Good morning, everyone. How are you today? I am Christina Kmetko, and I handle the Investor Relations for Hyster-Yale. Thank you so much for being here. It's wonderful to see everybody and be back in person. It's so much nicer. So before I turn the floor over to Rajiv for our official welcome, I want to provide some logistical information. First, our event is expected to run about three hours. It will include a 10-minute break and about halfway through, an approximately 50-minute Q&A session at the end. So please accumulate your questions, and we'll do all that at the end. All of our slides have been made available on our website, and we are simultaneously webcasting this meeting with synchronized slides for those watching the webcast. We've also provided a survey at everyone's seat for those individuals participating in person today.
If you did provide an email address through the webcast, we will also email one to you. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated. On the tables are a few black tents that give the Wi-Fi code, but for those that are not near a tent, the password is, "stayconnected," all lowercase. And then finally, I would like to ask everyone to please silence your cell phones. This is our safe harbor standard forward-looking slide. I won't read it, but it is in the presentations at your desks, as well as in the presentation on the website. And then finally, for those participating via the webcast, here's an email to submit questions. Please put Investor Day Question in the subject line, and when we get to the Q&A, I will include any of those questions in the queue. And with that, I will turn the presentation over to Rajiv. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our Investor Day. I'm Rajiv Prasad, CEO of Hyster-Yale Materials Handling. Okay. Let me first start by either introducing or reintroducing our company to you. We're one company with three businesses. Each business has a full line of product and services to serve our customers. The three businesses are our lift truck business, which is the core. Then we have our Bolzoni attachment business, which is closely associated with lift trucks. And then we have our Nuvera fuel cell business, which is the decarbonization green power solution that we're developing for forklift trucks, but it can also be deployed across associated industries, and we'll touch on that as we go through the presentation.
Just to get our heads around the numbers, in the last 12 months, our revenues have been just over $4 billion, with an operating profit of $180 million, net income of just over $100 million. We've come a long way, from our last two years, which were affected by, you know, having a large backlog and pretty high inflation that impacted us. We're through that period now, and you've seen over the last four quarters, things are a little different. In terms of how we participate in the market, Americas continues to be our largest market, followed by EMEA. We think Nuvera, JAPIC, and Bolzoni provide great growth opportunities for us, along with EMEA and Americas.
In terms of what you're going to hear from us today, I'm going to walk through the strategy for all three businesses. Then we'll have Tony walk you through the lift truck business, and David walk through our emerging technologies platform and systems that are being developed and introduced in the marketplace. Roberto will then talk about Bolzoni and Lucien about Nuvera. Both of those guys run each of those businesses. And then Scott will come on, who's our CFO, and tie it all together and talk about some of the strategies and models that we use in finance, but also give you some view of what we're thinking about the future. Al will then, you know, summarize, wrap up, and take us into Q&A. We have a pretty unique business model.
It's really built around efficient capital deployment and targeting high returns on those capital deployed. What we spend our money on is ensuring that we have the right product and the infrastructure to serve the customers. And some of the areas where we've deployed our capital recently has been developing our modular, scalable platform. You're going to hear a lot about that over this presentation. We're continue to optimize our manufacturing footprint, so you can have products as a customer quickly from us. And then we're partnering with what we call our center of gravity supplier, pulling them closer to our manufacturing locations and, you know, so that we can kind of take working capital out of the system. In parallel to that, we have a independent, exclusive dealer network. They are the investors.
Those entrepreneurs are the investors in our distribution, so that keeps capital low for the distribution system for us. As I said, we have independent suppliers. We manufacture the critical components of what makes a lift truck a lift truck: mast, frame, some of the drive systems. But then we have independent suppliers who provide the rest. And then we also have a number of joint ventures. We have a finance joint venture with one of our leading banking partners, and we also have, you know, for instance, a long-term relationship with Sumitomo in Japan, over 50-year, 50/50 joint venture, which I think is the longest-running joint venture between a Japanese and an American company, which is 50/50. So, you know, we're good at partnering. We believe that that's going to be a core competency of ours.
So all of that brings us to what we target, and our primary target is to make sure that we're getting very high return, top-quartile return, and definitely leading in our business, in our industry, of greater than 20% return on total capital employed. Supporting that is ensuring that we're getting to 7% operating profit. So... And, you know, Scott will come back and talk about how that model works for us and what it means. The vision of the company as we move forward is to transform the way the world moves material from port to home. Port to home is, you know, picking up the material from port and through the manufacturing process, combining it with local material, through distribution, delivery systems, to your home, to serve consumers. So we're looking at that end-to-end chain. And what does the, you know, transformation mean?
The transformation means that we want to lessen the impact of moving materials on people, on the environment, and also on the economy. And we want to do that really engaging the imagination and creativity of our people. And it applies to our attachment business, our lift truck business, and fuel cell business. So it's across each of the three businesses with the same vision. Okay. Supporting the vision are two clear missions built around promises that we want to make our customers, again, for all three businesses. The first one is, we want to understand our customers' applications and provide them with the optimal solution. And if we can do that, they will get the productivity they need at the lowest cost of ownership. We call that our optimized solution.
Each of the businesses have their own variation of that, but ultimately, that's how we want to provide the right solution to our customer. The second part of the promise is, once you're a customer, we will not let you down. Throughout the ownership cycle of owning our products, and then when it comes to replacement, we'll work hard to create increasing value for those customers through that transition to the next ownership experience. Supporting these missions are our values, what we call our ICARE values, and you can see those at the bottom of the site: integrity, commitment, accountability, respect, and excellence. That's what drives us. That's what lights the fire inside us to serve our customers. So to support that mission, we're also building and we've built and it continue to evolve an operating structure.
It's developed to deliver this customer-centric solution, and it's there for all three businesses. The first one is around customers. We are a global... For each of the businesses are global businesses. They have full line of product. Now, the products continue to evolve. We're focused on solving the biggest problems of our customers with optimal solutions for them, and then provide the care they need through that ownership experience. In that process, we have partners, and our distribution is exclusive, independent dealers. Some of these dealers have been our partners for a long, long time, and we go to market as one. There isn't a dealer and Hyster-Yale. There's Hyster-Yale, dealer, dealer, Hyster-Yale. We go to market as one. I think it's important to understand that.
The other thing is, in each of the region, the top 1,000 customers, we deal directly with. Of course, we engage our dealers in that process, but we take accountability for those relationships with those top customers. Typically, it's that way because they have a footprint bigger than our typical dealer, and they need that direct relationship with the OEMs. This distribution is focused on share growth, and we've evolved from thinking about unit share to really is dollar share of the market. Because we have quite a wide range of, when I talk about our full product line, it goes from trucks that are $4,000 or $5,000 to ones that are $500,000.
And so in that spectrum, we want to make sure that the focus is on, you know, serving customers with the right product. And so the dollar share growth is important in that. And then we want to capture the aftermarket, the full potential of the aftermarket as the trucks are used. Then we're building internal capabilities. As I said, you'll hear a lot about our modular, scalable platform. The reason for that is I think it's a very sustainable competitive advantage for us. Our competitors don't have that solution. It's not easy to put it in place. You pretty much have to revise all your platforms to do it, and it has to be well thought through.
So, you know, that's a critical part of our solution set, and it's really built to support this promise that we'll give you an optimal solution. We can configure the right truck just for you as a customer. We've talked about the center of gravity suppliers. They're a critical part of our value system and optimizing our footprint. We're continuing to bring down the break-even point for each of our plants, so we don't have a lot of manufacturing variance during the low cycles of the economy. And then the last one is building an infrastructure to support customer care. If you go around the market, let's say in Americas, and ask, "How good is Hyster or Yale at serving their customer?" You'll find us near the top, both on the solution side and the service side and caring for customers.
But what we're finding is the place we're going to, that's not good enough. We need to push that envelope higher and really get to a point where customers feel cared for and not let down. This is not possible without the culture of disciplined people, disciplined thoughts, and disciplined actions. We're a problem-solving company, and to have that disciplined culture is critical to our success, and that's what we continue to evolve and build on. So that's a little bit about the company. What's going on, you know, in the marketplace, and these are some of the trends that are driving our market. The first one is search for productivity. Productivity is critical for our customers because, you know, they're facing space limitations, SKU growth, time limitations.
To solve that and create new value, you have to have high productivity, and we're developing solutions that support that. In that process, when the pace is high and turnover in your employee base is also high, that's a recipe for, you know, safety issues in your operation, and we're developing solutions where that can be mitigated with our operator assist systems and AGVs. AGVs are also a big solution to labor shortages. I'm sure as you've gone around, you've heard from the other participants in the market that labor shortage is one of the key drivers, probably for your own companies as well. That's a big thing in for our customers and also for us. And so automation is a big part of our future. We're automating our forklift trucks, but also automating other processes in our solution system.
Electrification is a big part of our journey. We own a fuel cell company. That's because to electrify big trucks, and we want to electrify the full range of our product solution. We're still committed to providing the customer what they need, and if they need diesel engines, we have—we will be providing them. But there are many customers who are looking for a decarbonized green solution, and fuel cells are a critical part of that, and so are smart batteries. And that's a big focus for us. Information continues to be important, driven by data. Our telemetry systems and data solutions are key to enabling that for our customers. And then we've seen an emergence of low-cost competitors, predominantly coming from China.
Our modular scalable platform, starting at these low- to high-value solutions, is our way to solve for that and go straight head-to-head against these competitors, and Tony will talk more about that. Now, to follow these trends and to develop solutions for them, we have long-term strategies that will help drive growth in our business. And I'll come to those strategies in a moment, but these strategies are built around enabling us, you know, kind of, stakeholders. That includes our customers and dealers, suppliers, and our employees, and of course, our shareholders. That's done through some of the core initiatives we have in place.
I've touched on a few of those: the modular, scalable platforms, the solution-based industry approach to going to market, and these are built to generate cash in the core part of the business. That cash in the, is then deployed to get additional capabilities. We've added attachment capabilities to our portfolio through buying Bolzoni. We've developed our own technology solutions, such as OAS, telemetry, our green solution, and automation. And we believe that that deployment of capital is positioning us for the future. We're just focused on deploying capital where we have to. We're asking our partners to deploy their capital alongside us, such as our dealers and our supplier partners.
We're investing in some of the strategic initiatives that we'll talk about in a moment, and then, you know, the special focus on we're in the commercializing phase of our fuel cell, and that's a key requirement for us. So these are long-term strategies. You'll also find that our management reward program for our leaders in the company are also long-term. They're tied to the benefits that our shareholders have. Essentially, they are long-term shareholders in the company, so we want to make sure that all of that is aligned. So this is our economic engine for the company. It's really built on having a large lift truck population, if you look at the bottom. And with that population, we want ourselves and our distribution to serve those customers, to providing them parts and service.
If there's volume there, that will generate the cash and the resources to make sure that we grow our worldwide footprint and strengthen our solution set, and that will drive market share for the company. That will give us more balance. You've seen our skew to Americas. That will continue to balance our business geographically, but also across product lines, whether we're talking about industrial trucks, warehouse products, or our new solution set, or big trucks. In the middle are accelerators, for these are the strategies that will accelerate this this virtuous circle that we have. It's built around making sure we have the right product for our customer's application, providing them the lowest cost of ownership. It's built around having independent distribution and also being a leader in delivery of industry solutions.
The fuel cell and the attachment business also want to be leaders in their part of the market. Those strategies feed into projects, and these are the... On the right, you'll see the key projects that are being driven, reviewed by our board, to execute these strategies. You can take these projects and other projects that we have in the company and really kind of bin them into the value chain of the company, but also into the functions of the company. And I've got some examples here. For instance, you know, if you think about revenue growth, what will drive revenue growth? Again, modular, scalable, and the industry approach will drive growth, you know, market growth, and also our technology innovation.
Our for profit growth is our pricing strategies, plans, and tools, and also our technology solution, which attract higher margin than our core truck. So that will drive increase profitability. For cash generation, we've said we're very careful where we invest our money, so center of gravity suppliers are critical to that and optimizing our manufacturing footprint, which will really reduce working capital and deployment of cash internally. And that will produce the cash to grow the business. And then, as we've already said, we're very careful about where we deploy money, making smart investments, so independent distribution and collaborative partners enable that. These programs or projects really form a ticket of activities that gives us sustainable competitive advantage. They also drive our culture through problem-solving and disciplined execution.
