here returned more than 1 billion SEK. Sorry, $1 billion, and we have then restored our balance sheet. We are well within the range again, I will say here, great job done in terms of being capital efficient, so we can maintain this. Our focus here, of course, is to maintain a conservative view on our balance sheet, because we think that is a very, very important foundation for our future ability to generate shareholder value. In short, our building blocks are in place for our journey going forward.
Of course, a very important foundation of all this is a stable global light vehicle production. Here we have also said in the past, at least 85 million vehicles. We are also seeing price compensation as a very important part of the foundation, and here we are making progress, and we made progress last year. When it comes to the raw material, this year, as I said, is about the broader perspective of inflation here, so labor, freight, energy as an example. It's our strategic roadmap initiatives. We talk about footprint, structural initiatives, optimization, and digitalization. With the growth and the outperforming we're expecting to see here should then take us all the way to the 12% operating margin.
We will come back to the details throughout the day here, and I will end here now. Back here at the Q&A and for the closing remarks later on. I hope you enjoyed the day here, and looking forward to take any questions later on today. Thank you.
Thank you, Mikael. We will now move on, and I will soon invite Jordi Lombarte, Chief Technology Officer, and Cecilia Sunnevång, Head of Research, to the stage, but they will outline our growth opportunities that are firmly rooted in our vision on saving more lives, but also connected to the changes that happens in ratings, regulations, and technology. Please, Jordi.
Perfect.
Welcome.
Thank you. Welcome, all of you. I would like to share with you our growth opportunities that we are generating, how we do it, and also how this thing translates in real business cases here. To do that, I would like to share with you some points here. One is the Autoliv approach to safety. We call real-life safety. This is generating us the amount of ideas that we can really efficiently save more lives, and this, for us, is really one of the key elements. We will continue also to share with you that the pipeline of safety solutions that we have in our portfolio. Some of them are driven by the market trends, by the customers, but also there is other ones that comes from new ways of mobility. This is an area that we're exploring.
We also want to put a lot of emphasis how strong is Autoliv in participating with the regulators and consumer ratings, like Euro NCAP, working together we are shaping what will be these specifications for the future. We believe that when this thing hits the fan, in that element, that it goes in the regulations, is when we see the volumes, the economy of the scale, then this becomes popular and really we can save lives at a really good cost. Basically, to do everything that we will share today, I hope that we can transmit our passion for saving lives, because at the end of the day, this is the energy that motivates us to go further. Sometimes people ask me, hey, a lot of things in a car, you know?
Some years ago, was no airbags, nothing, and now it's, a re we there already? I mean, what can we do more? Actually, if you see the numbers, there is still 1,350,000 people that die, basically, around road traffic accidents. Only 30% of this happens inside of the car. The other 70 is either vulnerable road users, motorcycle riders, anything outside. There is a great opportunity also to improve inside of the car, but also outside of the car. Just a comment, if you look Asia, the number one reason for casualties is actually motorcycles, powered two-wheelers. This is an area that you will see later on with Cecilia, that we are working very closely with some Asian authorities, and based on the technology that we can develop to help to solve this problem.
I would like to talk about the real-life safety, for that, we visualize what we call the Circle of Life, at the end, even the presentation, Cecilia is going to be more deeper on what it means. Basically means that we are looking at how many people are affected by different crashes, by different situations, with the statistics, we can determine what are the areas where more people get injured. When we understand that, the next step is that, okay, now we know that is in this kind of situation. The next step is, what are the systems or solutions that we can or how people get injured, you know? When we understand the root cause, that in this situation, people get injured in a certain way, is when we can really develop systems to solve this problem.
If we can show the efficiency of these systems, I can tell you that today, when you see all these numbers, society is ready to say, hey, if the industry can bring technology, we can put it in the regulations and make it happen. This is when we hit the sweet spot here. The second thing that I think is very important in our D&A is that we are scientists. Cecilia and his group even more, that basically we try to improve systems, safety systems. At the end of the day, we always end with crash test. You see the dummies, they're very specific. If you want to simplify the equation, you could do products to satisfy the testing.
Our approach is we want products that in real life, and real life is more what you see in the left, that nothing is according on a spec. You can have randomly ways of getting crash accidents. This is basically in our D&A. With this, I would like to introduce Cecilia. Basically, she's our Head of Research, and she will give you more insight on how we do this process on generating opportunities and how we interface with the regulations. Thank you.
Thank you, Jordi, hello, everyone. I'm gonna start with a macro perspective. We all have common goals. We have the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that ensures that we will leave the world in a better shape, hopefully, than what we have today for generations to come. There are quite ambitious targets that we have to fulfill, and the goal 3.6 is the one with the 50% reduction of road traffic fatalities. That means that we have to do something different from what we have done in the past. Luckily, now, there are new technologies and the mega trends within technology developments like electrification, connectivity, automation, and shared mobility that will help us or enable us to reach those targets, not only the traffic fatality ones, but also the sustainability, the other sustainability targets.
That's the macro perspective. If we look in the automotive industry, there are trends like electrification, we have sustainability, connectivity, and autonomous drive that are also the big focus areas for most carmakers. The electrification, that means for us that we can design in a different way. You have design freedom that can lead to roomy interior or flexible interior. We also have the sustainability that drive the need for new materials. The new materials can also be coupled to new designs and also new processes. Connectivity, the car to travel in a car is not to move from A to B anymore. It's going more in the direction that you also need an experience. Software features and function will enable more value to the end user. The same with autonomous drive.
There are safety features, but there are also features that will make your ride more comfortable or convenient, and that also have implications and opportunities for Autoliv, for safety and for our solutions. Mainly, there are three important factors for our growth: it's the regulation, that drive content per vehicle, it's the consumer rating tests that drive the need for new technology, and there is also the customer demand, which is actually the response to the end user demand of this experience in the future vehicles. I will start going in more into details on the regulations and standards, and this is, as Mikael showed before, divided into the different regions.
As you can see in blue, these are confirmed regulation changes, then the yellow ones are the anticipated ones, where we are working together in the different working groups in order to shape the requirements so that it will result in real-life safety. I will point out a few. First of all, in this year, this was a working group established through the UN, and it's a working group on equity and safety, and it's not the kind of equity you are usually used to. It means that we want safety for everyone. In response to the recent debates on, is cars more safe for males than for females, this is the working group that will take care of safety for everyone. I mean, it should be the same if you are young, elderly, tall, short, what have you.
This is a very important working group because it's global, and it will lead to specific regulation in the coming years. As you can see, as Mikael pointed out as well, we see standard or regulation updates also for vulnerable road user. Anticipated in the 2025 time frame, there is an update planned for ISO standard for personal protection equipment. That includes motorcycle inflatable wearables. We also see in China that we're working together with CATARC in understanding how would a regulation for a frontal impact for a motorcycle, what would that look like? We have, as also pointed out before, in India, where we have the six airbag mandates and the side airbags, we also see that the regulation for more performance in the side airbag will take place in a couple of years.
These are on the regulation side. If we come back to the customer demand, as we were talking about the software-defined vehicles, where you want an experience. We already see today in the Shanghai Auto Show that you are presented with comfortable seating. Maybe not the driver at this point, but in the passenger seat, there are the comfortable seats where you can recline to a very large degree. We also see a lot of screens where you can engage in other activities than actually driving, and that has also implications on the safety. We see new designs of steering wheels, and also steering on demand, because a lot of the time you might have an autopilot that will drive for you, but you are still liable, you are still in control.
Based on this customer demand, and it's really the value for the end user, we have to make sure that this is safe, because now we see a lot of new technology, and how do we really secure that you are constantly safe throughout your journey? As an example, you can see here that today we design for a standard position, and we will probably do so for a long time to come, as Jordi showed, because you have simplified test methods. If you see in the video, that is a real video from a naturalistic field operational test study, people today are already engaging in other tasks than driving, and they are already today sitting in a very unconventional manner.
This is just one example that we are working on other techniques and ensuring that we can keep these occupants safe. In order to do so, because technology is developing extremely fast, we do have the rating and consumer test protocols. This is maybe a more quicker way of doing changes to the, to the standards. Again, blue is decided and yellow is anticipated changes. I would like to start with taking more of a deep dive into the Euro NCAP, which is the most progressive NCAP to date. The program, the roadmap Euro NCAP 2030's outlining several different updates in the four phases of driving, occupant protection, et cetera.
It's really enabling the ADAS functionality, but also ensuring the customers understand them, use them, and also that people are safe in the modern vehicles. What we can see is that in 2026, Euro NCAP is starting to address both variability in occupants and in crash speed, with introducing three different crash severities and three different dummies. This will be done physically, as today, but also in complement with virtual testing, that is also an enabler in order to be able to make or to validate these new systems. This will develop in 2029, where we will continue to do virtual testing using the finite element model of the human, the human body model. In that time frame, you can anticipate that you can do very many simulations in the different seating configurations, with different sizes, in different crash severities.
That's the evolution of the occupant protection. Also in 2029, we see truck safety coming in, and that's also dependent on the virtual testing. Truck safety for the opponents, for the truck driver, and for vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists outside of the truck. In 2026, there are work ongoing to improve the pedestrian protection. AEB is a fantastic technology, but we still see injuries and fatalities. Now also there are discussions on how can we better protect the hard surfaces in the car, like the A- pillars, and that is ongoing work until 2026. Going back to the virtual testing and the human body modeling, the increased adaptivity for size, severity, et cetera, that means that it drives the system approach, and it starts with a human.
As we, at Autoliv, we are experts in human behavior and understanding when you reach the threshold where a human breaks. This is really the key here, because we can have a lot of different fancy technologies, but again, coming back to the basics, we need to make sure that the technology we introduce is not a distraction, and it's not compromising the safety. In order to understand what we can do and all the opportunities, there are, of course, the vehicle structure, that is sort of protecting the occupant itself. Then you have the subsystem, the ADAS functionality. You have the brain in the restraint control, we have the restraints, we have the seats, and we have the steering.
All of these components are working together in determining the safety in every moment, and we are definitely part of that system and working together with partners in order to understand how we can improve our solutions. One example also then when it comes to steering, high complex steering wheels are here to stay because we do see that all the customers are still focusing on level two and level two plus, as the self-driving capabilities is harder and many programs are delayed. What we see today in the complexity and in the electronic content, we see that this will continue. We have all the things with the HUD, we have the HMI elements, and the light bars, and the different haptic responses, et cetera.
We do see the steering wheel still as a very important interface to the driver, and also communicating the level of automation to the driver. Another part, as I said also, is that in Euro NCAP, we also see the need for driver monitoring, both in order to understand if a driver is present, fit to drive, but also when we talk about adaptivity, we need to know who is in the seat. On top of all the current electronic content, there is also an opportunity to actually put the camera into the steering wheel, and when we have compared the solutions to the cluster camera, we can see that we have less occlusion if you have the camera in the steering wheel.
We can still have the same accuracy when it comes to the other parameters as well. Showing that more and more electronic content is going into the steering wheel, so we will show more of this in the product exhibition later on. Talking about the occupant monitoring and really understanding who is in the seat, we're also working on our smart seat belt. Today, we have some functionalities. We have the pre-pretensioning, et cetera, but now we have also added sensors, four sensors, as you can see in the, in the bottom picture. With the seat belt, as you can see in the video, you can detect if the person is correctly buckled, and you saw a green light on the monitor. Now, when he has the belt under the arm, it's a red indication.
You could also see that he can be classified as a mid-sized male. With these sensors, we can determine your size, your weight, your position, and this kind of monitoring is less intrusive than a camera, and it's also an excellent redundant sensor. Because in the future, when you will have all these system, and you will actually trigger your safety systems based on this information, we have high standards on the functional safety, and you will need redundancy to make sure that you are triggering at the right time. With the seat belt, we can also do vital signs, so we can understand breathing as well as heart rate variability that can be used as an indicator for fatigue or stress. Moving on then in the system approach, when we talk about the comfortable seating, we know that, again, it's market demand.
People want to travel very comfortably, we have identified what is the biomechanical risks. Based on the real-life data, again, from the biomechanics, we can design our system solution, which will then go into the different product solutions that can be integrated seamlessly with the seat structure, and that will also be shown in the product exhibition later on. Coming back to, we've talked a little bit about the different sizes and the different severities that we are looking into. High-severity crashes is still an issue in Europe and in U.S. Fatalities involving a truck is almost 15%, and that's why we, together with the Swedish Transport Administration and Euro NCAP, is looking into truck safety. Of course, it's represent a high-severity crash, even though this crash test was done in 50km per hour.
The car was traveling in 50, and the truck was traveling in 50. If you think about how does a normal restraint system perform in this kind of crash today, and as you can see on the top level here, we have a strikethrough. The mid-sized male is going through the airbag, hitting the head in the steering wheel, and that's not a good outcome. Again, if we have these we have the tools, we have the ability, we can work with the seat belt, with the pressure in the airbag, with the steering column force, with seat, and with the knee airbag. We can, as you can see in the bottom, improve the performance so that you can have a good injury outcome also in this crash.
This is the need for adaptive system, with the progression of Euro NCAP, this will be possible. With rating and consumer tests, as Jordi also mentioned, we are working with our friends in Malaysia, with MIROS, and also with the MyMAP program, where there is already today the first level of power to vehicle safety incentive program. This today, it's more focused on the ABS and also how to make the bike more visible and detectable. We see the progression of also introducing other technologies on the bikes, as well as in 2026, starting also to inform about wearables, about different other on-rider solutions. Last year in Malaysia, in the MIROS 10-year anniversary, we demonstrated the Bag-on-Bike solution to the Minister of Transport.
He also acknowledged that this might be a technology for Asia after the introduction of ABS. Moving further with the on-rider protection, we have worked on developing our own inflatable vest solution, and the white vest in these three videos is the Autoliv solution, included also our own ECU, our detection algorithm, and of course, the inflator and the textile. You can see with, compared to the competitive competitor products, that our vest inflates before the impact. One of the others inflates halfway through the impact, and we have a very quick detection time. This, of course, is a trade-off.
You don't want false positives because you can tune it into this specific use case, but we're also doing a lot of data collection with actual riders to make sure that we don't trigger it when it should not be triggered. This data collection also gives us a lot of insight in how motorcycle riders behave, and that is also opportunities for developing digital solutions, which might also be a good way in in developing countries, that can help in changing behavior. Based on this data, we can understand from one trip, in the spider web diagram here, for instance, you can see your acceleration, your braking pattern, your leaning angle, your steering, a lot of different parameters, and for each ride, you can make a profile.
If you have 100 rides, you take an average, and this is your personal riding behavior profile. Based on that, we can actually coach motorcycle riders, tell, in this curve, you were a bit fast, you could have used your grip or whatever. Based on all this data, we can of course, trigger the Bag-on-Bike, we can trigger the wearables on the person. We can also do post-crash reporting, and we can do behavioral analysis. With that, I hand back to Jordi to go back into details on some of these more specific solutions.
Thank you, Cecilia. How much is in the pipeline, and it's quite exciting, I think, because there's a lot of opportunities on how to go further on saving lives. If I may repeat a bit with the example of the motorcycles, how this Autoliv's Circle of Life that we call it, works. Statistics tell us the amount of people, the amount of casualties around the motorcycles. We investigate what kind of crashes are we talking about, and it was perpendicular. You can see here, maybe not in detail, but crashes in India are not the same ones that we see in Germany. Based on that, we estimate what are the cases that we have to go for, the ones that will have more impact on that.
Once we select that, in that case, because that was new technology, we have to develop also methods where we can in a laboratory, visualize how can we improve that situation? How can we prevent these injuries? This translates also with a set of products. The ones that you see in the screen go from the airbag on the bike, wearables, even helmets. We are looking what happened in helmets. This, at the end of the day, when we have the methods and we can prove it, you can see MIROS is already basically some legislators, some regulators are saying, hey, technology, we need technology to save these people there. This circle, we apply it in several areas where we want to explore. This is the engine for bringing some of the innovations.
Now I would like to show you some innovations that are already very close to have the SOP. It's just a summary. The first one I would like to talk is the Bernoulli Airbag. I think you have seen the announcement this morning. This is quite of a market first. It's a different way to inflate an airbag. Sorry. One, two. Yeah, it works again. Sorry. I try to explain how it works with an example. Imagine that I'm an inflator. An inflator is where we have the propellant. When you burn the propellant, it inflates with the gases, the airbag, right? Well, imagine that I'm an inflator. I'm going to blow and trying to inflate my airbag. Two blows, inflate something like this. What this technology does is applying Bernoulli's principle. It's basically with one blow, look at what we have.
This technology applied to airbags, imagine the less propellant that we need, but also by the nature of the inflation, we are providing some adaptivity that comes by the concept by itself. It doesn't need electronics like today, where we have dual-stage airbags, where we have two signals, one for low input, output, another one for high output. This is a product that is in the display, and this can be a big saving for the customer on the system-wise, because imagine all the sensors that you can avoid.
The second thing I want to share with you is that on top of all these sensors that goes around the steering wheel, hands-on detection, anything that comes from the, from the autonomous driving or semi-autonomous, where you need to know who's in control, there is also other features for the experience of the customer right now. This is tiltable steering wheels. There is one that you have seen because Ford has made it public, that basically converts the steering wheel when it's not driving, in a table. Sometimes to make the paperwork for industrial delivery vehicles, sometimes for the guy who is driving to have a lunch on that. You will see it's very cool. We have it in the exhibition. Another area that we want to show is the solutions integrated on the seat.
When you see the seat in positions in a comfort wise, to get proper restraints, we are building a set of solutions around the seat. What you see here in the screen is almost, I will call an invisible retractor, because it goes inside of the structure of the existing frame of the seat. It's very well integrated. Another one I want to share, you know, we talk about motorcycles. I think if you have any previous Capital Markets Days, we showed that we have intention to work on that. Now we have an SOP already planned for 2025. This is it's curious because with the we have seen the evolution of the airbag in the car, and this is the first step to start seeing this evolution on the motorcycle.
In the motorcycles, there is another way to protect, which is with wearables. Here we also are developing the system, the complete system, including the ECU, the telematics, everything that basically we can bring that to a full functioning system in a way that can be scalable. Pedestrian protection. We show this because this is the kind of the last mile autonomous car, where by definition, it has to go in between people, and it has probability that hits on people. Basically, all that has to do with protecting vulnerable road users, it goes from this kind of solution to what we launched last year with Subaru, that got the highest ranking on vulnerable road user savings. Now we have a generation in the pipeline to protect bicyclists.
You will see more in the exhibition. Right now, what I would like also is to emphasize this work that the team of Cecilia is doing and the network that we have around the group on participating and working with regulators. This is an example. You see the picture on the left is in head office of Autoliv in 2019, that was when we meet the industry ministry from India that joined us, and we presented the work that we did together. In this one, it was a series of recommendations. This has translated now in 2022, in the mandate for six airbags per car, which is a significant improvement on safety.
With this, maybe the last comment I would like to say is, again, repeat, I think our passion for saving lives. I hope that we have given a bit of energy of what we feel on how we do our development. I hope that, at the end of the meeting, you will be able to see this in, and you can touch these products. Basically, this is what I'm presenting. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jordi, and thank you very much, Cecilia. I think all of you now are clear on that the drivers behind the content per vehicle growth is not slowing down. They are rather stepping up, and the complexity of future safety products is only going to get more and more complex. With that said, it's time for Megan Fisher, Senior Vice President of Sales, to outline what this means in terms of commercial opportunities. Welcome, Megan.
Thanks, Anders. Good afternoon, everyone, I recognize that I'm between you and a break, so I hope I can hold your attention for the next 15 minutes here. Happy to share with you our commercial excellence strategy, and I'm going to start with our current market position and how we see that developing over the next several years, and then spend some time on our growth strategy beyond 2025. Finally, give you a little bit of insight into our global commercial excellence framework and an update on our commercial negotiations with our customers. Jumping into our market position, as Mikael said earlier, we are the clear market leader in safety systems. In 2022, we had a market share of 43%, and our next biggest competitor is less than half of that.
A really strong position to start with. If you look at our sales split across the different regions that we operate in, we are present in all of the major regions around the world. We have around approximately 30% of our sales in each Americas and Europe, approximately 20% of our sales in China and the rest of Asia, including Japan. It really gives us the right presence around the world in order to support our customers globally. With that, you can see our here, our diversified customer mix.
Obviously, we have a presence with all of the global OEMs, but also with some of the, you know, newer market entrants into the industry, as well as some of the local Chinese OEMs that we see really growing in the, not only the industry and the market in China, but also with plans to expand outside of China. As we go forward over the next coming years, we expect some shifts in this revenue split, where we might see more of the Chinese OEMs and the new market entrants take a bigger role in our sales split overall. Looking at our market share in each of the regions here, just to highlight, you can see again, the strong presence that we have in all of the major automotive regions.
When you look at the right bars here that reflect the global market share, you can see that 43% level last year and growing to around 45% in 2024. I also wanted to note a few of the areas that are, you know, the big markets and the growing markets in the world. If you start with China, we have around 35% market share in China in 2022, and we are growing that to just under 40% by next year. I think there's increased opportunity in China to grow even further in our market share and also, of course, capitalize on the biggest automotive market in the world.
If you look at India, again, another growing market for us, you can see a very strong market share that we hold today, which is just under 60% and still growing to around 64% by next year. With some of the ratings and regulation changes that we see in these areas, as well as the size and the growth in the regions themselves, we're in a really good position to capitalize on that going forward. Just a quick look at our market share in each of the product lines. You can see a strong position across steering wheels, airbags, and seat belts, and we are growing in each of the product lines. We really have good diversification, not only from a geographical standpoint, a customer standpoint, as well as a product line standpoint.
Here, you saw this chart earlier in Mikael's presentation, but it shows the top 15 OEMs by their market size. What I wanted to note here is eight of the top 15 OEMs, Autoliv has over 50% market share with those global OEMs, and 12 of the top 15 OEMs, we have over 40% market share. Really improving our market share position with all of the top leaders in the industry, and I think this really talks to the trust that we have from the OEMs to allow us to maintain and even improve our market share position with them. Of course, we're not sitting still. You know, we're not here to tell you that, you know, we have a great position, we're done here. There's a lot more to do.
There's a lot of changes in the industry that are, that are going on right now. I mentioned that there's new players coming in from an OEM perspective, and we see in China the shift from some of the global OEMs losing some market share and more of the local OEMs picking up market share. From a sales perspective, we have a strategy to ensure that we have the right position with these new players in the industry, as well as with the Chinese OEMs, so that we can have a good position going forward as the market dynamics change.
If you look on the left bar chart here, you can see our percent of new order intake with the new market entrants in 2021, which was under 10%, and growing to over 30% out in 2022, we expect that to continue to grow as a percent of our overall order intake. On the right, you can see our 2022 order intake in China, where a majority of just over 50% of our order intake was with the local Chinese OEMs. Again, making sure that we're well-positioned for the future and the expected transitions that we see in these areas. Another obviously huge transition that we see over the next five, 10 years even, is the electrification, where more battery electric vehicles are expected to, you know, enter into the market.
You can see on the right, just the overall forecast. Going from 2020 to 11% of vehicles in the market were full battery electric vehicles. Out in 2028 timeframe, we expect that to be around 40%. It's really important that we win business on the right platform so that we can manage this transition. Obviously, that's a forecast, so there can be changes in that and there will be changes to that forecast. Maybe it accelerates, maybe it, you know, depending on regulation, could change the other way. We need to have the right market share across all the propulsion systems.
In, again, looking at our new order intake on the left here, we have a significant increase on new order intake for electric vehicles from 2021 to 2022, and we expect that trend to continue, both from the standpoint that the customers are sourcing and planning for more electric platforms, and of course, we have a strategy again, to ensure we have the right position going forward. Let me take a few minutes to talk more about our growth strategy beyond 2025. Our growth strategy, we have targets of 4%-6% average growth in the period beyond 2025, and our strategy is really built on three main pillars.
The first being the LVP growth that is forecasted that we expect to come, which I'll show you more in the next slide. That is contributing around 1%-2% of our growth in the outer years. The content per vehicle growth that has been talked about several times here, will contribute 1%-2%, and then we have new markets with our Mobility Safety Solutions that will also contribute 1%-2%. Looking at light vehicle production, you know, you can see the trough, obviously, with COVID in 2020 and a steady rebound of light vehicle production from there.
In the outer years beyond 2024, we see a CAGR of just over 2%, which will be the contributing factor to the 1%-2% growth that we expect coming from light vehicle production. With the market share that we have, that will naturally translate to growth for Autoliv. Looking at content per vehicle growth, we've talked a lot about these industry shifts and trends that we see. You know, there's electrification, sustainability, and what does that mean for our content per vehicle? You've already heard a few examples, but another example here is with autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles, it allows for more space and different seating configurations.
We have products that we can provide to the our customers to provide to the end consumer, to, you know, deploy airbags from different configurations inside the vehicle and make sure that we can keep the occupants safe in these different seating configurations. Of course, that drives content into the safety systems of the vehicles, and that's a backbone of where we expect some of the growth to come. To put that in more concrete figures here, you can see on the left in the line chart, the content per vehicle growth trend that we've seen from 2020 to 2024 in all of the different major regions around the world. You can see the same trend. It's all increasing.