The synergy in the projects, so if you start putting some of these together in your mind, each one individually will, will bring growth, but the combination is a large accelerator and builds momentum in our business. And then it's about executing every day. Our missions, if you think about it, aren't, you know, possible without this relentless pursuit of serving the customer and excellence, and that's what these projects are, you know, drive within our company. So we'll want to, you know, we call this our, one of our superpowers... and it's really easy to think about what it is. It's very difficult to deploy it across the company and keep, sustain it over a long period of time. Let me just talk about each of the businesses, and the leaders will cover that in more detail.
But our core business on the lift truck side is built on, you know, an industry that's growing a little faster than GDP. That's why we call it GDP+. The reason is, it's in the business of moving material. Material movement is critical to economic growth, and it's actually a little stronger than the economic growth you get. That creates the platform for providing existing and new services to our customers that can improve their productivity and drop their cost of operation. On top of that... that's an evolutionary growth. On top of that, we have revolutionary growth through our technology solutions, and David will talk more about that. So you can see how we can go from GDP+ to GDP++, and Scott will come back and show you what that means for us.
In terms of the Bolzoni business, think of the lift truck as a body, and the lift truck comes with two fingers, the forks, but really, Bolzoni gives us hands. And just imagine now the productivity you can create once you have hands attached to a body. And so that's why we bought Bolzoni, and we're just at the start of creating value through that integration of attachments and lift trucks. Nuvera, we think that over the next two or three years, we'll have electrified solution across our complete range of products, all the way up to our biggest truck. When we thought about this back in the twenty tens, we felt the only way this was possible, because certainly batteries aren't a solution for those big trucks, was to have fuel cells.
And we felt that if we could deploy fuel cells for ourselves, which are very heavy-duty applications, then it would be beneficial for adjacent industries, and that's how it's panning out. Lucien will talk about that, but that's why we acquired fuel cell capability within the company. So as I end here, you can see we're one company with three synergistic businesses, but each business also has other paths to growth. But they have some things, some strategies in common. They're all central and regionally structured. They're all following modular, scalable platforms to find the right solution for the customer. They're going to market with an industry approach. They're working on the most difficult problems our customers have today and in the future, and they're leveraging our distribution, this HY distribution, which is our other superpower.
So whether we talk about lift trucks, Bolzoni, or Nuvera, each of those are deploying those strategies. So I've given you a feel for how each of the businesses are common. Now, I'll ask Tony to talk to us about the lift truck business. Thank you.
Thank you, Rajiv. All right. Good morning. My name is Tony Salgado. I'm the Chief Operating Officer for our lift truck business. Today, what I'd like to do is, first and foremost, just give you an overview of our lift truck business, where we sit today, give you some context and some direction on the industry that we participate in, the very exciting and growing lift truck industry, and then talk to you a little bit about the, you know, investments that we have been making over the last several years, many of which we've talked to the investor group about for these last several investor presentations.
Share with you how they've been maturing and putting us into a position now where we can compete with the new set of capabilities in the market ahead of us to continue to drive sustainable value for our shareholders and customers over time. We'll start with just a quick look at the business that we have in the lift truck group. You know, we are a comprehensive, integrated, and very well-established global leader in the lift truck solutions business, in the design, the manufacture, sales, and service of the solutions that we bring to market.
We're, you know, deep-rooted history in the lift truck business, with well over 100 years in establishing a very strong foundation, a very deep and vast number of relations with customers across the globe that serve as a platform in allowing us to deliver continued value in today's market, but also a great platform to leverage off into the future, which we'll talk about. You know, as Rajiv had noted, we go to market through an industry lens. That is an approach we feel is pretty unique in the market. We have coverage across over 120 countries globally. We cover all 22 of the industry segments within the lift truck business.
We do so through one of the broadest portfolios of products in the industry across all classes, one through five, with a growing set of technologies that are integrated into our lift trucks, attachments, as Rajiv had noted, and a new and value-add services that we're bringing to the market. We have a strong global presence. We have seven design centers, which are focused on different aspects of our product line and technologies that are located strategically across the globe. We have individual production plants and parts distribution facilities located across every region to deliver the value, deliver over 100,000 units of shipments into our markets every year, and to service and support nearly 1 million units in operation. As I said, we go to market through an independent distribution model.
Again, one of the key strengths and differentiators for us. We have over 300 exclusive dealer ownership groups across the globe, with over 900 different branch locations to serve our customers locally. And, you know, with these dealers and our combined Hyster-Yale Group, we have roughly about 3,400 sales professionals who translate our value into the market, and over 11,000 different service technicians who are trained in the specific industries that support our fleets and our customers worldwide through the life cycle of their business. Now, this is touchy, isn't it, Rajiv? So it wasn't just you. All right. So this...
The market we operate in is actually very exciting, and you may not have heard the lift truck industry described as exciting before, but we're finding it to be very exciting. It's a growth market, and you know, it is essential in enabling the movement of all goods globally. And as Rajiv noted, you know, the different dynamics of demographics, the growth in population, the changing of the age demographics and the expansion of the economic power across the middle class globally is really driving the growth of goods and will far into the future.
But on top of that, you know, the enablers of technology have, have driven this to be global purchasing, with local delivery, with, you know, high expectations for the, the size of the deliveries and the speed of the delivery, which drive, you know, a much higher demand for the lift truck equipments that support that. And when you look at our growth, in the industry, not our growth, but the industry growth, lift trucks shipments over the last 20 years, they've actually outpaced the global GDP growth annually by 1.5 percentage points.
In the last six years, they've grown at 8.6% or 8.5% of the annual growth rate, and really driven in large part by the surge in demand post COVID, which has really benefited the industry. Now, when you look at the distribution of the lift truck sales globally, we're seeing it become much more balanced with a growth in the China domestic and China export, and a growth in the lower value Class III powered pallet trucks. Hyster-Yale plays very strongly in this market, with over 100,000 units shipments with the Hyster-Yale Maximal brands and another 8,000 with our Sumitomo brand in the Japan and Southeast Asia region.
For Hyster-Yale, we still predominantly play, as you can see, in the Americas market, with nearly 60% of our shipments into Americas market, which is a validator, actually, of the fact that when we have a mature and highly capable distribution network, when we have the right products that are fit for market, and when we have the commercial capabilities, both in our network and with the Hyster-Yale Group, we can deliver some powerful performance. In China, we remain focused on the higher value segments because it's a very low value segment market there. But Asia Pacific and Europe, we'll talk more about. There's significant opportunity there as we scale up on our capabilities across the globe.
Now, on top of the lift truck growth, Rajiv indicated that, you know, there is opportunity for significant revenue generation with the advent of technology and the expanded services. When you think about, you know, where our customers' demands are going, it's really becoming more intense in the delivery of performance across their operations over time. In addition to that, they've got increasing ESG requirements from their shareholders and stakeholders, which really drive a new dimension to delivery of performance in their operations. You know, and then with the evolution of technology, it presents opportunities that didn't exist before to solve these problems, which actually puts a lot of pressure on these organizations to close those gaps.
So what we see our customers doing is really coming to us now and wanting to work with us on what these solutions are, how they can apply technology within their operations. And when you look at the market, the forecast is that the revenue associated with the technology and the additional services are expected to grow at nearly four times the rate of the already growing lift truck market. So, I mean, that's a very exciting opportunity for one. What we'll—I'll talk more about it, and David certainly will talk more about that. Now, the good news is that we have positioned ourselves to play very strong, not only in today's lift truck market, but in the spaces of technology and the service value growth.
You know, we'll, we'll highlight some of them, but, and as Rajiv said, one of the biggest things that we're doing in the lift truck growth area is the modular, scalable approach. You're gonna hear this probably no less than a dozen times between Rajiv and I, because it is so important. It is a differentiator. When you look at the service, you know, we talked about the Hy-C are service, this promise not to let you down. Very hard to do, but it is a differentiator, and it's one that we are, you know, we're working to develop experiences, formalize, and bring to the market. And the technology, again, one of the most exciting areas in our business right now, and I wish I got to talk about it.
David really gets to talk about it in depth, but it is essential to enabling our customers in a very different dimension, and we'll talk more about what that's going to do for us. Now, we've established the fact that there is significant growth opportunity, and we're well positioned to grow within not just the lift truck market, but the advancing technology markets. But when we look at, so where are we going to grow? Well, in addition to just growing generally across the board, we have some significant opportunities in two dimensions, the first of which is regional. In the U.S., in the North American market, one out of every five trucks installed is a Hyster-Yale brand truck. That is the power of having, you know, the brand equity, right?
Having the very strong and capable distribution network, having the right trucks for the market, the right products and the right solutions, and having, you know, a very mature and continually developing set of competencies across our commercial groups, both in the Hyster-Yale Group as well as our distributors. But when we look and compare that to the EMEA and the APAC markets, you can see that there's significant opportunity to scale up what we're doing here and apply that over there. Well, the good news is that's what we've been working on for the last few years, right? The modular and scalable approach allows us now to design globally fit-for-market trucks with a highly configurable platform that allows us to put the trucks into the market to meet the specific market needs, but at the right price and the right margins for us, okay?
And additionally, we are becoming a more and more global company every day. We are globalizing our processes, our best practices. We're globalizing certain functions so that we can quickly deliver best practices and level up across all of our operations globally. This is gonna enhance our ability to win in the EMEA and the JAPIC markets. And then finally, we're working very hard and making good progress in developing our networks in these other regions, where we've lagged to where we stand today in the Americas, and we've seen great consolidation opportunities and growth across key markets with strong business partners. So we expect that we're gonna be able to see an advantage in these two markets as we move forward here over the next several years. The other dimension is in industry.
You look at, if you divide the entire industry into the 12 industrial segments and the 10 warehouse segments, you'll see that Hyster-Yale plays significantly higher in the industrial segments, nearly five points higher on average, and that is due to the fact that we have an incredible brand. The Hyster brand stands for tough trucks, trucks that can meet the demanding needs of manufacturing, mining, metals, paper industries, the ports and terminal industries. We have dealers who this is their core competency. They know the industrial markets. They go in there with an expertise to solve our customers' problems. And, you know, at the end of the day, you look at the warehouse and we're not there yet.
However, again, the good news is so the position we've put ourselves over the last several years of investments in developing capabilities, we've now taken that next step and we've relaunched the Yale brand as the Yale Lift Truck Technologies to package the capabilities that we have with the full range of the warehouse products, the Class I, II, and III electric products, which are highly capable in this space. We've worked to really blueprint and map out these industries and put in place playbooks and specialized training for our dealers. And at the end of the day, again, we believe and feel very strongly that we're more capable than we've ever been to grow our share and scale up what we've accomplished in the industrial segments. Now, as you know, Rajiv noted in his economic engine here...
There we go. There are three key areas that we're, you know, we bucket all of our strategies into. The first is to develop solutions that drive productivity and drive the lowest cost of ownership for our customer operations. The next is to really go to market with an industry-focused approach so that we can understand what our customer's needs are and connect them with the right solution. The final one is to translate all that value through an independent distribution model. So in the area of the solutions, you know, we've got an expanding set of solutions across our global industry requirements, and, you know, we have one of the broadest portfolios of product lineup across the Class I through V.
And it's critical because most of our large customers have multiple applications, right? They need different types of trucks, from pallet trucks to, you know, to large capacity trucks to move containers. So they want to work with a supplier who can meet their full range of needs. But the most important thing we're doing now, and what's really changing the game is an inflection point for us, and the differentiator is the modular and scalable again, 'cause what this is doing now, and let me just walk you through the... The modular is not a new concept, okay? The automotive industry does it, other lift truck manufacturers do it, but they haven't created a module design concept across an entire family of products in the way that our team has done, and it's been an enormous investment to accomplish this.
But what this essentially allows us to do is assemble a whole range of trucks and capacities across less than a dozen modules of systems and components, right? Which are interchangeable, to allow us to simplify our manufacturing operations, reduce our supply chain just down to those core supplier groups, and then reduce the number of components in our SKU and that support our operation. This simplicity lowers our overall cost of conversion as we move forward. But then, even on top of that, the real winner is the scalability.