We expect that to continue going forward based on, again, consumer needs, our customer demands, as well as the end consumer, as well as rating and regulation changes around the world. Then I've just shown here a few examples of where we can already see and forecast the changes of content growth in the market, the first one being in India with increased airbag penetration. In 2022, we had lateral airbag penetration of just around 10% in India. Based on the current forecast and what we hear from our customers and already are quoting on business, we see that increasing to over 70% by 2025.
In Europe, so a more developed region, where we already have high safety content in the vehicles, we see technologies such as HOD, so hands-on detection, being increasing more than double in the same time period as far as the penetration rate. Really opportunities with, you know, consumer demand and, you know, different regulations coming from the different areas in which we operate. Finally, the opportunity that we see in growth markets, or new markets, I should say. There's four focus areas that we have in our MSS division, and the first one is commercial vehicles. We already have sales in commercial vehicles, but we have opportunity to grow, to really expand up on our current product expertise and take it to new customers and within this new segment.
Of course, there's also a ratings and regulation implication here that will potentially make the market size within commercial vehicles even greater going forward. Pyro Safety Solutions is also an area that creates an opportunity as we go through this electrification trend in the industry. It will create a bigger market, more opportunity, and really an opportunity for Autoliv to specifically leverage our expertise in this area. I'm sorry, the third one is powered two-wheelers. We've talked a lot about that. Jordi mentioned the opportunity and really the need for increased safety for riders on powered two-wheelers.
We are very pleased to announce that we are launching the first airbag that will launch in 2025 on a powered two-wheeler. We really see significant opportunity to both increase our sales and support our growth strategy, but also really increase safety for the riders on powered two-wheelers going forward. Last but not least is pedestrian safety. Really addressing the safety risk of the occupants, or I'm sorry, not occupants, but the people outside of the vehicle, not just inside the vehicle. This is, you know, both with our core customer base today, the OEMs, but also with, you know, robotaxis and, you know, these last mile vehicles that we're seeing in different areas of the world. That is really a summary of our overall growth strategy that we have beyond 2025.
I just wanted to take a few minutes to give you an update on our commercial excellence framework that we have within Autoliv. A few years ago, you know, we've talked about operational excellence in Autoliv, but in our industry for many, many years. A few years ago, we really launched a focus on what commercial excellence. Commercial excellence can, you know, be a strong contributor and is a strong contributor to us achieving our targets overall as a company. We've launched this framework, and it really is a basis for us to improve and make sure that we execute upon all of our targets that we have set out in both our sales teams, but also our extended cross-functional teams. The framework has four pillars to it, and I'll just walk through high level what they mean.
The first pillar is our customers and the market, this is really focused on ensuring that we have the right strategy within our customer base, but also within each of the markets that we operate in, to make sure that we're accounting for the different trends that we see. It's exactly what I talked about earlier with, are we on the right platforms within each of our customers? Are we, do we have a broad enough customer reach to ensure that we are set up for success in the future? It's our customer-facing strategy. The second area of commercial excellence that we have is what we call digitalization and enabling assets. This is really all about efficiency in the sales organization and in the extended teams that interact with our customers.
Ensuring that we have the right tools, data, and support processes for our teams in order to execute on their strategy. The third pillar is end-to-end portfolio management, and what this is really profitability management across the entire value chain, the entire product life cycle. Not just focusing on when I get an RFQ and what I need to do in order to launch, but really working cross-functionally before we even have a product to sell, to ensure that we have the right business case, we have the right commercial focus on profitability from that point all the way through launching a product, end of production, and even into service life. Finally, last but not least, is people and performance management, and this is really ensuring that our sales team.
A lot of changes that we're talking about in the industry, even over the last couple of years with inflation, it takes a different skill set today than it did, you know, than it took two to three years ago to work with our customers in the right way, to be ahead of these industry trends. We have the, you know, talent management systems and support for our team members to ensure that we're prepared for this transition. At the end of the day, it really is, you know, the entire program is built around how do we create value for our customers, because we know that when we create value for our customers, of course, we will then create value for Autoliv and all of our stakeholders. Okay, the last slide here is really an update on commercial recoveries.
You know that last year, we did a lot of work with our customers to ensure that we got the necessary coverage for the inflationary effects that we see in the industry or in the world, I should say. Most of the focus in 2022 was on raw material recovery. We were pretty successful. We got most of the raw material covered in 2022, but to a lesser extent, the other inflation that we've seen. We did get some coverage, but we were not fully covered for things such as utilities, logistics, and labor in 2022. This inflationary environment is obviously a new environment for both us and our customers, and our customers were not really set up with the right processes and procedures in order to, you know, fully compensate us.
Going into 2023, our number one focus in the commercial, you know, excellence area, or let's say in our commercial teams, is to ensure that we get the adequate coverage and the full coverage for the external inflationary pressures that we see that are outside of Autoliv's control. These negotiations are ongoing. We are in negotiations with every single customer around the world. Obviously, we have a bigger impact with inflation in the Western countries, such as Europe and Americas. These, you know, the negotiations are quite detailed and can vary in timing and effort, I should say. The customers really request a lot of data, evidence, and detail behind all of the commercial recoveries that we're asking for.
We are in negotiations both with each customer, both to provide that data so that we can support their internal processes, but also to ensure that we are negotiating on what is the appropriate level of data and detail that should be provided in this new environment, because it needs to be reasonable and fair as well. We do expect gradual compensation throughout the year from our customers. We had it, you know, last year, gradually hitting our financials throughout the year as we get through these negotiations. We have clear targets, to achieve them in the most timely and effective manner that we can. Finally, we also have an effort in Europe where we, you know, we talked about the restructuring and the recent announcements on what we're doing, both in Europe and other regions.
Specifically in Europe, we are doing an additional review of the overall price structure in that region to ensure that we're adequately compensated and working with the customers to make sure that we have the right price structure in place. With that said, I just want to leave you with a few closing comments here. First, I hope that you can see and understand that we do have a very strong position, and we are even improving that position going forward in our core areas that we operate in. We have a growth strategy, you know, beyond 2025, that is really built on the foundational principles of light vehicle production growth and content per vehicle growth, and we feel confidence in that.
Finally, we have a holistic commercial excellence strategy with a high focus on commercial recovery for inflationary compensation that is really put in place to allow us to execute on Autoliv's strategic targets. With that said, I'll hand it back to you, Anders. Thank you for your time.
Very good. Thank you so much, Megan. I think you clearly drove home the point that the automotive world is changing quite fast, both technology and, you know, OEMs who are winning and who are growing, also with the new OEMs, and that we have a very strong position to benefit from these changes. Of course, that's quite important. We are now gonna have a break, and we are running a few minutes late. I say that we reconvene after the break in 10 minutes time, which is at 1:36. It just turned to 26 here, so 1:36. Excellent. Welcome back after the break. We even gave you one extra minute. We'll now move on and focus more on our cost reduction activities.
For that, I welcome Magnus Jarlegren, President of Autoliv Europe, up to stage.
Thank you, Anders. Thanks a lot. Looking forward to share a couple of minutes and a presentation with you about the progress we have done in the operation excellence area. I will start off with doing a short recap on what I told in 2021 on the Capital Markets Day. It was basically two messages that I sent at that point in time. Number one, we have started the progress. We have a good plan of savings that we are expecting to have going forward. We are well on the way to capturing those. Message number two is really around how do we do that? Two things there. On the one hand side, you see the APS development, the Autoliv Production System, which is then combined with three other things.
One is benchmarking across all our plants, making sure that we bring the best of all the plants to the plants that need it, and also automation utilization, what you have heard Mikael talk about earlier today. I will again today reiterate the commitment, and also show you where we are on this journey and what has happened. I think it's fair to say that the last three years in the automotive industry, and also for us, has probably been the most exciting for decades. Mikael talked about what that meant in terms of volatility.
You have basically the same graph here on the right-hand side, which talks about how we went from a very stable production environment, almost no volatility, and very good forecastability going forward, meaning that we can set up our production to a very, very stable and, you know, smoothly running operations. 2020 to 2022 served us with a completely different situation. It's not only the, you know, average EDI take rate that has changed, but also the width of the volatility, all the way from -50 up to +10, and that is also within the week. It's not that we know that within a month or within two months this will change. It's really calling on Thursday, as Mikael mentioned, what we need to change for the next coming Monday. What does that mean?
It really means that it has a significant impact on the production. We have that short response time to the changing volatility, that really means that we cannot flex the labor to the extent we are willing to do. There's just not enough time to do it properly. Secondly, the pandemic, which we had during this period in time, also presented us with a lot of attrition on the labor that we have in our different plants. When we have that high attrition that we have had, we need to bring in more people. You bring in more people, you need to make sure that you also then educate them, train them to the standards that we have to secure good quality and productivity, and that definitely influences the productivity negatively. We also mentioned the supply chain earlier.
What it means from a production point of view is that we have plants where we have 10%-15% downtime because we just don't have the material to present at the line, meaning that we're not able to produce. All of those things has been, you know, in 2020 to 2022. If you look on 2023, quarter one, the good thing about this story is really that, you know, the stability is starting to come back in from an operational point of view. Not only the take rate is better on 97%, but even more important, the volatility is more in the range of ±10%, whereas we were on, you know, +10%, -50% the previous two years.
We come from an historical norm of driving productivity, where we've been around the range of driving 5%, you know, some years slightly hours, some years slightly lower, but around 5% productivity improvement every year. You can see that we have more or less been able to at least drive productivity through those years. Maybe we went a bit sideways in 2020, as you can see there. I'm also happy to see that when the stability is coming back and also underlying performance that we have done during those years here, gives us now a position where we are on quarter three, demonstrating a run rate of around 4%. Not necessarily back to the historical norm, but pretty close to where we have been in the history, and also an ability for us to continue on forward.
How have we done this? I wanted to give you a view on what I also reported on two years ago. What we measure in our plants and what we have been measuring is on the one hand side, maturity. How well are we deploying out lean principles or production principles? On the other hand side, what type of performance does that present us well? Do we get better when we do this? We started in 2018 on an average bronze level with a rather wide population of plants within the circle you see. We measured this, you know, on an annual basis. We actually measure it quarterly, but we have done a pretty good walk-up here, coming to quarter one.
What is especially important in this chart here is that we move diagonally, meaning that we improve equally much on the maturity, but then we also get the performance as an effect of that. We have actually achieved what we committed to do in 2019, where we said that we want to take majority of our plants to benchmark level, which is basically in the, you know, in between gold and platinum. We have 53% of our plants now on platinum level, which we are very, very proud of. That means that we have come to sort of the end of the commitment, what we did in 2023. Now what we're doing is really redoing the complete approach for operational excellence. We are introducing actually four different things.
On the first-hand side, what you see here on the left, we have significantly increased the rating levels, and we have also pushed our performance more to the financial side. The ambition level for the plants today, previously been rating on gold, platinum, drops down quite a lot, which basically presents us with a good opportunity to drive even more ambition and more results going forward. That is one thing, but in addition, we also put a lot more emphasis on safety, and we are also now integrating sustainability, and I will come back to what we're doing on the sustainability side, and then also digitalization. As we have previously kind of reported this separately, this is for now really our operational excellence journey going forward. As I said, this is a significant increase on ambition level.
If you look on the blue dot on the top there, that roughly presents something around 75%. We have rolled this out now starting quarter two. It means that the rating we get on our plants right now is in the range of 35. You could say that is bad, but for me, that's really another journey again to take once more, which is really what we are after here. Sustainability and digitalization is two of the areas where we go quite a lot more aggressive on and raising the ambition level quite a lot. On the left-hand side here, you see our journey towards CO₂-free operations in our own operations.
Starting from 2020, you can see that the GHG emission intensity, we have been able to reduce with the north of 35%, it's predominantly driven by two factors. Number one is that we are able to reduce the absolute usage of energy, so basically kW per, you know, million U.S. dollar or per units produced, if you would like. Secondly, we're also doing a pretty aggressive switch here to renewable energy. Both those two together present us with this opportunity to reduce the CO₂ emission to the air. On the right-hand side, what you see there is AMRs, so autonomous mobile robots, which is, you know, one example of the digitalization. This one I brought because it's a good integration between both automation and digitalization. It's basically installed in 14 of our plants right now.
Four more is on the way. We will gradually implement them in more plants going on. This is a pretty good example because it has several dimensions of opportunities for us. First of all, we can eliminate, to a large extent, the logistics operators. We don't need anyone, you know, driving around the material in the plant. Secondly, it's also a significant improvement on the safety and the road traffic safety that we have within our plants, so that also plays back to the safety focus that we're having. In addition, having this system also creates a lot more stability. The 10%-15% I mentioned here earlier, on the downtime for the lines, is also getting improved in that.