So within those modules, we've designed it such that we have multiple levels of options at different cost and performance capabilities, which allows us to configure a truck exactly to what a customer needs at the price they need it, but allowing us to still extract the full margin on those products. That is what's critical. It also allows us not to have to discount higher value premium trucks to put into a lower operation where there's a mismatch in value. So this is a real big differentiator and a driver of sustainable margin and profitability for our company as we move forward.
And leveraging that even further, you know, as we work to support our customers in the electrification of their fleets, particularly their current industrial internal combustion engine fleets, with this concept of modular scalable, we're able to bring on electrified mode of power options to, you know, traditional IC trucks in a way that it's simply an option on the line and not a whole another truck configuration. And then finally, David will talk about the technology side again, but I'll just note that the way we're designing the technology is such that it is going to be built in as, again, modular and scalable options that a customer can select on their truck, which really drives, one, the practicality of it, right? It was made and fit for that truck and for delivering value through that platform.
And two, the adaptability of it is made very easy, not only by the fact that it's a system option, but also by the way we're designing it so that it can be installed and supported by our dealer network and not, you know, some sophisticated, trained MIT grad. Okay, so it's a fantastic approach, and we're very excited about it. The next area is the industry focus. So, you know, when we say industry focus, you know, if you think about it, this is our way of formalizing and institutionalizing customer focus. You know, we've really methodically developed the 22 industries. We blueprint these industries through a deep understanding of those, take the learnings from that blueprint and put it into playbooks that, you know, can be used by frontline salespeople.
What we learn, we build back into our product development processes, you know, through a very organized and formal format, and then we roll this all out through training, you know, and specialization across our organization. So, you know, on a macro level, I'll go back to, you know, the example of the rollout of the Yale Lift Truck Technologies brand. I mean, this is really defining for us, and defining for the market that we're moving into this market to win now. We've got a package set of capabilities across our products, very applicable technologies with the operator assist system, the telemetry, and the automation that can deliver real differentiating value in this space to compete with the very few incumbents in this space today in each of the markets.
So we're very excited about this, and it's – the warehouse markets actually makes up 60% of the overall market, and it's gonna outpace the growth of the industrial markets as we move forward. So it's very important that we're in the space with capabilities. And then the final of the three strategies is our independent distribution model. It's how we are working in a very different way to translate the value of industry focus and the solutions focus into meaningful commercial engagement with our customers. The independent distribution model is different than a wholesale model, in that it is, as Rajiv said, it is a true synergistic partnership with OEM and with our independent exclusive dealers. You know, at the core of it is our independent distribution, and very, for very good reason, 'cause they're the best at what they do.
They, they are close to that customer. They have an intimate, you know, relationship and dependency on that customer satisfaction in a way that an OEM can't replicate, right? They're, we're moving and progressing very well towards getting a more consolidated ownership group structure across the globe, where they're well-capitalized and aligned. And, you know, at the end of the day, they're investing their capital in the front-end retail distribution, and which allows us then, as an OEM, to refocus our capital and our resources on developing the solutions, deeper understandings of the industry, and enabling our distribution through the training, through the specialization, through the playbooks, and augmenting them by deploying our own sales force to help them win the major accounts that go across multiple regions and global, right?
So together, we combine our strengths in a way that an OEM-owned distribution can't conquer, a typical wholesale can't conquer, but, you know, we can differentiate. Now, you know, we talk about a lot of capabilities, and I said from the beginning that these are maturing, and we're starting to gain an increasing confidence in the value of these capabilities, through actual wins and experiences in the market today. One example I'll give you, and it's one that I think you're probably well aware of if you watch the media, is over the last couple of years, our significant win by unseating a real strong incumbent in the warehouse space to win business with one of the largest retail e-commerce companies globally.
They had a significant issue with safety in their powered industrial truck equipment, is what they call it. They came to us to say how can you help us solve this problem? Well, we had a developing technology that we were able to engage them with, which today we call our OAS, or Reaction and Reliant Operator Assist Systems. Through the deployment of this technology, they've been able to significantly improve their performance and safety. As a matter of fact, I reviewed a letter today with David Furman from their safety director, saying that across 10 of 11 sites, they've actually reduced their safety incidents to zero for fork truck-related incidents.
They've gone to market because they were notoriously known for their safety challenges in these plants, and we helped them solve that problem, and now they want to grow their business with us because we're able to differentiate. We've also exercised the early stages of our Hy-C are, because introducing these new technologies is not easy to do. Change is tough. But we've exercised, you know, a very close and intimate customer care process that's helped them move through that so that they could do so successfully in operating plants and in greenfields. So it's been a great win.
We have many of these, and what we're doing, and we're able to do because of the operating structure we have now globally, is to get these scaled up so that we can run them across all of our divisions and attack the markets with these new competencies that we're building. So all of this is come together to really put us in a strong position, as we come out of the post-pandemic timeframe, when there's a surge in demand, we're able to participate very strongly in that build, an enormous backlog as a result of our performance and grabbing share and participating in the market.
And, with our, you know, recovery and stabilization in the supply chain and production, we've been able to drive an increasing level of shipments year-over-year now for the past several years, and delivering record levels of revenue over the last 12 months. It's been, it's been great. It's been across all of our regions. Our mix of products going out are still heavily weighted towards the counterbalance products, particularly ICE products, you can see is again, nearly 60% because that's where we play strong today. We've got a growing percent in the electric counterbalance, which is very important, and the market's shifting in that direction. But you can see very clearly, Class II and III, you know, only 18% of our mix is in that market, yet that makes up, nearly 50% of the global market.
So that's opportunity, and we're ready and prepared to take advantage of that. Now, when you look at the operating profit, you know, everybody is aware of, and Rajiv touched on the fact that coming out of the, you know, post-pandemic timeframe, we had a surge in demand, which was, of course, favorable. We took that on. We have had a large growth in the backlog, but then we had ensuing inflation, which really put most of that backlog in a very unfavorable position. You can see that in our results from, you know, 2021 to early 2022. However, you know, we've learned a lot from that to immediately put in place a restructuring of our pricing processes.
We worked diligently across our OpEx and other parts of the business to reduce our, you know, our break-even point, and we've been making great headway in stabilizing and restoring our production processes. You know, as I think we've indicated to you know, our investor group, you know, we were going to come out of this strong and we have. We've come out of it very strong, financially, you know, and not only from an operating profit standpoint, but, you know, delivering the free, free cash flow that is so important to our business. So when we look at that, I mean, let's talk about what are we doing with that? There's a lot of things we need to do with it in the near term, but, you know, we never stopped investing in the company.
That's a factor in this timeframe. We focused our investments on those things that were most critical, but now as we come out of this with the cash to move forward, we're going to, as we always historically have, be extremely diligent in how we allocate, you know, our resources and our capital to invest. And, you know, we've got a strong focus as we move forward now on the revenue generation, margin enhancement, making sure that we continue to lower that break-even point, and then in making, you know, our working capital more efficient and optimized. Now, we've got, you know, some top investment categories here, which I think are worth noting. You know, one of the key areas is we're gonna continue to focus on development.
That's our role as an OEM in this, is make sure that we're always out front in bringing the greatest and best solutions to our customers. You know, the modular and scalable is one of those that we're more than two-thirds through our investment on this and rolling the products out for several families right now, and we'll continue to invest in that as we move forward because it's absolutely critical to us. Technology, you know, we've worked a lot with partners, learned a lot, but our organic technology development is increasing and our investment in this area is gonna be commensurate with that.
And then the design capabilities that we've developed in the emerging markets has really benefited us, you know, not just to put out what was traditionally a lower value truck, but now as we move forward, it is really the genesis of a lot of our lower scalability options within our truck to help us get that full breadth of scalability to configure trucks into the market. So it's a fantastic area to allocate our capital. From lowering our break-even point, we are working to continually optimize our footprint in manufacturing, working to move further into the global shared services that we've done with our partners in India, and globalize a lot of our functions. Then we'll continue to focus on, you know, investing in the sales area.
We feel as an OEM partner, there's a lot that we can do to enable our distribution network, as well as to augment them with the large major accounts. You know, one good example, and again, this is one that I was checking in today, so I stood in front of the investor group in, I think it was May of 2018, and introduced you to our investment in Hyster-Yale Maximal, which is a Chinese OEM that you know, designed and manufactured and exported and sold into the domestic market with extremely strong value product lineup.
So at that time, you know, our investment objectives were to, one, secure a strong production capability in that APAC region, as well as to, you know, take on board and exploit a, a real strong value portfolio of products. I'm happy to say we've gone far beyond that now with this investment. The production plan itself is now becoming one of our three key global production facilities, producing not only the lower value add trucks, but localizing all of our standard and premium trucks for the region as well. And we continue to localize product and develop new opportunities to use the factory and all the skills that we have there.
From a design standpoint, you know, we've actually built more capability around their design group there to help us to accelerate the development of lower-cost innovation for scalability into our trucks moving forward. And they've also produced, you know, a great opportunity for us to consolidate the JAPIC region and make that whole operating structure, you know, more efficient and more capable. I apologize here. All right, I'm gonna land on this slide here. I do apologize. There we go. So this is an important slide. I wouldn't want to miss it because it tells an important story. You know, we've found ourselves now back in a very strong position, and not by accident, right?
We've moved through the post-pandemic period, we've leveraged our capabilities, and we're delivering strong performance, but it's important for us to sustain that performance going forward. It's also important that we never put ourselves in a position again, you know, where we're so exposed to the dynamics of the market. But we learned a lot during this time frame. The modular scalable, and this will be the last time I say that word today, but the modular and scalable is one of the key factors that allows us to build a robustness into our operation. Not just because, you know, it is a global, you know, globalizes the way we roll out our products so that we have redundancy.
We've got less suppliers who have invested in redundant supply chains for us, but also because as we move forward, we're so much more agile and dynamic to add different capabilities to our product in step so that we can deliver value to the market. You know, labor has been a challenge across all of our suppliers in our market as well as for us, and we, you know, are increasing our automation in order to mitigate that challenge. We've put in place a global sales and operations planning process, which is helping us now to synchronize demand with our supply chains and make sure that we can not only be agile to the demand of the market, but also optimize our working capital in the meantime.
And the last thing I'll tell you here is, you know, on the pricing side, we've learned a lot about the pricing. We've always had pretty good intelligence on pricing. We've really expanded those capabilities now for real-time pricing, understanding of the market, and the ability to now price with great agility and with added protections in the event that, you know, costs change dramatically and quickly. So altogether, we're in a much more, you know, robust position to not only weather, you know, the tough times, but to take advantage of the good times and to sustain our performance over time. So I will. I am over time, and I apologize. I'm just too excited about talking about this stuff. Okay, well, I don't have my last slide here, but let me just wrap it up for you.
So basically, I mean, in summary, we are a well-established lift truck presence in the market. You know, we've got a very strong customer base. We've got incredible capabilities that are expanding across all of our regions. And it serves as not only a strong platform for, you know, continuing to grow with the lift truck market, but an incredible platform to really take advantage of the opportunities and technology and added value to drive additional revenue into the business. And so, you know, with that, I'll turn it over to David, who's gonna... David is our president of our Global Technology Solutions, and he's got the great opportunity to talk about the most exciting part of the business, the technology. So thank you, David.
Thank you, Tony. So good morning. I'm gonna take just a few minutes to provide a little bit more detail on how we're gonna drive that accelerated growth agenda using technology solutions that, as Tony and Rajeev alerted to, these solutions are truly providing step-change value to our customers. They're definitely hitting on the stuff they most care about, and we'll take a quick look at that solution set as we go forward. Now, we've been developing and deploying technology in our trucks to differentiate them for many years. That effort, frankly, has gone to the point where a lot of the solutions and value added go beyond the trucks themselves, and it's captured in the agenda of the solution set and the technologies that we have in place.