Roughly, we have a payback for those installations between 14 to 18 months, depending on where you are in the world. That's one of the examples that we're using. It's not only numbers and facts, I think it's also people. I brought three of our plant managers around the world here to speak to you. Let's look at that movie.
Hello, my name is Dave Anderson. I'm the plant manager here at IBC, and I'm very excited to talk to you today. What I'm most proud of is the team and the people here at IBC. They show up every single day with heart, desire, motivation to be the best that they can be at what we do, which is saving more lives. In this factory, we build inflators. With the inflator technology, we've been moving more towards automation, and the automation is our robot automation. I just came off the ACH cell, where we have 11 robots building the parts out there now. What those robots give us is the opportunity to use human-like intelligence in an automated fashion to build perfect parts. Those robots, they do things repeatedly, so they take out the variation that human intervention can enter into the process.
They also can learn from their movements and measurements and create a way to use digitalization, incorporate digitalization, to make them better and better with each part they build. If we become further- and- further from nominal, the robot can adjust itself to bring it right back to nominal, to build perfect parts every time. We're just scratching the surface here, and we have opportunity to expand this across this entire factory. There's lots of runway for us to create new environments for these robots to operate. I think hearing about it is one thing, but seeing it is another. If you get a chance, I hope to see you soon here at IBC, where I can show you this personally. Thanks.
I am Ket Manirat, AS Tech Thai director. I have started with Autoliv since 1996 in purchasing and customer service area. Autoliv has given opportunity for challenge myself in many positions, even plant manager, which is quite limited for women in the manufacturing company. We first started cushion operation in 2009 with 200 headcount and 0 knowledge. Currently, we have more than 2,000 headcount with the high experience of textile, and we are ready to be a leader of the textile in Autoliv Asia. We forgot safety in workplace. We never have any serious accident. The last accident case to last time was since 2016. Our operation excellence, APS system, is the key principle for our work. With the high plant performance according to APS assessment, and we achieve platinum level, both airbag, cushion and steering wheel plant.
We continue to a new segment criteria coming. Our success and growth come from our people who contribute their hard work to support us. We rely for the our importance of our product. They are saving more life.
My name is Christian Gulicska. I'm working in Autoliv Steering Wheel Division, responsible for the plants in Romania. The turnaround in plants went to Georgia. I had to create a strategy, starting with a very ambitious vision and getting the buy-in from plant team, but also external stakeholders. The vision is clear, bold and very ambitious: Become Global Steering Wheel Competence Center. The turnaround starting with creating a strong and stable team, develop and transform operational processes, and align the plan to the true north using APS and lean principle. We managed to connect processes, starting with incoming through manufacturing and shipping, eliminating non-value add, work in progress material, and creating much more efficient production processes. Payback for this investment was achieved in less than one year. For sure, the journey will not stop.
We must take the next challenge and develop a strong automation program to absorb inflation, improve quality, and stay competitive in the volatile business environment. I'm very proud that the turnaround for one of the worst sites to the one of the best was achieved, that the colleagues working in Autoliv steering wheel factories are looking to a much more safe and stable future with us.
What you see there is three of our, you know, strong plant managers. We have all around 70 around the world that every day, you know, do their utmost with what we have in the strategy and realize that on an everyday area. Looking a bit closer to automation, that's something that I've been talking about before, and I'm happy to report that if you look on the different product lines we have here, and on the ratio that we can install automated solutions going forward, we have almost doubled the capability that we have in Autoliv compared to where we started the journey. On airbags, it's very much a very good situation when it comes to the inflator area.
We have done a lot on the more airbag side of things, taking us from a 25%- 40% capability to install that. Seatbelts, which is slightly different, we have maybe less of those fully flexible lines, but there we do a lot of automation when it comes to the in-station processes or the stations in the lines, going from a 20%- 35% automation rate. Looking at steering wheels, which is by far one of the most manual areas we have in Autoliv, we have been able to achieve a lot, all from basically nothing up to a 30% rate of automation in everything that we're installing. Obviously, we're doing this from two dimensions. When you implement that, of course, you try to touch in on all the new programs.
When we invest in new machines, we invest in automated solutions, but at the same time, we also automate in serial production. We have more of the process type of automation, what I talked about here in the seatbelt areas. Both of those areas are in play at the same time. Far, if you look from 2020 to quarter one in 2023, this is equivalent to around 3,000 head counts in terms of efficiency that we've been able to take out. I think this goes back to the chart what I showed before on the labor minutes per unit, but also what Mikael showed earlier here on the head count in relation to sales. We have ramped up our progress here significantly.
You heard almost all of the plant managers here talking about automation in their interviews. We have around 5,000 people here in play when you look at 2023, 2024, and 2025. Obviously, this is one significant part of what you also could read in the press release here previously, but it's not the only component that we are addressing here to reach the 6,000 that we laid out there in that press release. I also wanted to bring something around the footprint, which we have not really talked about in this setting before. This is what you see here on this chart, is the publicly spoken about efforts that we are doing. What you can see is really that we have two epicenters of activities.
We do optimization across the full globe, so to say, but it's really in Asia, where we optimize and develop a footprint to capture the growth that we are having in front of us here. Looking at the European, it's more of a consolidation and reduction of the different sites we have. We have around 40% of our plants in the structure of Europe. Hence, what you see there is more consolidations. You see no green dots in that sense, meaning that we build new plants, but we expand the capacity in the existing plants in order to simplify the setup that we are having. There is no geography left alone. Also, China are doing some efforts here, but it's really the two big areas: it is in Asia for growth and in Europe for savings and optimization.
We have been onto this program for a while, and we have invested both in 2020 and 2021, also now in 2022 and 2023. There are a lot of money going out, but we also now see that the savings for that is coming in, starting this year, and then it's growing up all the way up till 2028. This footprint program is something that we've developed almost three years ago, and we have a very good structure for managing our setup here. This is something that we continuously evaluate, and we take the actions and decisions as we go along, and we see as it's needed going forward. That's a big, big effort undertaken and also a big opportunity for us here going forward.
With that said, I also brought another movie to you guys here, where we will show one of those capacity expansions, which also then talks about how we build a capacity expansion and getting an end-to-end flow, very much exemplifying what we are doing here in Europe. Also a lot of automation examples from China, which is a really accelerated geography when it comes to developing those different things. Let's look at that one. The first example we see here is really how we use something that is called Operations Avatar. It's a homely developed digital twin of how we look into our plants. We replicate the facility, and we also replicate all the assets in there.
What this enable us to do, and what you see here, is that we can very clearly simulate our way on getting to a fully, you know, capacitized plant, and we know exactly how we want to develop it in order to get the right flow in there. Moving over to airbag, this is from our Lugoj plant in Europe, and this is what I talked about before, where we want to show you how we basically do a capacity expansion. To the right here, behind the fence, you have the existing plant, and on this side, we have built a new building. In that building, the whole intention is really to bring the full operations into an end-to-end flow, meaning that we don't need to have any logistics or shipping between plants, and we have everything in one space.
This is where we in European have the first plant with an integrated beaming process. This is where we basically weave the textiles that then later on goes to the next one. The weaved textile goes out on looms, which is then also put into an scouring and coating process. You see 1P1P here. That stands for One Product, One Process. That's the way we standardize across the board, making sure that when we do a change, either to the product or a process, we can easily do that change across the full network, making sure that we have the same process for the same products in the different areas. Obviously, when we build a plant like this, we use the best knowledge we have at hand, the latest developed solutions.
When we have this one now grown up into the plant we have right now, we have the best practice installed in one area, which is then, you know, something for the other plants to look into in order to develop. What you can see here is also this autonomous, automatic, mobile robots. You saw my picture before, this is one which is roughly this big, which you use in a line. The opportunity with that is it's fully flexible. We can do whatever product that we want in this setup without being constrained of any installations. This is Dave. He talked to you in the movie before.
what he invited you guys to go and look at if you wanted to. But this is the robots he talks about and basically how we install the cell without literally any operators in this setup. Looking into China, this is a combination between different installation, fully lines that are automated and flexible, but also different type of in-process automated solutions that we've done. Put your eyes to the numbers on the right. You will see that we are able both to reduce the number of headcounts, you know, from 30% all the way down to 80%. But you will also see that we're able to reduce the cycle time of the process, which essentially means that we increase the output.
For sure, when we automate, you know, the equipment and the assets are more expensive, but when we increase the output, the CapEx per unit produced basically stay around flat, which is basically how we finance the automation journey that we are on. Very quick, but some examples of what we're doing from all over the world. For us, we have three main focus areas here going forward. Number one, this is what I alluded to in my first slide, short to midterm, we want to take full advantage of the slowly returning stability and also the underlying performance that they have been developing over those years. We want to see better throughput, output, and through that, productivity. That's, you know, focus number one. Secondly, we are having a new journey to take.
We are launching this new operational excellence approach with four dimensions: safety, sustainability, digitalization, and also then the traditional lean principles, but with a significant higher ambition level on that. Of course, we have built up the capabilities of automation. We're going to continue to develop that capacity and that concept, but it's also now about rolling out all the concepts that we have into the existing production and the new programs coming. That's the main three things that we're focusing here going on, and I thank you very much for this.
Thank you, Magnus, for some great insights in what we have done and what we continue to do to improve our cost effectiveness. I'm sure you all now are eager to hear what all of this that you've heard today really means in terms of financial performance and shareholder return opportunities. For that, I welcome Fredrik Westin, CFO, up to the stage.
Thank you, Anders. I will put this in a financial context here now, and I will focus on five things. Number one, I will say, lay out a position of strength that we're operating from that allows us to confirm our financial targets. I will deep or dive deeper into in particular, the sales and the profitability development, both in the near term but also in the longer term. Then I will also talk about the capital efficiency program that I talked about in the last Capital Markets Day, 2019, 2021, sorry. Then I will close off with what that means in terms of capital allocation, so opportunities for shareholder distribution.
Let's a gain, if we look at performance over the last, we have an organic sales growth that is 6 percentage points above the underlying light vehicle production over the last five years. Very, very strong top-line development, supported by both the content per vehicle growth, also our market share gains that we've been able to secure. The adjusted operating margin, Mikael already alluded to that. It's been a challenging environment, at the same time, we've been able to keep our return on capital employed at a very stable level, showing also here our focus on capital efficiency, and even being able to slightly improve it versus the starting point of 2018.
This, of course, goes in hand with the strong operating cash flow development. Also here, a continuously positive trend. Also here, a cash conversion, where we have the target to be above 80%. We have been at higher levels than that, if you take the average year over the last five years, and this combined has allowed for us to return around $1 billion in returns to our shareholders. We believe this is a very strong position to operate from. Through that, we again confirm our financial targets. We have a few of them out there. If we look at the near term here, it's the organic sales growth, where the target is to be 4% above the underlying light vehicle production growth.
In the longer term, to have an organic sales growth of 4%-6% from [2035] onwards. On the margin side, we have the midterm target of 12%. I'll take the microphone, okay. We have the target here of 12%, and that goes in hand also with the framework that we have laid out, where it is that we need a volume of at least 85 million in light vehicle production. That we are able to compensate for the inflationary headwinds, beyond, so to, what we have been facing after 2021, that we're able to compensate for that or get compensation for that. The last component is that we can execute on our strategic roadmap in a stable environment.
As you saw here also from Magnus before, we are not there yet, but that is, of course, an important prerequisite for us, and I will also talk a little bit about what that actually means for us in terms of margin opportunity. We still or we also confirm the ambition here to have operating margin of around 13% in the long term. Let's look into how this has developed on the sales side here over the last couple of years. We have the 4% growth over market that we have communicated in the timeframe, 2022 to 2024.
We are on track, where actually, if you exclude the pricing component, which of course has been a significant contributor in 2022 and also in 2023, we are actually slightly ahead of this 4 percentage point growth target. The growth drivers here are, as we've laid out, the market share gains, but also the continuously positive development on the content per vehicle. As I mentioned, of course, in last year and also this year, a significant pricing component. Here we are on track. When we look at the adjusted operating margin progression, as I said, it's been a volatile environment to operate in.
I think we have maintained a profitability level that is in the top, I say, quartile of the industry, and we are also significantly above our peers and then competitors. It has been an external market environment, as we've talked about here, especially Mikael laid out. 2020, we had basically complete standstill in parts of the world related to the pandemic that impacted us. We had a very strong rebound on volumes in 2020 into 2021 with a very favorable development also on our margin development. That was then unfortunately hindered by the issues on the supply chain, where we saw both volumes being impacted, but also the volatility increasing significantly.