We started that journey quite a while ago with the introduction of our telemetry solution, which connected our trucks digitally. They allowed our customers to collect valuable productivity and safety data. That solution's been very popular, it's been widely adopted by our customers, and it continues to grow at really good rates as we're helping our customers use that information better and better in deploying in their operations. Now, from connected trucks, we moved our solution set to smart connected trucks, and we added this solution set called OAS, that you've heard about. The OAS was really part of introducing a series of technologies that are dynamically sensing a range of unsafe operating conditions of the truck, and as it does that, automatically adjusts the operating envelope of the truck until the safe conditions return.
And it's been a remarkable technology. It's been deployed and hardened with the most sophisticated warehouse customer here. We'll show some information on that. It is very much in big, broad scaling mode right now. We have a couple of videos on that, a short one to give you a better sense of that functionality, and a little bit broader one at the end of the break. From providing solutions for smart connected trucks for manual operation, we shifted and expanded the solution set for full robotic solutions to our customers, as Rajiv said, really to help them address one of their most acute problems with labor challenges. We do have a very broad and deep experience base on that. We have an impressive portfolio of deployments.
We'll see a couple of examples of that, and you'll see really what that foundation of the exciting growth that we think going forward is. Shifting gears a little bit, we'll also wanna give you a glimpse of some of our big truck electrification solutions. I think a lot of folks here know Hyster-Yale, working with Nuvera, has really been a leader in zero-emission solutions on the fuel cell side, and also on the other electric powertrain options that are there. Initially, again, as Rajiv alluded to, we focused that kind of effort on fully industrializing the zero-emission technologies on smaller trucks, and as that was done a couple of years ago, we shifted our attention to the big trucks, where they're very much on the clock, and to meet government mandates in California and other places over the next couple of years.
So we wanna talk about that initiative because it's particularly critical for many of our customers' products right now. Now, moving beyond just the technology set, you know, the company's worked very hard in building and deploying the various other and very critical elements to drive successful technology, technology adoption. And if we wanna grow, we've got to have these elements in place to do that and do that well. So as Tony alluded to, we've got a very segmented approach of customers that's built us deep domain knowledge and unique knowledge of our customers' applications. It's when you're deploying a robot, it's just simply not enough to have a robot go from point A to point B. You gotta know how the work gets done in order to make that deployment effective, repeatable, and scalable, and we've done that in spades.
At the same time, if you wanna scale that solution across a broad range of customers, you've got to have a cost-effective service network in place, both to hold hands of our customers in that early adoption phase, as they need help, but also to keep the trucks running. Because at the end of the day, you know, these are vehicles, and they need maintenance, and very few technology companies really can combine that. And finally, for the end-use customer, we've got to ensure that a lot of these hard-won best practices on these deployments, they scale effectively across their networks. This is something that goes from this plant, then across their networks, both in the U.S. and, of course, globally.
So we think we've built a strong set of complementary capabilities that very few competitors can match to really drive technology adoption to the potential that we think it can be. I'd say just one small last area on this, as we think about driving technology, growing the business at scale that we need it to be, it really kind of turns us back on: Are our solutions really hitting on the things that our customers most care about? That's a theme that runs through our business. I think, as you see in the chart on the left, we believe that absolutely is true. These are solutions that are top of mind for customers.
These are solutions that we think help customers finally get full value and hit potential of smart, connected machines and the Internet of Things, help people do easy, deployable, effective, ROI-driven, automation solutions, and then, as we've spoken about, really deal with the most difficult to decarbonize sections in zero emissions. One of the themes that's been mentioned here is about easy to deploy. Knowing very specific use cases allows us to develop solutions that are as close to out of the box as they can be, but that, again, allows us to scale. To do that process well means we've got to be very discriminate on those initial users and the early adopters, so that is bulletproof as we go forward.
And then underlining all of that is at every point, look to really leverage the core infrastructure, which we think is extremely strong and, frankly, a set of capabilities that very, very few people can match in terms of rolling out this technology. So let's take a look at some of these solutions. This is critical. The first we're gonna take a look at is Operator Assist. As we've said, we brand it Yale Reliant Hyster Reaction. If you can play that video now... what you're gonna see is an animation, and we'll have another video a little bit later that just shows the range of capabilities that this technology can provide.
Some of it familiar, some of it very, very different, but at the end of the day, extremely powerful, adds great value to our customer, avoiding collisions of all types, of people, of product, of a truck, lowering cost of ownership, lowering product damage, and having breakthrough safety results, as Tony referred to. So it's been, as I said, an incredibly breakthrough product. It's been widely. The additional adoption is with Amazon. We'll show you a video with Amazon that's quite remarkable going forward, and we're in the scaling mode now, rapidly beyond that. The next area we wanna look at is in robotics. If you wanna show the video on robotics here. This is an example of some of our deployments. It really does almost capture that future lights-out warehouse application.
This is a deployment at one of the world's largest consumer goods company. This has been an extremely effective deployment, where it's lowered their labor cost by over 80% in their operations. You can see some of the metrics on the left-hand side of that screen there. We're in full deployment mode now in terms of taking that best practice solution and bringing it across our networks, both in the U.S. and around the world. Now, just a quick glimpse at our big truck zero emissions solution. If you wanna play this. This is an example of a top loader we have commissioned at the Port of L.A., Port of Long Beach. It's been in operation since January. Unique in many, many ways, and it's been extremely well-received. It's actually super critical.
So the market—the segment and our customers for this type of product, frankly, are under California mandates to start transitioning their diesel fleets as soon as 2025 and 2026. These customers are on the clock right now, and that transition curve is not abrupt. It's not step change, but it starts, and this business segment is very much on the clock. The segment itself, I think, produces meaningful volumes for the company, but this, in many ways, given that it's a closed-loop type of system environment, is a real beachhead application for big truck diesel transitions going forward. So it's a very exciting piece of work going on there that we expect to leverage. Let me get back to... Try it.
Okay, so in just in wrapping, I hope you got a sense that, you know, the technology solutions set that we have is far more than an exciting engineering agenda, and it is cool stuff in every sense of the word. But we also expect that to be a huge driver of our business growth. We think that also is gonna drive huge differentiation of our brand. As the charts below give you a glimpse of, it we fully expect this area of our business to drive growth, drive margins, and drive market share as we move over time. This is gonna end the formal segment that we have. We're gonna go into break. As we do that, we're gonna show a couple of videos.
One, how Amazon has deployed our OAS system in their site, and then a second one on Facebook Meta, how they've deployed one of our robotic solutions. They're a little bit long. We're on break, so you can see as much as if you want to. We've used those videos with their permission, so the break is gonna be about 10 minutes long, and we'll see you after the break.
At Amazon, we obsess about the safety of our people and partners. It's our highest priority. Every day, we are developing technological solutions that improve both the daily experiences of our associates and our ability to exceed customers' expectations. As part of that obsession, we're committed to solving complex problems in the midst of continual change, seeking out simple yet scalable solutions. This is why we're implementing first-class innovative technologies throughout our facilities. Amazon's legacy of innovation isn't confined to customer obsession. We aspire to set the global industry benchmark for safe and efficient operations. Just one example in our growing portfolio of this technology is how we're improving our fleet of powered industrial trucks, simply known as PIT.
Currently, PIT operation, much like driving a car, relies solely on the operator, leaving them vulnerable to human error, distractions, or cognitive overload, which research has shown can lead to collisions and injuries. To mitigate these hazards, Amazon's PIT solutions, worldwide engineering, and workplace health and safety teams have partnered to innovate in technology powered by real-time location systems or RTLS. When this innovative technology is paired with the established technology of LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, RTLS can track the location of PIT vehicles inside our buildings in real time and reduces the risk of collision compared with relying on human reaction alone. RTLS with LiDAR works together to automatically issue operational commands to the PIT vehicle.
For instance, when the PIT approaches an object or pedestrian with an RTLS tag, the RTLS can calculate the required distance to stop the PIT, slow down, and even warn pedestrians by signaling alarms to reduce the risk of collision. Alternatively, RTLS tags can also identify low-risk areas, allowing PIT vehicles to move at higher speeds and increasing efficiency. This will have a positive effect on the safety of our people, but no impact on the logistics of our operations, so it's a win-win solution. In an environment where hazards are inevitable, we are taking a bold, cutting-edge step to minimize the potential risk, care for our associates, and deliver smiles without compromising safety. We strive to be industry leaders and raise the bar through innovation.
RTLS with LiDAR is just one example in a growing portfolio of technological solutions that improve both the daily experience of our associates and our ability to exceed customers' expectations.
We really feel like we're at the forefront of data center operation. Meta owns and operates huge data centers all over the globe, and we've invested a lot of time and effort into optimizing the operation of those data centers. In particular, Meta is at the forefront of physical automation of these data centers with things like robotics and automated processes.
As we scale our data centers to meet the rapidly increasing demands posed by our user growth and new applications such as AI, we need to be smart about how we best utilize our most important asset, which is our people. We've been working on innovative ideas to bring automation to the physical world in the data centers. By automating work that might be repetitive or dangerous, such as moving heavy racks around the facility, we can ensure that our people are able to focus on the most important operational tasks.
This has always been the intersection of, you know, leaders in their industries coming together to look at an application and go, "Yeah, we need to completely think about this differently." We're not doing fulfillment with our robotics at Meta. We're using them to improve productivity, safety, accuracy on a data center floor. So that's a new application.
Rack volume is a huge challenge, and by adding TUG V3, we're able to tackle moves, receiving, decom simultaneously.
We have a lot of space and a lot of ground to cover when we're moving materials from one corner of the building to another. By maximizing the mechanical capacity on an AGV was pretty critical for us.
Between TUG V3 and the Asset Scan robot, it exposes the team more and more to robotics, which is a win, because that's just the direction we're going.
These are not AGVs in the traditional sense. These AGVs have LiDAR, and they contain a map of the facility, and they actually plan their own routes, and, and then they navigate and do their own localization using the LiDAR sensors. We actually extract from the CAD of the data center what the map should look like from a robot's point of view, and we actually just build the map through software, and then we can push it to the robots. Because that's all automated, anytime like racks are shuffled around, the system will just generate a new map and then send it to the robot, so we don't have to, like, manually run SLAM and cartography algorithms.
With things like the Asset Scan robot, as they become more detailed, they can get a higher level of scanning done and provide us better assurances, our SOC compliance, our inventory accuracy. There are some parts of the logistics world that use robots to deliver parts. I see us potentially getting there down the road.
Physical automation, I think, will continue to remain central to data center operations, especially with the focus on sustainability and energy efficiency.
We believe that the innovations that we're able to drive should be shared with the industry. In some ways, it's no different than when we originally started Open Compute and shared the entire data center design of our Prineville data center. We did it with our hardware, and now we're going to do it with our robotics.
We firmly believe that sharing this work with the industry will expand the pool of people who can utilize, test, and further build upon our work, which will result in even more innovation and improvement. Open sourcing our products and designs gives them a better chance of becoming the industry standard, which in turn makes them more widely deployed and easier to improve and support. We end up with better security and robustness when anyone is allowed to examine and stress-test these innovations. And all of this aligns well with Meta's core values of being open and building community.
Okay, everybody, we're gonna get started again, please.
Okay. Good morning to everybody. I am Roberto Scotti, President and CEO of Bolzoni. I'm sorry, but... Okay. It doesn't go back. Okay. Okay, I would like to start with my presentation, giving you some hint about the Bolzoni, where we are, you know, as a company. We have seven manufacturing plant, you know, three in Europe, in the EMEA, and the headquarter is in Piacenza, that nearby to Milan. And then we have in that plant, we are making a lot of different attachment and, let me say, the new technology, you know, machine attachment for the AGV. Then we have a plant in Auramo, in Finland. Auramo is specialized in the paper. We bought Auramo in 2001.
Has been a quite great acquisition because it was quite well-known in the market, really well-respected, and, Auramo has been founded, has been set up in 1947, you know. The third plant we have is in Germany, is, Meyer. Meyer also, in this case, it's, specialized in, in the beverage industry with the double pallet handler. And, Meyer has been set up in 1953, and we bought this company in 2006. Then, we have, in, Americas, Sulligent in Alabama, is, where... It's a new plant, where we are introducing, the cost-- We are building, of course, attachment, but also we are building legacy that are transmission drive axle for, aftermarket.
Then we have the last plant that we build up is in Brazil, you know, in 2019, and also because also the South America is quite important, you know, at least in the future, and then we are thinking that to be there is important for us. And we have other two plant in China. We are there since 2011. We set up two plant. One plant in Hebei Province, where we are manufacturing forks. Last year, we manufacture 500,000 forks there. It's been quite successful plant. And Wuxi, where we are manufacturing attachment for the JAPIC market, but also attachment and the component for the other factories of the group.
We have, besides the eight manufacturing plant, we have seven commercial branches, mostly in Europe, but also we have in Canada, we have in Australia. We have 25 independent dealers. The strategy here, where the market is important or the perspective is important, we want to be there directly. Where the market is quite low, at that point, we are working, let me say, with dealers. Our sales, as you can see, is about $380 million, you know, and, of course, we in 2020, we had a problem with everybody. Now we are, let me say, recovering.
And if you look at the net sales by product line, we have 53% of our turnover is related to the attachment, 37% is legacy and component, 8% forks, and 2% lifting table. The operating profit is at 3.9%, but frankly speaking, you know, I have to say that if you don't consider the legacy, because legacy is a product that we are providing to Hyster at a very low price, you know, and a very low margin, is intercompany, but this is affecting a little bit our operating profit. These, the legacy is going to phase out in the next couple of years, and they are going to be replaced by attachment with a higher marginality.
So in other words, our operating profit is much higher than that if we are not considering, let me say, legacy. And, looking at where our position, you know, and, we truly believe that there is a lot of opportunities to grow. We are number one in EMEA, you know? We are at number one in EMEA, and we are doing really fine. And our focus today, because we want to expand the market, is in Americas and in Japan. And, we have, as a industry focus, in I mean, we are really well-respected, in the market, and, we want to work more and more on the new technology, because, automation is something that above all else in other area are, let me say, very, very important.
And, when we talk about expanding market share, we are talking about Americas, because we have tremendous connections with Hyster-Yale. So Hyster-Yale is a leader in this market, and the fact that we can be the hand, you know, talking about the attachment, and we are a first-class product we have that can allow us to get from the market recognition that we are really absolutely a player. We are manufacturing here, so this main manufacturing here, we are close to the customers, so we are able to supply, let me say, service, and we can expand our business with the OEMs because is another opportunity for us.
We want also on the other side to expand the sales of the cylinder, because there is also this production in Sulligent, and I truly believe that today we are supplying Hyster-Yale, but I truly believe in the market there is an ample possibility to grow with, let me say, with the cylinder. And considering the fact that we are working more and more with the dealer of Hyster-Yale, creating a great opportunity for us. Japan is basically the same. We are manufacturing there, and we have a low cost, of course. We are also working with the OEMs there to expand the business, and technically it is quite important for us, our plant we have there, because they can supply, as I said before, also component to other factories around the group.
One of the things that represent for us opportunities, everyone that is manufacturing attachments, they have some sort of premium line, and they have only the premium line, one type of product. But we introduce a second line of product, and then we call the Silver Line. Silver Line is made according with some design that has been made by our operation in Germany. We bought this design in China, and we localize the production there. And at that point, we got a quite robust product. For this reason, we provide a warranty of three years, like the premium, and is ready. The product is... we can deliver from the shelf, you know? The customer has not to wait.
One of the most important point is the fact that the price is 25%-30% less than the premium. So we are very, let me say, it's a great opportunity in the market, because we are in this way, Bolzoni is the only one that is able to provide two different product, but the second product having a big advantage, you know, due to the price, the fact of the delivery. And this is very good for the rental, also second-hand, also to sell directly and also recycling, all this kind of, let me say, of industry. Here we are talking about the driving growth, industry by industry, and we are working specifically.
Of course, we are working on the 22 industries that we have in the market, but we are really focused on four industries, because there is a lot of users of the attachment in this area. The beverage, and we have a Meyer that is provided double pallet handler, and Meyer invented the double pallet handler. For this reason, it's really well-recognized around the world. We have the major beverage industry that approve and want to buy the attachment from Meyer. Bolzoni is providing many different type of attachment, but we are specialized in the carton clamp for the home appliances and on the automation, the AGV attachment. And then we have the pulp and paper.
Auramo, since it has been set up in 1947, this company just works in providing the best paper or clamp and bale clamps in the market, you know? And then we have automotive and 3PLs. You know, we have a client for tire, we have for positioners or these kind of things. All in all, this is an area where we are quite successful, because historically, we, the attachment was sold to the dealers and then the OEMs, and we open also, we open also this channel to sell the attachment directly to the big industries. We want to see if we can, let me say, take all the opportunities in the market. So we train our salesmen to go and visiting customers and to see the new material handling opportunity or applications, you know.
This, when collect the data, come back, our marketing department understand if that application is just standalone, there is no market for that, or there is potential in market. If this is true, there is a potential in market, at that point, we go to the research and development, you know, there to provide solutions, and we have a new product or innovation product that to put, let me say, in the chain, you know, and again and again. So because we want to have to be innovative in what we do. For this reason also, we are very keen on the future development, providing automation, AGV.
For the RGV, we are working, a couple of years ago, we set up a new center, research and development center, just to promote all this type, let me say, of attachment. There is a clear path to achieving profitability goals. So we want to increase America and Japan market, the participation and share. That is absolutely out of question, because it's where we can. We can also working on the technology, because when you work on the technology, the margin that you can have is always bigger, because we are selling also the technology, let me say that. And then we want to improve the efficiency and create synergies, and we want to continue to work with, let me say, the OEMs.
In fact, our turnover is split among three or four important OEMs. We have 31%, 23%, 22%, 14% of our business to these OEMs. And this is Bolzoni is a strategic multiplier, because Bolzoni and Hyster-Yale, they match, you know, they complete, you know? One, the attachment, the other one, the lift truck, and together. So we want to grow the margin, to have expansion on the margin to support the Hyster-Yale goal, because we are the same family, you know? We want enhance the market, above all in Europe, because in Europe, we are quite strong, and working together, we can do, we can have a, let me say, success.
But we want to work also with the other OEMs because there is a lot of business there, and then we have to continue working in that. And we should also have a very disciplined execution and operation effectiveness. That, let me say, is important in order to increase, improve the working capital and the cash. But to do that, also, we should have a talent that, let me say, can manage a little bit the company. Talent is very important, absolutely, and then we are working in order to get this talent on board with Bolzoni. So the key takeaway, expanding market presence and outside Europe, investing in customer-driven product innovation, and accelerating financial result with ongoing margin expansion opportunities. Thank you very much.
Okay, now let me introduce Lucien Robroek , President and CEO of Nuvera.
Thank you.
And friend of mine.
Thank you, Roberto. Thank you for the introduction. Thank you for being able to speak here. We've been talking about fuel cell quite a while in various presentations, so I would like to make sure that there's no misunderstanding what a fuel cell is. Actually, we call it a fuel cell engine, like on this picture. So what it does on board of a vehicle is it actually produces electric power. So not like a battery, where you store it, where you charge it and store it, but it produces electric power during the operation of the vehicle. Hopefully, it works. Yes. And Hyster-Yale, although our, say, most beloved customer, is not only our only customer, there are many applications where we deploy this fuel cell.
It's especially important where you have heavy-duty operations, so you need a lot of power to execute what you're going to do with that vehicle or that piece of machinery. On the graph, you'll see on the top right-hand side, a kind of a schematic. Don't take it too literally, but it actually shows you where a fuel cell is really competitive with alternatives. The traditional alternative is a diesel engine, a combustion engine, but that is being phased out. So very depending on local regulations, on actually strategies of larger companies that want to be green, that is driving where that competitiveness is against the original diesel engine. Now, a vehicle needs to be electrified first.
It doesn't matter if you need batteries or you want to put a fuel cell to it. So, our other competitor, to some extent, is an electrified vehicle, but then only using batteries. The problem with heavy duty, though, is that, depending on the duty cycle, you cannot carry all the batteries on board just to perform the same shift that you originally would do with your diesel engine. Meaning that it will become either way too heavy or too bulky or simply too costly if you would do that. Now, adding a fuel cell to the system takes out the majority of the batteries. You can use it to charge the remaining batteries, or you can actually use it to directly drive your electric propulsion.
So where is that competitive with plug-in batteries? That is, again, where you do not have the time to charge all of those batteries or where it becomes too heavy. And I'll show you that in a minute. There are downsides to fuel cells. It needs fuel. So you have a fuel tank on board where you store hydrogen gas, and hydrogen gas is not as readily available as diesel, for instance. So that industry is developing and needs to mature. Fortunately, a lot of the governments see this in Europe, in Asia, in the Americas, and they are stimulating the build-up of that infrastructure. So hydrogen production, especially green hydrogen, but also logistics around it, including fuel cell stations.
And, what I'm showing you in this graph, and I don't have any newer information, but it shows the acceleration of that kind of industry in the hydrogen gas sector. So the gray area is, all the announced projects in 2022. The green area is the only announced projects in the first month of this year. So my expectation is that if, if we would show you this next year, there will be a huge increase of these projects. Now, the problem, obviously, is that these projects take time. They take a couple of years before they will end up in having that additional production of hydrogen, because of lags, because of permits, because of simply lead times of a lot of things.
So we expect that it will take two-four years to really see that hydrogen availability go up, the cost of hydrogen go down, and the acceptability of hydrogen taken to the next phase. But equally long, the development of the applications takes time. So how is Nuvera playing into all of this? First of all, I have to mention that Nuvera is not a new company. We were founded in 2000 from parties that were already in hydrogen gas processing and fuel cell manufacturing. But what we had in those first years, say, the first 15 years before Nuvera bought Nuvera, sorry, before Hyster-Yale acquired Nuvera, is that we were executing projects.
Projects for larger companies to see what a fuel cell could do or one of the other applications. After we were acquired, we very much focused on having product, having those fuel cell engines available to drive these vehicles that were coming up in the market, and we're already seeing the issues with batteries. So, that's what we've been doing. We've putting all of that expertise, and actually, also the IP, which is very important to us, into making it into product, in developing production capabilities, in developing testing capabilities. Now, we know that is not enough. Five, 10 years from now, fuel cell might become more a commodity like a diesel engine is today, and we need to have a very special place in that area.
So our focus is already on our unique selling points, and they are fuel efficiency and compactness of the engine. So we not only have product available, you can order them today, we also have the most fuel-efficient solution there, and we also have very compact engines. And those are not the words that I make up. Those are the words of customers that choose Nuvera. Now, I don't expect you to understand completely the graph there, but it shows actually the results, the test results of our fuel cell generations. Actually, it says that there is a penalty to pay. If you want to have more compact engines, you will lose efficiency.
Well, we managed, in our latest generation, to make that line more flat, that's the upper, light blue line, more flat and also at a higher efficiency, and that is what we're working on. Now, stacks are modular. You can build more stack, you can build more cells in a stack, and you can build larger stacks, giving you more power. What we also do is that the products that we have available right now, and we keep expanding, is we can multiply that with our customer in one vehicle or one application. That makes it extremely, again, scalable and modular, and that helps us to address many more markets than just, say, the port equipment or something else.
We can build those, and I'm showing you this graph that the dark green areas are actually our focus area, or I shouldn't say focus area, addressable markets, and they already add up in an addressable market in 2030 that we expect is well above $20 billion. And I'm not even including the automotive market, because we consider passenger cars not heavy duty. Yeah, there are fuel cell cars already running around, but eventually, we think that battery technology will continue to develop and might have a much more solid place there. But never say never. So what are we focusing on?
We still focus on on-road vehicles, but those vehicles that need more than to go from A to B, that they do more than commuting, they need to do some work while they're underway. In many, many occasions, going from A to B is not even the most important thing for them. Off-road, probably easier to understand because heavy machinery, difficult to charge them, often in places where you do not have a connection to the electric grid, and they need a lot of power. And then port equipment, you've already seen a couple of examples, and I'll show you a couple more in the next slides. But it's a very interesting area because ports are, although we have limited hydrogen availability, they are the drivers of having that availability at the location.