Also combined with the increase in raw material prices, this continued into 2022, and then exacerbated by the inflationary pressure. We have focused on what we can control, so we have grown above market, we have taken market share, we have been very focused on cost reductions and activities internally to drive our strategic agenda, and also got the compensation on the raw material side that was required, and are now very, very focused on also getting the compensation on the other inflationary components. If we look more specifically on 2023, we have said that it will be a gradual improvement of the margin, quarter by quarter. We started off in the first [inaudible] margin level of slightly above 5%, and we expect this now to improve here sequentially.
The drivers for this will be that we expect to see the compensations from our customers coming in here and starting in the second quarter. You also need to understand that these negotiations are by nature digital in outcome. As we also laid out or alluded to in the press release last week, there might be shifts between the [inaudible]. We don't expect this to be in line with expectations, but within the quarters here, there can be some deviations on how these things go. We are also released on the cost and headcount reduction activities, which should also see a further stabilization of volumes. Let's hope this works better.
Yeah, and we also have the seasonal effect here of the engineering income that is stronger in the second half of the year than in the first half. So these are the main drivers of the sequential margin improvement that we're expecting, yeah. If we look at the full year, overall, we now, we basically expect an improvement of around 2 percentage points, if you take the midpoint of our range of 8.5%-9%. And we do expect a significant inflationary headwind, so around 3% of our margins should be impacted by what we've also laid out earlier.
The inflationary headwinds, both in our supply base, which is the largest component, meaning the development of energy costs and logistics, and most importantly, labor costs on our suppliers, and how that moves into our cost base, but then also the impact of those same components on our direct costs. This should be around 3% is what we expect, but you also see that we expect to get an offset on about a similar magnitude than in the pricing negotiations that we have at the moment. We had one timer, if you want to say it that way, last year in with a patent infringement that we successfully closed. We don't expect that to be repeated this year.
Then we also expect a carryover effect from the price negotiations that we completed last year. I mean, they came in the second quarter or third quarter of last year, so there's a carryover effect of that into this year. Then we should also see a further stabilization throughout the quarters here, that we should have a lower impact from premium freight costs than what we had last year. Then lastly, the contribution here from volume, but you see that that is a smaller component. These are the major building blocks that takes us from the 6.8% last year to then the midpoint of the range in this year.
If we look at the growth component, we start with the near term, we're guiding for a 15% organic growth. We have split it out here also by geography. You see that the most significant growth we are expecting in Europe and in Asia, excluding China. That also goes in hand with, if you look at the S&P Global forecast, that's also where the LVP growth is expected to be the highest on the underlying LVP. There's certainly also a pricing component in this growth that we're showing here. China is expected to contract as a market, we're still expecting to show significant growth also in that market. The growth drivers are what we've already talked about.
It is the content per vehicle growth that we see to be around 3% in this year. A more pronounced market share growth in this year that takes us from the 43% closer to 45%, around 45%. Also very or a good position here with the domestic Chinese OEMs, whereas traditionally, we have had a higher exposure to the Western OEMs and joint ventures in China. We've been very successful on taking business also with the Chinese OEMs to benefit from the significant market shift that is happening right now in the Chinese market. Long term, it is the combination of three components that takes us to the 4%-6% growth that we are targeting. It is the underlying LVP.
Traditionally, that has been between 1% and 2%. If we look at what S&P Global, again, is forecasting it up till the time frame of 2030, this is closer to 2%. We have the CPV content or the content growth on top of that. That has also been actually closer to 2% in the recent past. Also here, we expect that to continue with all the components that Jordi and Cecilia talked about here earlier, in the range of 1%-2%. Adding on top of that, the growth of MSS, which will be limited in the initial years and then have a larger contribution as we progress.
It's the Bag-on-Bike that we have also talked about that starts in 2025, that should take some time before that becomes a meaningful contributor. Actually, commercial vehicles, the Pyro Safety Switches, and the pedestrian safety products should add more to our sales in the first couple of years here, that will be added on with potential growth from the two-wheelers. This is the framework for the organic growth beyond or from starting in 2025. If we go into the profitability development, to show you that the building blocks of then, where we expect to end this year, that should then take us to the around 12% margin target that we that we have.
I mean, you can understand when you look at what Magnus showed, and then the implications for our own operations with the volatility that we're facing, a large or a main building block of this margin improvement is stability. Really, that we can take better advantage of, say, our historical productivity achievements and also get the efficiency back into operations that we have had historically. We have added a structural initiative component to this with the announcement last week. What we're showing here is the combination of that with the footprint activities that Magnus also showed. A significant second contributor here from those two activities.
A smaller component from sales growth, where, you know, this would be obviously where we would end up if we had the volumes above 85 million. Also a factor here or contributor from the automation and digitalization roadmap that we also talked about here. These are the main building blocks that takes us from where we expect to end up this year, then to around 12% margin. As I said, I wanted to come back to say, capital efficiency and capital management. We did present a framework where we saw an opportunity to improve our working capital by around $800 million. I think we've made great progress on the accounts payable side.
This is actually already in line with the target or the ambition that we set ourselves, and that we communicated in 2021. We have achieved more than $500 million improvement and released from the balance sheet through optimizing our payment or payable structures here with our suppliers. That's on track, and we expect that to also be sustainable at this level. The second largest component we saw from inventory improvements, where that we could have a more efficient inventory turnover rate in our operations. We're showing a flat development here, but if you compare us to most of our peers, this is actually not a bad development. I mean, most other companies actually show quite an increase in this time period.
With the stability improving, we believe that many of the initiatives that we have put in place will then also bear real fruits, and that we should be able to get significant money here from the balance sheet and improving the inventory levels significantly. Lastly, we continue to work on the receivables side, where so far we've not made so much progress. I think the $800 million here still remains intact, and we've made great, or we've advanced greatly here towards that target. Just a few words on our capital expenditures. As you understand from in the ongoing footprint activities, we are operating at elevated CapEx levels right now. What Magnus showed you before was the net CapEx number.
What I'm showing here is the gross CapEx. I don't have the benefit here on the first quarter of last year from selling a plant in Japan. You do see here that over the last couple of quarters, the investments that we're making in the footprint, of course, have an impact. As you also saw from Magnus's slide, we expect that to continue at least for another year. Then we also see with the approach to automation that we're taking, that we should be able to get this down to around 5% over time. If you look at the depreciation expense with the top-line growth that we've had, it actually come down quite significantly as a percent of sales, despite the high CapEx levels.
Going back into the shareholder return topic here, what does it mean in terms of how much we can and how will we return funds to our shareholders? A main building block in this is our leverage ratio. We have the ambition to be at around 1.0 x over time and have a range here of between 0.5x and 1.5 x. You do see that in the last couple of quarters, we've been operating at the upper level of that range. That also shows you how we control the buybacks and then how we look into how we can distribute funds to the shareholders.
With an improvement on the EBITDA level, that also provides for more capacity to distribute funds to shareholders. If we look at the speed of doing that in 2023, we are at a higher pace of the buybacks than we were in 2022. With the improved profitability that we expect here sequentially in the quarters, this should also continue to pick up pace. Just to lay out here the key components of this repurchase program, it is, I mean, the visibility and the involvement here of the operating and free cash flow.
It is the credit rating that we want to maintain at a strong investment grade, which goes back to the slide before on the net debt development to the adjusted EBITDA, but then combined with the business and macroeconomic outlook, and of course, the share price development. M&A, for us, has a lower priority, and this is in essence, the framework under which we conduct the buyback program. Just as an exercise here, if you look at the 2023 indications, it would add around $900 million in capacity for shareholder returns. If you look at where our net debt to EBITDA, if you put that at 1.5 at the end of the year, and translate the other targets that we communicate.
There is significant space here and, with a stable environment, and then continuing towards the midterm targets, there's further opportunity for this also going forward. That concludes my presentation. With that, Anders, I think we're going to the Q&A session.
Yes, we are. Thank you very much, Fredrik, for translating into financials. It's time for the Q&A, so I ask Mikael to join us up here on the stage. All the other presenters are, of course, also available to respond to any question that you may have. As I said earlier, there are three ways to ask questions: of course, live here in the room, on the chat, on the webcast, and, of course, on the phone lines. I think, we should, of course, start in the room. Yeah, Rod, for instance, could start.
Not sure if this is on?
Yes.
I wanted to ask you two questions. First, on these pricing recoveries of 300 basis points that are being negotiated to offset the new inflation. Can you give us a sense of how much has been achieved already at this point, as we're approaching the middle of the year, or how the first half, the second half looks? Would you be sort of at a run rate? Your initial guidance kind of had 200 basis points of margin improvement every quarter, so it would be like 5%, 8%, 9.5%, 12%, something like that, if you were to sort of do it evenly. Towards the end of the year, are you sort of fully recovered, and do you still expect to be there?
Because I didn't see any additional impact in your bridge to the midterm targets, which are presumably 2024.
We haven't guided quarter- by- quarter. What we have indicated is that it should have the same profile as we saw last year. Of course, the negotiations is, I would say, eating calendar time as we have in very detailed discussions with the customer, and I think we alluded to that already last year when we said, you know, raw material, we need to go down, component- by- component, plant- by- plant, and work that through. Of course, when we move into non-raw material inflation, it becomes even more complicated, because then you need to break all these different type of costs down to the plants which we are operating.
Of course, that's also taking time. With that said, our expectation was still that we should have a similar profile as last year, but we haven't given any details exactly on how that looked like. It is a very, let's say, digital consequences of the discussion. If it's done, let's say, three days before the end of the quarter or two days after the new quarter have started. Of course, you have some challenges in that. We are making good progress with our customers, and as I said, we are also coming to the customer with really well-justified claims. We feel good about the full year indication.
Okay.
The second quarter last year, I mean, don't forget this patent infringement settlement that we had, that was not a run rate based.
Yeah. I guess maybe just to clarify, are you anticipating that you will have that more or less in the year by the end of this year? Because I didn't see any carryover effect in your forecasts going forward from these pricing. That's all the pricing. Maybe if you can just elaborate a little bit more on the structural headcount structural cost savings opportunity. Sounds like it's enormous. If you're looking at 8,000 people at, I don't know, even $50,000 a person, this is $400 million, and on your revenue run rate, that's 400 basis points. Can you give us a sense of how much you're expecting to retain and whether we're actually offsetting that in your forecast? Your margin forecast doesn't seem to show that.
Just a quick comment on the headcount side there. I mean, the 8,000 is both blue collar and white collar. Of course, there is a difference in the numbers there. I think also when you look at the what we are looking for here also is connected very much to the structural improvement. It is a very meaningful potential in what we're doing there, and that's why we do it also. It's also because we are making progress here in a lot of the initiatives that are connected to the optimization and digitalization that provides these opportunities also. We can't give any detailed numbers around that now because we need to have the process in each country where we are taking these steps and follow the procedures there.
Especially on the direct side, I mean, we have quite a significant part of temporary labor, and also a high attrition rate, higher than we would want to have. Of course, that will also help to get these 6,000 headcount out, especially on the direct side.
Pricing. Are you saying-
[crosstalk] what we want to show that there might be a pricing component also in the work from the, let's say, 8.5%-9%, to then 12%. That depends a lot also on the inflationary development. Should inflation keep high, then, of course, there will also be a pricing offset in there. We aim to basically close the inflationary headwinds that we are facing right now within this year, and that's where there's not a carryover component in there.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Hi, it's Richard Hilgert from Morningstar. Thanks for hosting the investor day today. Very good, very informative. On the new technology for the airbags. The press release seemed to highlight that the technology would be implementation in large airbags, where there's a lot of airflow needed. It seems to me like this is a technology that makes inflation just simply more efficient overall. Would it make sense to replace current airbag inflator technology with this technology in all applications, or is it just some application specific?
I think we'll let the expert to comment on specifically, Let me just say that, I mean, our focus right now is to fill the need from the customer here to have larger airbags, but still in an interior where you may have less space. as the electrical vehicles, for example, have a potentially smaller dashboard, you're farther away from the dashboard, so therefore, you need the bigger airbag, but you don't have as much space to put it. this is really to answer up to those needs. I mean, it's, of course, a very effective technical solution that we can see other applications use for, but I'll leave it to you.
Yeah. It, it true. I mean, it's much more efficient than the current ones, but also, we need to understand that each airbag has his own way of working. For example, a curtain is something that you want really fast, because basically, from the moment that you detect, you don't have so many milliseconds to deploy. In these ones, maybe we cannot play with this technology. For example, in a steering wheel, the space that you have, here we are fighting a space. Basically, you have seen the latest modules. They are of the size of a cup of tea, basically. It's a technology that has a lot of potential.
It's just the beginning, but it has, its, sweet spot probably in the front of where Mikael has said we have bigger volumes to fill, and actually, it is more airbags also in the rear seat also, but normally they have to fill bigger areas.