They have chemical industry, they have shipping, they have logistics. So we feel that ports will be the beachhead of these fuel cell applications. I'll go into marine and stationary portable power generation a little later because we those markets, actually, we see as upcoming, that we didn't expect as soon as that we now see coming. Now, the next three slides are an array of pictures. Pictures of applications that we are working with our customers in. So not just illustrations, these are real, live applications. I have to explain that you see in some of these pictures, this green kind of dot there with an H2 logo on it. That means that those applications are not only being worked on, but they are operational. They work.
And in most of the cases, they're being used as demo units to convince their customers in the ramp-up. So you'll see buses. Originally, we started in buses for on-road, but you also see some other applications, like refrigerated trailer. Actually, that needs to have a dot already, but by the time that we made this presentation, it was not yet operational, but it is operational today. I just got confirmation. The other interesting is a prototype car that, yeah, we don't expect a lot of volume with racing cars on-road, but it's a typical example of how our customers are trying to get expertise, and this particular customer has the medium-duty trucks as a target for on-road trucks. Off-road, already mentioned.
Big issue with off-road, again, is charging, and having that on-board charger, fuel cell on board, will definitely help progress the electrification of this difficult to electrify industry. Now, port vehicles and equipment, I won't say too much about the top left three. They are all with Hyster, including the terminal tractor that you see there. But there are many more pieces of equipment running around in ports. If you have hydrogen, and if you go to electrification, and especially if you have the authorities saying that you need to be zero-emission by a certain year, then you better work on electrifying those as well. Doesn't really matter how big that market is. Marine is very interesting. I already mentioned that.
We still expect that ships will take a long time, first of all, to be replaced, but also to be changed in the guts of the ships. I mean, you have to imagine that we go all electric. That means that there are no axles there, that all the diesel equipment is gone. It's a completely different way of operating a vehicle or a ship, in this case. So they go lower risk. They first go with electrification of their auxiliary power, their AC systems, if you talk about ferries, and then they go to the main propulsion. But we see partners, and we're working with partners that actually are aiming at both in a very thoughtful way of introduction of that.
By the way, the marine power pack you see there on the right top-hand side is also operational. And I'll, I'll come back to that because we actually use it also as—or a customer is also using it as a power generator in, on this slide. So it's the same one that you see, top, bottom right, the blue box there that says E-60 Twin. That's another application where we use more than one engine in that application. We're also building larger engines. So the next engine, the E-125, is 125 kW output, and an E-60, as the name says, is 60 kW or 59. That new engine, again, for its compactness, has more than double the power, but it, but it's.
We'll have it in the market in 2025, but we already know it's not gonna be much larger than half of the E-60. So I mean, the E-60 plus half, let me be sure. So 150%. It's not double this size. That's what I'm saying. Mobile power generations are great. If you do battery electric vehicles, that's great for us. We know you will have a charging issue. If we all go and drive electric cars, where are we gonna charge those, especially in the first few years? I'm sure there will be some solutions in the future, but right now, we already see the demand, and our customers see demands for mobile power stations that you can use to charge electric cars. Great for us. And then larger power generators.
Wanna draw your attention to the one in Italy, where we've built a power generator that is actually almost half a megawatt, that is powering a neighboring factory and is connected to the Italian grid to deliver electricity there. Now, back to why I'm showing you this. I'm showing you this because there is a long road to volume for us. We know we're scaling up, but it takes a lot of steps for our customers to go through in order to reach that scale. If you go in this graph from left to right, from exploration to scale, there are different phases that we typically see. First, they need to electrify their vehicle....
Once they've done that, or while they're doing that, we try to convince them that a fuel cell actually makes sense in that application, and they make a decision to do that. Then, obviously, they need to decide for Nuvera. We want to sell an engine to them, so we send quotes, and hopefully, we'll win the business. And then it doesn't stop. We help them build a successful engine, a successful integration in that electrical system, and make sure that they reach a demo phase, because they need to convince their customers, and often their customers' customers, to go that way. It's a very new approach, so everybody is trying to minimize the risk. And then you go to perhaps a demo fleet of 10, which, for us, means you start the scaling up.
So the numbers you see are the customers we have in these different phases. The idea, of course, is that we get all these customers to the right-hand side, to the scaling phase. Every customer will have a potential of volume that they target to sell or will sell. For us, in the beginning, these are one-offs, but we are very, very kind of keen on making that progress go faster. Again, in the blue on the bottom, very important, the last time we were face-to-face, we only had two active applications. One was Hyster-Yale, which we still have. The other one was Zero-G in China on the buses, which we also still have. That took much longer for all kinds of reasons, hydrogen one of them, but also all of the environments.
I think the key fact is that right now, we have over 100 of these, customer engagements. We have more than 20 active applications, in operation, and those are facts. Now, we do try to accelerate that. Obviously, what we can do, we'll do. Already mentioned that, adding more products to the product line, but also seeing what we can do to help them build these engines into their vehicles. So we have stacks. From stacks, we build subsystems, and what we sell actually are engines.
But what we try to do now is, together with the partners we already have or customers that have been successful, add a step in between level two and level three, and that is showing new customers what systems they might use for integrating a fuel cell into an electric system. Because you need tanks, you need a power intake, you need electronics. That is actually what we're trying to do, and that's not so much to generate more revenue, because we could decide, are we going to be a middleman in selling these components? We can, and in fact, Hyster-Yale is doing it for some of their applications as well, but it's merely to speed up for Nuvera.
Now, what we do more on broadening our say addressable market is, we're not ignorant of things happening around us. We are focused on the markets that are already mentioned, but we do see that a lot of customers, new customers, are starting to pull at us. Now, because of the fact that it's modular and scalable, it's easy for us, relatively easy, to accommodate those customers. And again, you've already seen a picture of a locomotive. This is another one. This is a shunt locomotive in Italy, where even in Europe, can you imagine what is the opportunity in the U.S.?
But even in Europe, there are many places where the trains are not electrified or you have duty cycles that cannot be electrified, and they all run by diesel locomotives right now. Now, there are already electric locomotives, so you don't have to electrify it, you just pick another one, but you need to have a source of electric power, and it cannot be the overhead grid. Adding a fuel cell or even a cart with additional hydrogen tanks next to or behind that train is a relatively low-risk demo for those companies. That's what we're working on. Marine. We have our first engines certified for marine in Europe. Very important. This is a different industry.
We're not used to that, but we have great partners that help us modularize that, and they actually will be the ones going to market. Again, we work with them. We help them build our systems in that, and then we work with them to distribute that. A great potential. Cranes is a very interesting one. These big cranes, again, port equipment, they are quite often already electric, but they carry a diesel generator on their back. Now, for us, a power generator is pretty easy. It's, you don't have to fit it in, into a specific space. You just make sure you have all the components there. So that's what we are doing with cranes there, within a project in the U.S. And then power generators.
Again, we see a lot of these things happening in Europe. We see less of that in the U.S., and obviously, that, again, has to do with cost right now. But we also see applications where you really need zero-emission power generator, and this green thing on wheels, that's what we're building with a, or have built, actually, because it works with a an electronics partner of ours. We are now kind of seeing if we can bring it to market as our own product, whether that's Nuvera or whether that's Hyster, and starting in the in the U.S. And that is taking out one of those steps that is holding our scaling up back.
So we are looking for ways that we can influence to speed up the application of fuel cells, and these are a couple of those. Now, what I want you to take away from this presentation is that, first of all, fuel cell engines are real. They are there. You might not see them in the streets right now, but they definitely are there. And it's growing. It's growing across a lot of markets. It also takes a lot, a lot of time to be ready for that. So if you decide now to, "Oh, let's do fuel cells," I can guarantee to you that will take a long time. So the entry so competition entry is very difficult, and we see that already that market is immense.
So we feel that with Nuvera Fuel Cells, Hyster-Yale is already a leader in that zero emission powertrain solution, and we can bring that to market together as one of the clear examples that it can be successful. Thank you for your time. And now I want to introduce Scott Minder, our CFO and Treasurer, for wrapping up this section.
Thanks, Lucien. Nuvera's got some great technology, and it's a real opportunity for Hyster-Yale moving forward. So Lucien said, my name is Scott Minder. I'm honored today to be on stage as the CFO of Hyster-Yale. I joined the company about a year ago, and what a great year it's been. Record production, record revenues, and record profits, and I really think this company is in the early stages of what it can accomplish. So with that, let's jump into the financials. I'm gonna cover where we've been, where we're heading, and give you a framework for how to think about our future financial results. So it starts with our recent past, and that puts our current situation into the right context. These charts here look at four income statement and cash flow metrics over time.
They start with 2018 on the left, and they go through the last 12 months, ending Q3 2023 on the right for each. Two things stand out for me here. We turned the corner in late 2022, and we haven't looked back. We've had four profitable quarters in a row, and we've moved the needle on all these other metrics. I think just as importantly, we're ahead of where we were in 2018 and 2019 on each one of these metrics. So the recovery and growth here are pretty impressive. But what matters is how did we get here? Ultimately, how are we going to sustain that performance? So like many industrial companies in 2020, 2021, we faced material cost inflation.
We put five price increases into the market to offset that, and I can tell you, year to date, we've offset accumulated of inflation in our business. We've also developed a pricing agility that Tony referred to, that's gonna benefit us going forward. Also, like many industrial companies, we had to reduce costs in 2020 as the market shrank. Not only did we reduce the temporary costs, we took a look at the fixed cost structure to lower the break-even point and ultimately give us better flexibility moving forward. A couple of examples. We increased the size and scope of our shared services operations in India, and we also combined overlapping regional teams in areas like marketing and pricing, not only to be more cost-efficient, but also to be ultimately to be more effective. Good progress there, but more work to do.
You've heard a lot about the strategic initiatives today. Well, those played in here as well. Modular, scalable trucks, industry-specific approach to products and sales. Those are gonna continue to benefit us as well. These things really helped us turn the corner, but they also lay the foundation for continued progress toward our long-term objectives. Speaking of long-term objectives, you've heard a lot about them today, but I wanted to clearly lay them out for you on a single page. On the far left, we have GDP ++ growth. Now, that's a term we've coined here, but I think as Rajiv explained, we expect the materials handling industry to outpace GDP. Why? Because of e-commerce growing in size and scope and supply chain localization efforts going on around the world. We think Hyster-Yale can even grow faster than that.
We've talked a lot about increasing share with our new products. We've talked about increasing revenue with our new technologies, and as Lucien laid out, Nuvera provides us with a really unique opportunity in hydrogen fuel cells. The next box speaks to our operating margins. We intend to earn 7% operating margins over time. We've, we've moved the needle a lot in 2023, and we're gonna continue to do that as the revenue base grows. The strategic initiatives have helped us get there, and they're gonna help sustain that going forward. But I think the technology applications, combined with our new products, can be a real game changer for Hyster-Yale over time, and we're gonna keep working on reducing that break even and making our cost structure more flexible. The next box over, we aim to have working capital at 15% of sales.
We all know that cash generation starts with working capital efficiency, and if you take that 15% number and multiply it by our LTM revenue, it's a $150 million opportunity for more cash from operations. It's a huge opportunity, and the good news is we've operated at that level in the past. So it's getting back to where we were, and we've got a lot of opportunity in our supply chains with modular, scalable products. And we've got new tools that we've put in place over the last year and a half or so, to really better align inventory and production rates in a dynamic environment. And last, on the far right side of the page, you have our goal to have at least a 20% return on total capital employed. And that's really a culmination of the other three metrics here.
Profitable growth is gonna expand your numerator, working capital efficiency, along with capital spending discipline, is going to optimize your denominator. And when you work on both at the same time, you have significant opportunities here. So I've covered where we've been, and I've laid out our long-term financial goals. Now I'm gonna paint the picture where we're headed by combining the two. So this is a familiar slide with a couple of key differences. First, the graphs are now the metrics you saw on the last page. So these are how we've been performing since 2018 to the middle of each chart to the last twelve months. So you see the same improvement trends, both to the most recent periods, but you also see improvements versus 2018 and 2019 on all but working capital, and that's getting close, right?