Okay, great. Thanks. Fredrik, on the CapEx and D&A chart that you showed, you know, we've got D&A coming down quite a bit compared to where CapEx is right now. Before we get to CapEx and D&A being down to the numbers that you talked about, will we first see a spike back up in D&A because of the current CapEx level that we're seeing?
Yeah, I mean, we expect that the D&A is impacted also by the high CapEx levels that we have right now. I mean, they have not all come into depreciation yet, because it's, yeah, the SOPs and the work in progress and so on is coming a bit later. On the other hand, many of these investments are structural investments. It's new buildings and sites, and they tend to have longer depreciation times. It should not be a major effect, yeah.
Hey, guys, it's Dominic O'Brien from Baillie Gifford. Thanks for the time. I just had one question, well, two questions, actually. The first one would be on the structural cost reductions. The 11% global headcount reduction you announced last week, is that incremental to the information you're giving us today? The reason I ask is, I guess we had these sort of margin targets presented beforehand. I didn't see anything as radical as this in terms of the headcount reduction. I know you'd already given us sort of automation savings of $300 million, et cetera, but yeah, are these structural cost reductions that we see now incremental to the targets you've just given us? That's the first question.
No, I mean, it's support our journey towards our mid-term talks, as we have said. I think it's very much in line with the communication we have also in the past, where we have talked about footprint structures. We have also talked about making our different processes more, more effective. We're not only talking about the plans or so, we are talking about the real end-to-end. In that work now, we have come to a point also where we see that we can start to execute on some of these initiatives, that, therefore, we wanted to communicate this last week.
It is also in line with what we have said here, that as we have been facing headwinds throughout the last couple of years here, we will do what it takes to get through those headwinds and offset some of these headwinds. If we go back to the 2019 Capital Markets Day when we launched these mid-term targets, I think we have talked already about the global light vehicle production difference. We have also seen here the inflationary headwinds that we already had actually in 2021 on the raw material side, and we said, we will manage through this. Then, of course, it hasn't slowed down with headwinds over the last couple of years.
We feel very comfortable with what we already are doing, and then what we are having in our strategic roadmaps, including then the structural changes here to get to the midterm targets. It's in line with the overall scope and approach we have towards the mid-term target. It's not incremental.
The structural cost reductions are essentially a function of the work that you've been doing, you presented in the plan in terms of automation?
It's a part of it.
Okay, great. The second question, Fredrik, you mentioned that this year, to keep your leverage ratios towards the high end, you sort of free up $900 million or so of capital. When I just extrapolate it to your medium-term plans, is that number a billion-plus that you probably have every year just to keep leverage ratios flat?
It increases, so it's more than the $900 million. The $900 million is a combination of, I mean, the free cash flow improvement, connected to the $900 million operating cash flow, ambition that we have or target that we have, plus then the slight increase in the leverage ratio. We were at slightly above 1.4 at the end of last year, and if you then do this theoretical calculation with 1.5, those are the two components. Of course, as the EBITDA continues to increase, and if you then take this 1.5, and also with the 80% cash conversion. Y es, it creates further potential.
Thanks. Colin Langan from Wells Fargo. Thanks for your time. I think in Q4, you sort of outlined the 12% margin framework. You, on that call, I think, said, you know, you're on track for 2024 to do 12%. Is that still the case, or is there more caution around it, or did I misinterpret the comments on Q4?
Well, I think it's the same answer we have had along the way here. I mean, what needs to be in place there is then the framework as we had talked about. Is that 24? It is 24. If it's not, it is when it appears, if it's 25 or 26. I think the bottom line is the building blocks I talked about here. I mean, we need to have a stable situation on the call-offs and how the outlook for the need from our customer looks like. Then we need to get to the minimum 85, as we had talked about, and also then, that we are managing through on the price adjustments here.
I think the challenge here is to see how the inflationary scenario plays out, because with the current situation here, we have this, let's call it, seasonality effect of the inflation. Because similar, as we said last year, I mean, we are getting the effects early in the year. We have the negotiations with our customers, and they're gradually coming in through the year, and then we keep the balance here. Last year, as we have laid out here today, we got basically what we needed for raw material side. This year, we are working on the other. The critical point is what happens with inflation, because if we have another significant inflationary years, we will have that, you know, let's call it seasonal effect of the inflation also next year.
So I mean, I think that is what we need to get in balance. I think with what we have described here today, we as a management team, have no doubt that we have the ability here to get to the targets with what we are doing, both short term in offsetting the headwinds and with our what we then call the strategic roadmaps initiatives around optimization, for example, the footprint adjustments and so on.
Okay. In terms of the headcount savings, which bucket, any framing of the size of that? I follow up on sort of broad commentary, you kind of come up with pretty broad estimates. Is that adding certain basis points to the walk to 20, to the 12%? You know, which buckets, when we're looking at that sort of current margin to your 12% target, is it in several buckets, or is it in just the structural initiative, or is it in the automation, or is it in the labor efficiency? I wasn't sure which area, if we were trying to gauge how big that helped it.
It depends on which category of positions you talk about. It comes in different buckets. Of course, the overall footprint is also in another bucket. I mean, if you connect it back to your short term, I would say it's hitting several buckets here as it comes through.
I mean, it will be in a large part of the 2,000 indirect will be above the gross margin line, it will be production overhead headcount. We're not excluding SGA or RD&E from the exercise either.
It will come in all buckets, in direct labor, indirect above gross margin, and then also R&D and SGA.
Okay.
What exactly, and then how that, we will come back then later when we have the specific actions that we communicate.
Perfect. When I'm thinking of that walk, it. Some of it is actually sort of the production schedule volatility, which is out of your control too. That's part of the labor inefficiency, if I'm understanding that right?
Correct. Yeah.
Okay. Thanks very much.
Let's move over to the other side in the room.
Hi, Jerome Nathan from Daiwa. Thanks for taking my question. Just first on the, on the new airbag, I just wanted to kind of understand how receptive are the OEMs, especially given inflator issues recently, to kind of experiment with new technology? If you could talk about that, and I had a few more.
This technology that we are showing you at this moment, we are collaborating already with some customers, where basically we are doing what is considered as a system integration, understanding it can be other effects in the car, and this is already quite advanced. I will say that we are already closing this kind of work with the customers, and basically, it's a lot of expectation from the ones that we have decided to share these starting points. As a concept, basically what you are doing is taking the air around the car and introduce it in the airbag. This we have to do many sanity checks that inside of the IPs, the instrument panels, there is air, or this is not encapsulated in a way that then we have other sides.
This work is showing preliminary, very good results, and this is giving a lot of expectations also from our customers, especially in North America, is where we have this system that is self-adaptive in some way.
I had another question on the 2023 operating margin walks. The operating leverage is a pretty small portion of that walk, it's still, I would say, even if you exclude pricing, you're looking at 10% kind of revenue growth. What's the big driver out there? What are some of the offsets that you're seeing for the operating leverage to be so minimal?
It is, say, in the mid-range of the 20%-30% that we're normally guiding for. The volume contribution is not so great. I mean, the organic growth comes from much more the other components, as I mentioned. It's pricing, market share, CPV, and on market share, you have the volume component or volume growth. A lot of the growth is also not volume related, and that's why the contribution then from say the growth component is not so large. I think it's also being a bit. If you compare to the other building blocks, it seems small, but in a normal environment, it would stand out as a much larger contribution. Due to the current environment, it's kind of being, yeah, it's dwarfed a bit by the large impacts from the other components.
Okay.
Of course, you have the effect of that, I mean, as we grow in market share. Yeah, is basically pretty stable. Of course, you have more programs and, by that creating more volumes, but you don't have the same effect as you have an LVP growth. You have the same program just jumping up in volume. Of course, there is a little bit of a, let's call it, mix effect in that also.
Thank you.
Hi, team. Doug Dutton from Evercore ISI. Can you just quantify how much the schedule volatility and start-stop production has maybe affected these margins the past two years with all the black swan events that we've seen? You know, it feels like it could be material, maybe 100, 150 basis points. Could you maybe elaborate on that? And, you know, when we see that coming back, and how you're thinking about that right now?
We haven't gone out and quantified it because it's very difficult to, well, say, verify in such a way that you can put it out as a, you know, exact number into the market. I mean, I dare to say it's a meaningful effect, because, I mean, it's of course the effect you have in the plant that you need to sit there with capacity when for a week or potentially more than before coming back, because you can't, you know, adjust it with a short notice, plus that you need the extra resources when they get back on track. That of course in itself is. It's also putting a lot of challenges in terms of material handling from our supplier side.
Our supply chain team needs to spend time to manage that, so we don't have too much material coming into the plant, et cetera. We have tied up capital in inventory side, et cetera. Of course, the instability creates a lot of additional work besides the lack of opportunity to continue to trim your system. Yeah, it comes across in many shapes and forms, but it's very difficult to have a public number on it, but it makes a difference for sure.
Okay.
On coming back, as Magnus showed here, I mean, it is gradually improving, but, I mean, we are not close to where it was before the pandemic yet, and we still have component challenges in the industry, I would say.
Just on currency, particularly Mexico and China, still sort of remain a headwind, haven't moved since Q1. How, how is this incorporated into the 2024 guide of 12%? Is that something that's expected to improve over the course of the next few quarters? How is it interpreted in that guide?
Well, at the moment, we talk about a fixed rate end of, say Q1 this year. I mean, that's what all our projections are based on still. Yeah.
I think maybe we should give the people on the phone lines a chance to ask questions also. I'm not sure if there are any, Operator Roberto, do we have any lined up questions from the telephone lines?
There are no questions on the phone at the moment. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone.
All right. Yeah, you've been very eager. Yeah.
Hi, Ryan Brinkman from JP Morgan. Thanks for taking my question. You showed some really, very impressive market share figures, both by region and by customer, which I wanted to ask around. Including the comment that you have more than 50% share with some customers, with maybe opportunity to even grow from there. As I think about, you know, some of the reasons why automakers might not want to be over-concentrated with a particular supplier, I mean, first and foremost, would seem to be the risk of quality or continuity of supply issues, which don't seem really applicable here, because your execution relative to the competition, is maybe the biggest driver of your outsized share. Another reason, though, could be, you know, wanting to foster price competition.
Do you see any practical limitations to your share by customer or geography? You know, how much is share growth contributing to your outlook for four points of outperformance versus LVP through 2024? Will you expect the contribution to growth from share increase to maybe level out thereafter? You know, for how long do you think that share gain can continue to be a tailwind to growth?
There was many questions in one there, let me try to cover the topic as such. As I said before here, I mean, the key components to be successful with the customer is that you have the superior quality, robustness in your deliveries, and you are price competitive. You're, of course, not more successful than your last quote that you were awarded. That's, of course, something we always need to lean forward to make sure that we continue to win. I think, I mean, if you look only until 2024, it's basically already in our order books. That's not the topic. I mean, it's really when you look out in the outer years where the awards are being won right now.
Also here, we showed in our order book, fulfillment, so to speak, that we are gaining orders here that supports the market share that we are growing into, which is around 45, as we said. Beyond that, we don't have, well, we don't have a market share target at all as such, but of course, our intention is to defend that market share. I think the only way to do it is this, what I call, customer commitments. From a customer point of view, I mean, if they feel and see this, I don't see any problem why they would continue to have somebody on, let's say, 50%, 60%, as long as they have options, which they have, if you don't have 100. I think that's speaks for itself.
That's very helpful. Thank you. Then just last question is, you know, what amount of the four points of outperformance versus LVP through 2024 or outlook for four to six points of, I think, total growth thereafter, it is driven by the passing along of higher input costs, and, you know, how does that maybe compare to history? Thank you.
We don't giving in the numbers on the price increases here. I mean, of course, in the short term, the price increases as an impact. When you look further out, I mean, the pricing is building in the current inflation cost increases that we have already. That's taking care of that, and it's a part of normal business, I would say. I think the key drivers for our outperformance here is, without a doubt, the market share growth that we are seeing and that we are gradually gaining here. Seeing since 2018 here, we have moved up from 40 to 43 and towards the 45.
The targets exclude any surprising components-
Yeah.
from, say, inflationary compensation.
Yeah.
That's what I mean. What we showed was that we are on track to be actually slightly better, when you exclude the pricing from our sales development. We are slightly better than the 4 percentage points that we are guiding or that we're targeting.
Hi, Eli Laskow, Neuberger Berman. I want to go back to this market share question on the slide that Megan showed, broken down by region. You gain share globally in Europe, China, even Japan. Of your largest market, North America, it's small, but it's a slight decline, and I'm wondering, can you comment on the competitive dynamic here in North America? What accounts for that decline in market share?
I think, I mean, I think last time when we showed this at CMD, I think we had a small decline in Korea. I mean, it's a part of Asia here today. I think the point here is when you look at each region, I mean, of course, we are defending the market share. We are the market leader in these regions, then depending on how it plays out the specific years, you can have these small adjustments. I would say, I mean, overall, it's a very competitive industry, no doubt about it. I think we all know how this industry works and what drives it.
I think we have an advantage towards our customers here, and I wouldn't read in terms of being competitive here on the categories I talked about before. I shouldn't read in too much there. I mean, we are the market leader in Americas here, and I don't see any reason for change picture. I don't know, Megan, if you have anything you would like to add to that, yeah.
I think, actually, I've been informed that there is a question on the phone line. I think we'll give her a shot. Roberto?
We have now one question from the phone. We are now taking the question.
Hi, how are you?
It's from Agnieszka Vilela from Nordea. Please go ahead.
Perfect. Thank you. I have two questions, if I may, starting with your restructuring program. Looking historically, your latest programs were down in times, when car production was coming down, and your organic growth was more subdued. Now you expect 15% organic growth in 2023 and most likely growth in 2024. I just wonder if you could explain, how can you practically achieve this kind of, massive, headcount reductions? Is it only about the automation, or is it something else? Thanks.
No, I think as I, as I alluded to before, I mean, when it comes to the what we call then the direct workers, the blue collar category here in our plants, I mean, it is connected to what we talked about here around optimization and digitalization, but it's also getting back on track when it comes to the productivity, where we have been faced with the challenges due to the volatility. I mean, in 2022, we had the significant, especially in the beginning of the year, significant effect of premium rates. One way to balance this and to make it, I would say, manageable in a more cost-efficient way was to man up in certain areas here in our plants, to deal with the volatility internally in the plants.
Of course, if that is coming through, we see an opportunity now to get back on track with that in combination with the, you know, strategic steps that we are taking here. On the direct work, indirect workforce, we also here talking about the different way of setting our operations up. I think I mentioned flattening the organization even further, making more emphasis on the structure connected to touching the products and the customers here. Different way of working, I would say, but also that we are moving forward with our structural opportunities here when it comes to the site setup.
Of course, that's one reason why we also put emphasis on Europe here, as we see bigger opportunities there when it comes to the site structures. I hope that answers your question there.
Yeah. It seems like you're now targeting really 1.5x net EBITDA rather than 1x. Is that a correct assumption? Also, when it comes to share repurchases, first of all, did you, and the room that you see in your cash right now, did you account it for the costs for the restructuring program in your cash flow expectations?
Also, would you consider taking on more debt to fund the buybacks? Thanks.
No, we still have a target of being at 1.0x over, as in the long term. We have this range between 0.5 and 1.5, and then at the moment, we are operating at the upper end of that range. No, no change to the long-term target here. We have to come back on what the implications of the restructuring needs for the headcount reductions, what that explicitly will mean for potentially this year, but then also the upcoming years when we announce those. What we presented here today was based on what has been communicated specifically so far.
Thank you.
Any more questions on the phone?
We have another question from the phone. We are now taking the question. The question from Tom Hughes, from Point72. Please go ahead. The line is open.
Thanks for taking the question. Just have onw quick follow-up. You talk about 45% order intake on EV, but giving penetration only at 27% by 2026, when we might start to see some of these programs roll out, are you potentially meaning even larger ones?
We cannot understand the question.
Yeah.
The line is very bad. Sorry.
I think, Tom sent this question also on the web chat, I think I know what he's talking about. He wants to know, you have 45% order intake on EV, but EV penetration is only gonna be 27% a couple of years down the line. Does that mean that we're getting larger share on the EV market than on the ICE market? I think that's the question.
Yeah, I think what we have said here is that we have a slightly better market share of the EV platform market, if we call it that, than what we have on the total portfolio. This is a fast developing market, you could say. I mean, it's very year from year, we have to follow this very closely. As Megan pointed out, that needs to be a very focused effort here to make sure that we are on the right platforms as we move forward. So far, so good, and we are continuing to strengthen our position with the orders we have won so far.
There are also a couple of questions on the chat, including from Tom here, about the size, the potential size of the two-wheeler market. Could the margins be similar to the like vehicle business?
We haven't quantified that yet, but what we have said when it comes to the overall MSS effort here, is that it should be positive contribution to our margin development.
Margin accretive.
Exactly.
Whilst I'm still on the chat here, there are a couple of questions. Quite a few, actually. One from Mattias Holmberg, DNB, basically asking a long question. I'll pick that part. How long time do you expect it will take before the industry returns to the normal volatility that we had pre-pandemic? This 2% volatility. Do we have an opinion on that?
I wouldn't dare to have a forecast on that, it's moving in the right direction. we also have, we see some setbacks on that because we are not where we were before the pandemic in terms of stability throughout the whole value chain. I think one part we didn't spend so much time on throughout the day here, but it was mentioned on one of the slide, is labor shortage, and we see that particularly pronounced in Americas and in Eastern Europe. when we look at our supplier base there, they are fighting hard to secure that, and that's also has its effect. also in the logistic side, on the logistic side, we see challenges there due to labor shortages in some areas.
We don't have the stability throughout the system yet, and it will probably take some time.
I have another question here from Agnieszka Vilela. Megan, you talked about working with the pricing structure in Europe. Can you elaborate a bit on that, please? Or maybe some of you could also.
Do you want me to answer?
The price structure, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We can't provide so much detail at this time. We're just starting discussions with customers. Of course, as we look across improving the financials in Europe, we want to ensure that we're getting adequate compensation from our customers for, you know, the volatility that Mikael has talked about, as well as, you know, changes that the customers make, volume deteriorations, et cetera. There is more information to come, I think, you know, we're starting some discussions to ensure that we are adequately compensated for these types of changes in the market.
Very good. Okay, very good. I think we return to the room here with questions.
Thank you. Michael Jacks from Bank of America. I appreciate your slide on EV-led order intake and the emphasis on the content opportunity here, but it just strikes that every automotive supplier at the moment is speaking about selling more content into EVs. The real conundrum, obviously, is that EV prices need to come down not go up. Do you think there is potentially a scenario where content could potentially go in the opposite direction for you, in passive safety? Maybe just aligned to that question, you seem very well represented on order intake with new EV entrants, particularly in China. The market is clearly getting more competitive, and it seems rather unlikely that everybody's gonna survive this.
I guess the key question there is, what kind of a haircut, if any, are you taking to the intake assumptions there? Are you perhaps a little bit more conservative when allocating production capacity for these? Thanks.
I think, I mean, in terms of less safety products in the EVs, I don't see that. I think that, I mean, we have a very important and critical components going into the vehicle. I think that's not the first you start to reduce. I think the EV price reduction that is needed or expected, depending on how you see it, I think will come from certain components that are, I would say, challenged in when you look at the difference in price between an EV and an ICE vehicle. I think there's more focusing on those components than if you rather start to demount the features of the vehicle. I think that's really where the focus on cost reduction needs to be.
When it comes down to the who will survive.
Hello, my name is Quin Soderquist.
I am the manager of the Frontal Module Development Group at OTC.
Working with many OEMs, if not, I would say, all relevant OEMs here, and well represented both with the new ones, well the newer ones, I should say, in this space, as well as the traditional ones with EV platforms. I think the, of course, the strategy from our point here is to work broadly with many customers, and be attractive for all the OEMs here.
Thank you. If I could maybe just sneak in one final question. Just on the recent finding by the NHTSA on the ARC Automotive recall, can you just please clarify if there is any potential positive or negative implications for Autoliv from this, either near term through potential provisions or longer term on the positive side through market share gains? Thank you.
Yeah, I could respond to that. I mean, what the facts are that there is one recall being done by GM, about 1 million vehicles. We have no involvement in that at all. We know that NHTSA is pushing for further recalls. NHTSA can't make any recalls, you know, it's the OEMs that actually makes the decision to make recalls. The number from NHTSA has clearly been, you know, disputed by ARC, which is, you know, the involved company here. To us, it's very difficult to know at this point in time how this will develop. I mean, of course, if there really be a big recall, someone needs to manufacture and sell those replacement parts, replacement inflators, and I think we would be happy to do that if that is the case.
I mean, we don't know, at this point, really, how this is going to develop.
Two questions, if I could. Luke Junk with Baird. First question, you've noted that the commercial recoveries of non-raw material inflation this year includes both costs in your P&L and costs that you're taking from your supply chain. I'm wondering if it's possible to help us understand the weighting of those costs that you're looking to recover between what's in your costs and what's coming from the supply base, and whether a customer receptivity to that differs, or if it's being viewed similar by your customers from a recovery standpoint?
It's the largest component in that inflationary headwind. That's as much as we've said. It is significant, yeah. There is an openness from the customers to, I mean, in some cases, these suppliers are customer-directed, it's very easy. Our argument is well, if you accept it on that one, it should be valid also for the whole setup. There is an acceptance and openness also to discuss that inflationary headwind for us. Our ambition is definitely to get compensation for the full content.
My follow-up question, just wondering if it's possible to put a finer point on the incremental benefit from the head count actions in the 2024 margin walk. Just from a timing standpoint, I understand the dollars are something that we're going to talk about later, but just from a timing standpoint, in 2024 relative to the benefits that might accrue as we look to 2025 and beyond, given what appears to be some just longer term nature of some of these actions. Thank you.
Well, we've said that in the press release last week, that we expect that the savings from the structural initiatives for the 6,000 + 2,000, that they will be completed by 2025. You should not expect the full effect in 2024, but they will be then, say, fully implemented during 2025. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Thank you. Dan Levy, Barclays. First question, wanted to ask about Mobility Safety Solutions, some of the new products that you have here. Maybe you can give us a flavor of how significant the resource outlay is. Sometimes we see with suppliers that are supplying to new programs, new customers, that the validation expenses can be a drag on margins. Maybe you can give us a sense of how significant the resource outlay is, but your confidence that there won't be maybe execution drags on the margins.
No, I'm pretty comfortable to say that. I mean, what we are doing here is really leveraging on what we already are good at. I mean, as you see, I mean, when we talk it's about two-wheeler airbags, for example, it's of course, built on the knowledge we already have. I mean, with a strong research team, we know a lot about accident patterns for two-wheelers, et cetera. We can really leverage on that. I mean, we have a very small core team around the MSS business, so it is not any meaningful, I would say, cost connected to those efforts in relation to the overall business of Autoliv here.
Really, really cost efficient, and also once again, what I said there around MSS, is that it should be more accretive to what we do, both short -term and long- term.
Great, thank you. Second is a follow-up on automation. Maybe you can give us a sense, sometimes with automation, there's a risk that you might potentially have quality issues. Quality is at the core of your product offering, what's the confidence that quality is not being compensated as you ramp on automation? The second on automation is maybe you can give us a sense of the extent to which customers are. What's the pull forward on customers on automation, specifically as it relates to passing along some of these benefits, and in return, getting maybe some of the better pricing that you need?
I think, I mean, first of all, quality is absolutely critical for us, so we never do anything that jeopardize the quality here. As you saw from, the plant managers here, and especially from the IBC there, it was a lot of focus on actually making sure that we only, not only protecting the quality, we actually improve the quality by having less variability with optimization, rather than to have operators doing certain activities there. It is really to strengthen the quality, and I think that's also a very, very important contributor from the optimization, actually, to improve the quality.
I mean, in terms of passing on, any benefits from this, I think that discussion is pretty short, considering the current situation here, where we actually need compensation from the customers for the inflationary pressure. I don't see that in today's environment.
Are your customers agnostic to the automation? Do they want this?
I think, I mean, everything that can improve the quality of the products, and I would say the predictability of the quality, is supported by the customers. I don't see any negative commentary around optimization from our customers when we talk about that.
Okay, we are running a little bit late. I will allow one last question, if there is one. It is not. All right, very good. That ends the Q&A session. It is time for brief concluding remarks from Mikael.
Very good. Thank you all for good questions there. Appreciate the active participation. Let's see, let's move to conclusions. Let me just wrap up today's meeting by stating, I probably need some help here. Here we go. By getting back to 2019, the CMD, when we launched our mid-term targets, and in connection with that, CMD, I showed a slide, you may see it up in the right-hand corner there, what was the ambitions with Autoliv moving forward? We said this was our commitment to make sure that we created an even stronger company in the years to come, and I think we are on a good way to achieving this.
When it comes to saving more lives, we clearly have moved that forward. You have seen also in connection with our yearly summary here, that we have moved up from the 30,000 lives that we saved in 2018, to 35,000 lives, and we are on this journey towards the 100,000 lives saved per year through our product innovation. We have taken the first steps into new markets. We have talked briefly about the MSS business here. Also in the light vehicle segment, we see a lot of interesting opportunity to address new features in the vehicles here. You have also see us announcing several cooperation agreements with some of the OEMs for future interior safety products.