It's improving, but we're not there yet. So the "so what" on this page really becomes the far right bar on each one of these graphs, and that's the goal that I laid out on the last page. So we've made a strong rebound, but there's a big opportunity ahead between the current performance and that long-term goal. So I'll summarize the actions to get us there and keep us there. So I can't say enough how important our modular and scalable products are for us. They're gonna help with profitable market share expansion, increasing the top line, as well as reducing working capital with fewer suppliers and a more tight supply chain, you know, optimizing the bottom line, so really moving our return on capital forward.
Our industry-specific approach to product and sales, we're gonna deliver a capable lift truck with a specific attachment for our customers' needs and their industry needs, and I think that's really important, and it's a value proposition I think we can really price for over time. We're gonna add those emerging technologies to our trucks, and I think this can revolutionize our business, both with expanding revenue, but, bringing in new recurring revenue streams into the business that we haven't had in the past. And, of course, we're going to keep working with the pricing agility that we've developed over the past couple of years. So getting to the targets is part of the story. Staying there is the other part of the story.
So those four things that I just covered are gonna help us get there and stay there, but we're confident that our end markets are gonna grow. And I think we've laid out a case for our ability to grow faster than our end markets. And we're gonna become more leaner in our operations and our supply chains, ultimately building more trucks with less working capital over time. So we're lowering that break-even point to absorb cyclicality in our business. When we do these things, I think free cash flow becomes more significant and more consistent for our business. So the last three slides really talked about how we're gonna achieve our long-term goals and sustain that performance. This lays out our cash allocation framework. There's really three sections to this slide.
The top part talks about how we're going to increase more operating cash, and it starts with using our fixed assets more effectively, running our factories optimally. The middle box really talks to how we're going to better align our working capital, our inventory with our production. And the last box talks about applying that same discipline to all of our other investments, getting the most out of our people and our technologies as we move forward. So the bottom... The middle and the bottom section of the graph really talk about our cash usage. And the middle section talks about our more foundational cash usage. Not that the dollars are set, but these are consistent uses of our capital over time. So we're gonna, as many in the room happy to hear, we're gonna maintain our debt.
We're going to pay our debt to our banks. We're also gonna routinely maintain our factories. This is important for us. We're also gonna invest in our products. Now, I've separated evolutionary R&D to revolutionary R&D, and here I'm talking about evolutionary R&D, making sure our products are fresh, and they can deliver what our customers need. And last, really important to us is providing a reliable dividend to our shareholders. We've paid a quarterly dividend every quarter since we became a public company in 2012, and it's our intent to continue to do this throughout the business cycle. We think that's important. And the final section on this page really says: What are we gonna do with the excess free cash flow that's left after that middle section? And we'll start on the left. We're gonna reduce leverage.
We think it's important for a company like ours to use our ABL sparingly to not at all in the upcycle, and then to use it reasonably in the downcycle to sustain our business. We're also gonna fuel growth. We're gonna do that organically by investing in revolutionary R&D, the type of R&D that brought you the modular and scalable products, as well as the new technologies that we've talked about. And we're also gonna invest in making our factories more efficient and our supply chains more effective. The next box speaks to inorganic. We can invest M&A to acquire capabilities or to accelerate development of capabilities, accelerating the results and the financials. And then, after reasonably filling up those three buckets, we'll return excess free cash to our shareholders over time.
And we're keep one thing in front of us at all times, and that's that bottom number on the chart. We do all of this allocation with a return on capital of at least 20% in mind. So I'm gonna wrap up with this slide. I think, I'm pretty lucky. I get to take all the hard work of my prior presenters, and I get to roll it up into a single capstone slide, sort of all the hows and whats on a single page. So it starts on the left with our last 12 months financials, and we've talked about these already. But just to put into context, these are significantly better than they were in 2020, 2021, but also better than they were in 2018 and 2019, so we're starting from a position of strength.
In the middle, you have the goals that I just walked you through: GDP++ growth, 7% operating profit, and 15% of sales for working capital. I think I've made a compelling case, or we've made a compelling case for achieving and sustaining of these across the business cycle. And if we do that, we're gonna generate cash, and we've talked about how we're gonna deploy it, accelerating the momentum in our flywheel. So moving from the first column to the middle column, it's just math.... We're gonna be a $5 billion company, generating $350 million of operating profit. We're gonna turn $300 million of that into cash from operations, and we're gonna do all that while achieving at least a 20% return on capital.
And we think that's, that's important, and I think that's really the message for you to walk away with today. But there's one important detail left to go, and that's the far green box that represents Nuvera. Today, Nuvera is more financially akin to a startup business, strong technology and growing market momentum. And this business isn't where we thought it would be when we bought it. However, we're closer than ever to achieving our objectives. Our customers are more interested in hydrogen today, and we have more customers, as Lucien laid out. And we can really combine the experience of a vehicle OEM and the leading technologies of hydrogen and bring that together into a very powerful proposition for the market.
So the bottom line, we've got two great mature businesses with outsized opportunities in their markets, and we've got a dynamic green energy business with demonstrated technologies and a growing customer base. So we think one and one make three, and we hope we made a compelling case for you to feel the same way. With that, I'm gonna hand the floor over to Al Rankin, our Chairman, to conclude and take us into Q&A.
You know, in summary, we believe that we have sound, long-term core strategies, that those strategies are backed by key projects, that those projects have a clear path to completion, that they're being executed in a very disciplined manner, and that individually, in some cases, and certainly collectively, that they give us differentiation from our competitors. We expect those to lead to revenue growth, profit growth, cash generation, and to do that on the back of a low capital intensity approach to the business. We believe that these strategies and projects can support a 20% or more return on total capital employed, and by that we mean our investors' capital and our debt, which is... and that, that 20% would be backed by a 7% operating target. And it would also include a sound and growing fuel cell business over time.
We would suggest that there are several key takeaways. First, we have attractive global markets that support a solid, long-term growth potential in all of our three businesses. Second, we have technology-enabled materials handling solutions that are designed to solve our customers' most difficult problems. And third, we have hydrogen fuel cell solutions, which can provide the energy sources of the future for a significant set of applications, which include lift trucks. And fourth, we have accelerating financial results. We've come out of the difficulties of the COVID period with strong returns on capital and supported by strong P&L results. We further believe that when you stand back from all this, that Hyster-Yale is a solid long-term investment option.
It's an innovative, disciplined, long-term-focused company with a core lift truck and attachment business that's in an established industry that provides substantial growth and consistent growth potential. It has high barriers to entry, good profit generation from new products, technology, and market penetration, and very strong operating cash generation potential. It also has a fuel cell business that's an emerging business in a technology area that we believe will provide really significant long-term growth opportunities. It's a next-generation technology, which is backed by patents, that are very substantial in the fuel cell area, and we're building for the future, but we're doing that with a clear focus on increasing revenues in the near term.
We think that all of this combines innovation and disciplined execution to create strong outcomes, and can lead to increasing shareholder value off of a base that we think is undervalued and under-recognized at the moment, and it gives us a lot of potential, and both from an operating and a profit perspective as we look forward. With that, we'll now turn to question period, and I believe that the presenters will all come up to the front, and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
While everybody is moving up front and we're getting situated, I just wanted to say a couple of reminders. Please complete the survey that is at your desk and leave it on the registration desk when you do leave here today. Also, we have provided boxed lunches for everybody in attendance, so please feel free to grab one of those as you leave once we are done with our event. Thank you so much. We will get started here in just a second.
... Looks like we're missing one.
We need some microphones.
Okay. Do we have enough microphones up there?
No, we have another one.
Okay. All right, do we have questions?
Sure.
You knew I was gonna ask.
Yes.
So, okay, I got three questions for you. I'm gonna start with lift truck. You know, there was a good discussion with regards to Maximal, and now it's outperformed, you know, the expectations since you got involved with it. And so my question-
Hey, hey, Ted?
Yeah.
If you bring your mic up just a little bit for everyone.
You can't hear me?
Yeah.
Oh, well, no, but I'm a really loud speaker. I wanna talk about JAPIC. And so, I mean, really where I'm getting at it is, you know, it's a business that has been running at an operating loss. You have, you know, the Chinese lift truck business that's outperforming. And so I guess my question is, you know, at what point do we see that portion of the lift truck, you know, business for Hyster-Yale move into a positive operating margin?
Yeah, so, maybe I'll take that one and then pass it to Tony. So what you heard Tony say that we're localizing more and more of the product that JAPIC needs into our Fuyang facility. So if you look at, as you're looking at the results of today, what you're seeing is significant import from EMEA and Americas into that market. Within the next couple of years, they'll have everything they need localized, so I think that's the timeframe we should be looking for them to be sustainably profitable. But Tony, what else do you want to add to that?
Yeah, I would say, you know, part of it, too, is, you know, how we do our, our management reporting. In reality, there's a significant amount of export to our other sales divisions, where we recognize a good portion of the revenue and profit for those products. So as an entity in that region, it is very accretive to our business right now and adding value, not just in the products, but in the continual development of that scalability that we talked about. So I think, you know, Rajiv noted that we are going to see the growth in the region from the volumes driven by the localized product.
We've got the OpEx base that will support that today, so we'll be leveraging that OpEx base that we have there today, and so I think that we'll be seeing that in the not-so-distant future.
Thanks. My second question is on Nuvera. I would just like a little more color. You highlighted the 2.5 level, and you know, I'm just kind of curious, as you work and try to bring the other parts of the solution that need to, you know, happen for implementation, are you working with specific partners to bring in the tanks and all the things that bring that 2.5 level, or are you doing it yourself? I mean, what you know, kind of how is that strategy, you know, evolving and playing out?
Yeah. So maybe, again, I'll say a few words, and then Lucien can build on it. So what we've found, you know, one of the elements that's taken us more time than we expected is the immaturity of the supply chain. A lot of the components we use outside the fuel cell are emerging components, whether we're talking about tanks, DC-to-DC converters, some of the power electronics that goes with it, or even some of the components such as a, you know, electrified air compressors at high voltage. So those are coming along, and certainly, we are integrating those into our trucks, and that provides a component base. But then Lucien can talk about the other places we have those components maturing.
Okay. Thank you, Rajiv. Yeah, Hyster-Yale obviously is the most progressing one, also easiest for us to access, but we have others. Thank you for the question because I forgot to thank Dayco as an important automotive supplier for providing a level 2.5 drawing. We're working with them as an example because there are others of companies that are reinventing themselves. They see electrification happening, so mature traditional companies, system suppliers, that are reinventing themselves, and they are investing in this area, and they can do that much better than we. They already have the distribution channels and the relations and all of that. So we're very lucky that we can use those kind of partners. We have Urban Mobility Systems in Europe.
They actually do already convert diesel-powered products into small series of electrified products. They've done it always with batteries. They now recognize that, hey, a fuel cell, that would be great. So we have a collaboration agreement with them. Power Innovations, which is on the electronic side, that we actually kind of work together with on that trailer with the power generator and a couple more. So, we are fortunate that we are seen and noticed in the market, and that takes away a lot of our kind of burden because we want to be focused on that fuel cell business. We want to be the best. That's why they came to us in the first place. But we're not blind for future opportunities in that area.
Then my last question, 'cause Scott, I'm not gonna leave you out. On the long-term financial goals, $5 billion in revenue, 7% operating margins, you know, I mean, is there any timeline you want to put around it?
Maybe we could start with Al in a kind of well-
... giving us his thoughts on that.
Well, I think we have a very long-term perspective, but if you look at the nature of the strategies and the programs that were laid out and take an execution period of the next very few years, the platform is laid to accomplish those objectives. In the near term, unless we have an unexpected event, like a steep downturn, in which case you have to adjust for that, that's not something we can control. Frankly, we don't see that now. We were more worried, as I think many people were, just a few months ago, about a steeper downturn. On the other hand, historically, it has been a cyclical business.
We do think with some of the characteristics we have today, we'll be a less cyclical business, going forward than we were in the past, because some of these technological innovations that David and Tony described are gonna provide an underpinning for the business that's quite different from just the original unit business. I think it's very significant that we've demonstrated that, even at 5%, that we can generate the 20% or so return on total capital employed. That's a substantial achievement to get. It's not just the investors' equity, it's also the debt that we have, the total capital employed.