I think that's a good sign that we are regarded as a preferred supplier when it comes to new technology and to drive safety forward. We also on a good way when it comes to automizing our operations, and you saw from Magnus here that we are taking significant steps in all the different product areas, covering many different operational processes when it comes to implement new technology to support our productivity journey. I think also we can say that we have strengthened our overall position in the market by continued outperformance, and at least this year, you see a significant step up here. Even then, excluding price adjustments here in the short term, the LVP + 4% is expected to be overachieved.
We covered many new products, not least for EVs and vulnerable road users, as well as talking about more autonomous vehicles here to have the right products for the future demands from our customers. We have further integrated sustainability into our business. I think the strength with Autoliv is, of course, also that our business is sustainability, meaning saving more lives is really the heart, I would say, of sustainability. We have also here signed up to the science-based targets and have ambitious targets for both 2030 and 2040.
We have raised our level of profitability, even though we have faced these headwinds over the last couple of years, I think we can show here today, and also in the past here, that our relative position here and the foundation laid to achieve our mid-term targets is there. Of course, this all together should lead to that we are viewed as the preferred supplier moving forward. That is always in the center of our attention, and as I said, we are not more successful than our last award. This is nothing we take lightly on, and we continue to maintain in focus.
Today, we have also then reconfirmed our mid-term target, as you see on the screen here, I think we have, throughout the day here, laid out the different drivers to get here. I think when it comes to the growth, we see content and LVP serving as a great foundation for our growth, we also, on top of that, have then market share increases towards the around 45 percentage points. We have adjusted operating target of around 12%, for that, we have the different building blocks in place. The foundation, of course, is what we see here in terms of stabilizing the call-offs and an LVP growing into the around 85 million vehicles.
More importantly, what we can control, we are controlling and delivering on that as a part of this journey. Cash conversion, critical for our future shareholder return, and here we are having a lot of focus also on the balance sheet and the capital efficiency, as Fredrik has laid out during the day today. Of course, continue to make sure that we have a healthy balance sheet in order to cope with challenging times as we just went through, and that has definitely been a strength for us over these last couple of years. I hope you have got a good overview of where we stand and what we are doing here in our journey to secure the mid-term targets.
We have a truly committed team and a focused team to make sure that we come through in this, in our ambitions here. Thank you very much. I will hand over to Anders here now to give you some details around the tech show here for the rest of the day. Appreciate you all joining, and appreciate to see you here in the room, and thank you all joining on the over the webcast here. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Thank you, Mikael. For all of you here at ATC, we have a great product display outside here that you will see, and we also have a deeper dive into the research focus and the Autoliv Circle of Life, followed by a very nice barbecue dinner. For the webcast audience, there will be a prerecorded version of the product display, not the barbecue dinner, and that will be broadcast momentarily. With that, today's live webcast ends. Thank you for your participation.
Hello, my name is Quin Soderquist. I am the manager of the Frontal Module Development Group at OTC in Ogden, Utah. I'd like to introduce you to our aspirated passenger airbag module. It's a new concept that my team has been working on for a few years, and it's about ready to quote to customers. Pre-TG2 is slotted for quarter three of this year. Aspiration is a way of pulling ambient air into the airbag module, so we get extra gas to fill the airbag. What happens is the inflator is at the end of this module, it generates high-pressure gas that comes down through these tubes. It comes out of these holes, and as it comes out of these holes, it generates a very high suction that is pulling ambient air out from beneath the airbag module through all these little holes.
There's a flap in here that opens up as it's pulled through, and it fills the airbag with extra gas. We are able to fill a 155L bag with an inflator that would normally fill only about a 100L bag because we have all that extra gas come in. The other wonderful thing about this design is as the bag fills and gets pressurizes, the pressure closes off these flaps. We actually have a self-regulating airbag module that'll shut off the aspiration at a certain point. The benefit of that, I'll explain here in a moment, is significant to our customers because we can now fill a much larger airbag with a much smaller single-stage inflator. The single stage is a benefit because that allows our customers to use one third less for their vehicle qualification testing for FMVSS requirements.
The other benefit is, since it's self-regulating, we can now meet out-of-position requirements with that single-stage inflator. We no longer need dual-stage inflators to meet the out-of-position requirement. If there's an occupant in front of the airbag, it automatically shuts off the aspiration technique, and the gas is now a small inflator trying to fill a large bag, which is much softer deployment. The benefit overall to the customers is a much lighter airbag module, a lower cost airbag. A gain, the development is much less for our customers for the FMVSS requirements. The other aspect that I wanna focus on is one more comment on the lower cost. The cushions right now have to have a lot of low-risk deployment or LRD features in order to meet out-of-position. Those can all go away with the new airbag module on this concept.
Just bring your attention to some of the videos that we have up here right now. The top video has, with aspiration and without aspiration. With is on the right, without is on the left. You can see the left never fully fools. It's the exact same inflator, exact same cushion module, except aspiration is turned off versus on. This 155L bag comes out and is inflated in time, in position, with the proper amount of pressure to restrain an occupant. The lower video is the sled test with that same 155 L bag here in the center, and on the right or the left is a current production system, 120 L bag with a dual stage, full output deployment. Again, the aspiration is a very small single-stage inflator.
As it comes out, you'll see it restrains both occupants the exact same. We're able to tune it and match existing systems with the single-stage inflator. This far right video just shows you the aspiration function, where the flaps will open. You'll see them start to flutter as gas is being pulled in. As soon as the occupant hits it floats and closes off. That is our new development concept, the aspirated passenger airbag module.
Hello, my name is Russ Gantz. I'm Engineering Manager for Development of Airbags here at ATC. Today I'm going to be explaining the passenger overhead airbag concept. This concept was developed with our CTC counterparts. They developed it for the single-stage market. The advantage of a passenger overhead airbag is it allows for a slimmer IP styling. You can narrow down the IP styling to allow for other features, where normally a passenger airbag would have taken that space in the instrument panel. The other thing you see today is a lot of OEMs are trying to put monitors and screens in front of the occupants. This allows for that to be more freedom for the stylist.
They can put bigger monitors, we don't have to worry about deploying up and over them, getting between the windshield and that monitor, and we can deploy down from the header and get in front of the monitor and provide restraint for the occupant. We use a single-stage APG inflator in this system. It's a tubular inflator that allows it to package in the header, and then we have a two chamber fill style bag. The first chamber provides the inlet for the gas from the inflator, stability to the windshield and the instrument panel, and then allows gas inlets to fill the primary restraint cushion, which supports the occupant in a crash event. We have this system in production with NIO today, with a slightly modified cushion from this version. It has a couple of little ears on it.
We call it a fox cushion, we have six programs in production today and two more slated to launch before the end of the year. The total system is about a 95 L system, including the fill tube and the restraint cushion. That's our overhead airbag concept that we have in today in production, and it provides benefits for our customers in a belted-only market situation. Thank you.
Good afternoon. My name is Damon Reynolds, I'm responsible for the Global Development, Seat Belt Restraint System team here for the Americas. We have an array of products on the table, starting with some innovations for packaging on the left and some innovations for noise reduction on the right, followed by our flagship PPMI retractor. As we start transitioning from a product-based development to a system, restraint development projects, I wanna focus around our new seat integrated restraint, product that we're getting ready to offer. There's three distinct advantages around this product. The first is in the packaging. It's a slim, modular design in the sense where we can mount in a standard type seating configuration. We can exit from either side to accommodate both a right-hand and a left-hand drive vehicles.
We, by mounting in the seat, we can also provide a full restraints system for any type of kinematics, whether it's in a standard seating configuration, all the way to a full recline or a zero gravity type seat in the next generation autonomous vehicle. Also provide modularity in the system such that we can provide a standard retractor for an entry-level vehicle, all the way up to a full performing PPMI retractor, like our flagship product, but within the same package size and the same linear package as in manufacturing equipment. That gives us a full market advantage moving forward.
Hello, my name is Mike Grove, Business Development Director for Electronics and Mechatronics here in North America. I want to talk about some of the things that Autoliv has been doing and provide an update. We continue to focus on RFQ-ready opportunities so that we can generate E&M additional sales and start to manage our own business and build up our production capabilities. We stay engaged by talking with customers, and we also see trends in the marketplace when we look at the regulatory side of things. I want to talk about two trends that we see in the last year. We certainly see that the many bodies, safety bodies within North America, like automatic emergency braking, which will have a huge impact for Autoliv products, specifically the pre-pretensioning, the electronic pre-pretensioning. We also see opportunities for the electronic car sensor.
Additionally, we see in North America that advanced driver assistance systems have now been rated by the marketplace, which could lead to additional regulation, and do a lot of policy influence and work on what a driver monitoring system is. There's a lot of advocacy for a driver monitoring system to contain a camera, and this is certainly for when you're having an hands-free experience. We need the camera, we see privacy concerns with continuing to use the camera for L1, when the driver's hands are reengaged with the wheels, and that is good for Autoliv as a way to promote the capacitive hand sensing. This is some of the trends we see in the market.
Of course, our number one priority is to get customer feedback, but I work very closely with electronics and Mechatronics globally to develop the products that are needed and proud to do that, and keep our development team connected to the market and these future technologies, and influencing that as best that we can on behalf of Autoliv.
Good afternoon. My name is Stuart Sherry. I'm the North American Manager of the Mechatronics team, as well as the Global Mechatronics Director. I want to talk to you today a little bit about the different products we have going on and also how we work end-to-end in Mechatronics. We're showing you here today is our GM CSAB steering wheel that we started last year and also showed you the internal development that we did. Unfortunately, the customer has delayed the RFQ, but we are actively working on pursuing that for this year. Just to be very clear, we don't sit idly by when we have a delay like this, and we have spent the last year taking out costs from the ECU. We've removed at least $1 million just from the software development alone by using a GM-specific operating system.
In addition, what I want to show you here is this is our competitor's ECU. This is Autoliv's ECU. As you can see, we've optimized the design to fit around the rim of the steering wheel, around the hub, and you don't have to worry so much about the packaging like you do with our competitor, to stick it right in the six o'clock area here. It gives our customers freedom in styling. We also have better performance from an HOD perspective. One of the nice things is that we have an LED bar here that is more optimized for the cost and function that the customer is looking for. We currently only use two LEDs, where our competitor uses several more. Thank you again. To continue on, to show you some of the demos.
This is showing a concept of how a driver monitoring system could look like. This is a mock-up showing where potentially a camera could be placed as an integrated part of our steering wheel system solution. Autoliv is not currently providing cameras and infrared systems for doing driver monitoring, but it is something we're paying attention to in the market, knowing this could eventually disrupt the HOD system that we're doing today. We're definitely spending time and understanding properly what this integration could look like in a steering wheel. Moving on to this steering wheel here, this is an example of something that would enable a lot of the features that you see customers asking for. Reconfigurable interiors, where you can maybe stow away the steering wheel.
It can fold, it can twist, it can just get out of your way, so you have more freedom of design on the interior. One of the great things about this is Autoliv has a lot of engineering capability in many pockets of the world. We currently have a facility in northern Germany, our ANG location, where they have a ton of expertise in motor design and simulation, as well as rapid prototype. We contacted them to help us on the steering wheel side to design and develop a motor that is very optimized for this application in a very efficient, quick amount of time that works perfectly for the solution. Not only are we bringing the best product, we're also bringing the best engineering efficiency. Lastly, what I want to show you is this steering wheel here.
This is a steering wheel that was a concept from Ford. This is going into production this year, which is essentially the tiltable steering wheel. This is really designed for those kind of construction or contract workers, where you need to be pulling off to the side of the road to do some of your reporting, working on your laptop. You can activate this function, and then you can place your laptop or other devices on top of the steering wheel, so you can utilize that space efficiently to get the work done that you need to do. Again, this is going into production this year with Ford Motor Company. Thank you.
Hi, my name is Chuck Butler with the Mobility Safety Solutions. Today, I'm excited to talk to you about our pyrotechnic battery disconnect devices. These devices are small devices, but play an important part in protection in the growing market, battery electric vehicle market, where it not only can protect and disconnect the battery in an overcurrent or short circuit situation, but also during a crash event. Let me show you how they work. Simply put, using a small pyrotechnic charge, an initiator, when deployed, pressurizes a chamber that pushes a plastic piston through a copper busbar, breaking the circuit. Everything you see in the front row is our low to medium voltage, low energy disconnect solutions, and they're all in mass production today. Moving to the rear row, we have the PSS-4, a 500 volt system, medium energy system that's in mass production today.
In the market, as the market grows to 800 or even 1,000 volt systems, we have some 1,000 volt system options to satisfy those needs. Those are in development, we expect to see them in 2025. Thank you.