It's one of the reasons that I think Scott can summarize the business the way he did as a real cash flow generator when we operate at those levels. So I think that what that leads to is a sense that we have the capabilities now, and we can drive it further in the near term rather than the long term, assuming the economy continues to be supportive. Rajiv, you want to add to that?
Sure. I think our focus is to continue to execute our initiatives that we've walked you through. We know with our financial planning that those pretty much bring us those results. The only variable is will the market... You know, how the market will behave. So, you know, timing is difficult to predict, but sooner rather than later.
You know, I'd just like to give a lot of credit to the team that you heard today. I think we've demonstrated that we are willing as a company, and have been willing over time, to take a very long-term, steady, consistent view. It's hard to describe the magnitude of the undertaking involved in a complete set of modular, scalable products that we outlined. Rajiv and his team, and the product development side had that vision, and they really put it in place. There were parts of it that were quite agonizing in the early days, as we've done something that we believe none of our competitors have come close to, and that's a linchpin to providing cost-effective solutions for our customers.
So, a lot of this is what you heard, I think, is about laying the groundwork over a long term, over a long period of time, for future results that we think are now starting to come to pay off for us.
Thanks. Hi. Wanted to follow up on that one, on absorbing cyclicality, and good to hear you're more optimistic than perhaps a couple of months ago. Just with your backlog position, $3.5 billion, and some of the initiatives you've taken, maybe talk about how you've lowered break even and how you would perform if we did go into a bit of a deeper downturn?
Yeah, I mean, even if there is, you know, of course, this is projection, but from everything we're seeing, if there is a downturn, we don't expect it to be very big, because there is a huge amount of upward pressure on the economy, just purely on demographics. You know, the Gen Y, Gen Z generations really haven't got to their peak spending yet. But, you know, if we do have a recession, we have that backlog. It'll act as a shock absorber. It'll allow us to adjust. You know, we're pretty much tracking things by production line, product line, and as the lead times come down, we are adjusting our the way we go to market on those products, to add to the backlog at the rate we need it.
So, I think that's the strategy we'll pursue, and we're feeling pretty confident that we'll get through that.
I think the only thing I would add to that is that. And again, it's both the right thing to do from a business point of view, but it's also a contingency. It addresses a contingency of a downturn. And that is that we still have very substantial excess inventory, as Scott really outlined in his discussion of working capital. We think we can bring in 2024 that working capital way down, and that puts us in a very good position to get our returns in the face of some of these difficulties. We've stabilized production. At this point, our suppliers are now pretty supportive.
We have worked through labor shortage issues in our various plants, and I think that lays the groundwork for a different kind of improvement in 2024, but a really important one in terms of our returns on capital and being prepared if the markets don't perform the way that we think they should. So 2024 should be a year of very significant cash generation.
... Maybe a follow-up. You talked about footprint optimization. I guess, where do you stand on that journey longer term, and what is sort of contemplated in that long-term model on that side?
Yeah, I think we're, I would say, you know, kind of in the early stages of that. You've, you've heard that we've expanded Fuyang. That was critical. We'll further expand Fuyang to produce big truck for our JAPIC market, as well as some of our other, emerging markets. And then you heard Tony say that we want to produce, our, you know, internal combustion engine trucks and electric trucks on the same line. Today, that's not the case either in Europe or North America. The plan is to do that. That will further, you know, aggregate that counterbalance production line, and then we'll go from there. So we think, I would say by the end of 2026, we'll, would have pretty much implemented all the changes.
Thanks. Maybe one last one on Nuvera. Maybe just talk about that chicken and egg problem more, more broadly. I think you talked about 25, 26, some mandates in California. You know, when would customers need to, to place orders there? Talk about the hydrogen hubs and some of that investment, and just, just hydrogen in general.
Yeah, it's always difficult to predict. I mean, we've seen it in the past. Things are being delayed, but it's now so overwhelming. So I always say that, I mean, Nuvera has been there when there were hypes around hydrogen. And they came and they went. But what is different today, and we see it. First of all, it's global. I mean, you see it all over the world. It's global, it's not just one region. We're not dependent on California or one particular place. You see a difference in attitude from governments. They cannot just be more green, one by the other, but also traditional companies. So it's taken seriously. What we see now is an eagerness to get into that business that we haven't seen before.
It always was a niche. Now, they—you see, the market trying to find the, the most kind of prosperous and, and, and good players there. Where the politics go, I cannot tell you. We, we hear all kind of different, kind of new parties say, "No, we shouldn't be going as fast." Others say, "We need to go faster." So I don't do any prediction on that. We just keep our focus on the longer-term strategy, and up to now, it has been paying off because, I mean, changing a strategy is, is, something that we are, kind of not doing right now.
One thing that, you know, we've seen is that you have to on these heavy trucks that you have to experience the pain of trying to do it with batteries first before you realize that's not gonna get the job done. Now, we've told people that, but looks like you have to feel the pain before you get the religion of finding the next—the right solution. And somewhat, we've done that ourselves. If you look at our medium-size trucks, they're all lithium-ion batteries. That's because we don't have the right size fuel cell for them. But we know as soon as we have that, we're going to turn them into fuel cell trucks, because battery alone is difficult for our customers to handle.
So as we get into medium-duty trucks, for instance, especially medium-duty trucks that have some form of accessory, whether it's a dump truck, whether it's a refrigerated truck, traction is not the only demand. It has ancillary power. It's gonna be impossible to, to just work on battery. So I think that's still for the market to learn, because we've had dialogue with all of these people, and they think, "Well, you know, we think we can make it work." And then sooner or later, they realize it won't, and then, you know, they look to fuel cell. So-
That's the inflection point right there, is when they realize that it won't work, and instead of thinking they're gonna get half or two-thirds battery of one of these heavy-duty applications, they switch to two-thirds fuel cell, one-third battery, or whatever the numbers may turn out to be. That's the moment when we think demand will rise very rapidly, and hopefully supported by the hydrogen infrastructure that Lucien outlined, and the timing of that fits that profile pretty well.
One real quick request from the stage. When you ask a question, can you let us know who you are and where you're from? That would be helpful.
Okay.
Brian Sponheimer from Gabelli Funds. Just a question: If I were to go back five years and look at your 2018 day, the targets then were for an 8% operating margin as well. You know, obviously, while inflation has played a role from a purchase component standpoint and labor as well, you put together a terrific day where you, there's an obvious value proposition for your customers. I guess, why wouldn't the potential profitability for this business be closer to some other specialty equipment manufacturers in the 9%-10% range? Is there anything holding you back from a pricing perspective there? And can you talk about the pricing and the backlog, the dynamics there?
Yeah. I, I don't recall us ever having an 8% target. It's been 7%. Yeah.
Yes, yeah.
So seven, it continues to be seven, and I think part of the issue is what I talked about, that we only manufacture the critical components that make a lift truck a lift truck, as I've said, those are chassis and those are masts, and we buy everything else. Now, a lot of our competitors and adjacent companies, when you think about some of the agriculture companies or construction companies, they make a lot more of the truck themselves. They have to deploy a huge amount of capital to do that. So the way we would really like you to think about our company is we are very capital intensive, efficient. That does hold us back on the return on sales, in our operating profit, because we're also, you know, using suppliers who need to make their own. We want sustainable suppliers, they need to be profitable.
Whereas a number of our competitors and adjacent, they, you know, they really build up that profitability because they make a lot more of the components. They also own their networks, which is, we know, is a profitable portion, but also, again, you need to deploy a lot of cash.
So let me take it one step further, if I could. I think if you reflect back on the presentations that were made right from the very beginning and throughout the presentation, and then particularly in the summary financial presentation that you heard, the return on capital came first. If you look at those same competitors that you're describing with a higher return and operating profit, their returns on capital employed are really low. That's the trade-off, and it's a very practical one. From our point of view, they aren't getting a good return for their shareholders' money, and even at those higher operating profit levels.
We think the 7% is well integrated with the 20% and with the capital deployment concept that everyone has described and that Rajiv just went through.
I appreciate that color. Just one question, though. Parts, what percentage of parts or your revenues are parts that go out to your independent dealers? And is there an opportunity there?
Yeah. I think our Hy-C are platform or our customer care platform that we're building is to increase both part penetration into our network. I mean, we're already doing very well, but there's definitely room for us to provide all the parts they need. And also on the service side, more of the, you know, services around digitization, automation, the OAS system. And so I think those are all good opportunities for parts and service support.
Is any part of the tech subscription system?
There's gonna be a fair bit of that. Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we've moved away from the terminology of parts to aftermarket. That's really what Rajiv was describing, is no longer going to be just parts, but a whole variety of services and follow-on capabilities, and regular recurring revenues from some of them, like telemetry, for example, and others.
I have a question, actually, from the webcast, and this is from Steve Ferazani at Sidoti. Says: "How focused are you now on gaining share in the U.S.? Have you ramped up introduction of entry-level trucks in the U.S. to gain share?
Yeah. In terms of gaining share, we're very focused. Now, we have to talk about our, you know, the way our lead time is. We're, you know, kind of we're still, you know, kind of leading in the on the pricing side as well, because if you have that long lead time, you want to be, you know, want to be very careful what you're adding to your backlog, because, again, we don't know what will happen to, to inflation. In terms of introducing the, the, you know, our value trucks, we're moving ahead with that. In fact, we've already introduced it in each of the markets. There is going to be a big drive for both the lift truck business as well as, Bolzoni globally, to push the value truck as well as the Silver Line attachments.
They actually go very well together.
Tony, why don't you outline how you see the timing of all that coming together in the Americas in terms of playing out here in the next year or so, both with regard to the backlog and how the new trucks come in to position us for share?
Yeah, I think a couple things. One is, as we look to our focus on share, it's not just a general quest for share. It's a very focused, targeted understanding of where we're going to get the share, and that's the value of the industry focus approach. We know the customers that we're gonna get share from, and we know exactly what solutions we're gonna bring to do so. And of course, the value products that we're talking about from Fuyang are not just to serve a low-cost market. There's actually many of our customers today who have operations that and applications that don't need a standard or premium level truck. They're low usage, low duty applications that are really fit for the products that we're gonna bring in from Fuyang and that scalability.
So, you know, as we look from a timing perspective, those are actually the type of applications and customers we're focused on now, because the availability of those trucks, you know, are far shorter than what we have in our other U.S. and EMEA plants. So, you know, we are in the position now where we're transitioning from what we had called the UT/UX product that was produced in our Fuyang plant to moving all of that scalability onto our recently launched ANN platform, which is going to further enhance, you know, the competitiveness of that product line because it's part of the family.
It's got the look, the feel, of the other, the rest of the lineup of that product, which is really gonna be beneficial for our customers and for our sales teams.
Now, just as a sort of a follow-up, and it ties to an earlier question with regard to the Maximal business. If you go back 15-20 years ago, there was no truck that was designed to serve the lower intensity use products that Tony just described. There were only standard and premium trucks in the marketplace, by and large. And that existed over the period when Japan came into the market and challenged the rest of the world in the forklift truck business, and then moved from Japan to Korea. When it moved to China, the game changed because the market potential was so enormous. So, but also, the applications in China tend to be low intensity.
And so the economy of scale structure for building low intensity trucks emerged in China, and it's the only place to really have those skills and that kind of cost-effective solution for what has now become a global need. But it couldn't become a solution until the Chinese created the market volumes to sustain and support that kind of a truck. And so from our point of view, the acquisition of Maximal was certainly about doing better and covering the losses we were incurring in Asia Pacific with our existing standard and premium lines. But it was really about making sure that we were able to compete in the developed world as those application needs changed. So it's a global business, and this is just one more, if somewhat different, manifestation of that.
Follow-up on share question, but a little different spin. Where are we in the robotics evolution for lift trucks? What kind of share do you think automated trucks could hold 5-10 years in the future? And are you using partners to develop this technology?
So right now, that market is extremely fragmented. There's probably 20 different players that all have, you know, very low single-digit percentages of that market, 1% or 2%, something to that magnitude. We're a little bit higher than that with what we have in place right now. As we start that scaling process, we think we have a very unique opportunity in terms of not just the technology, but all the things to deploy and deploy at scale, which has really been difficult for everyone else to do. There's so much handholding that has to get done. There's so much ongoing support that the distribution network, combined with the, the real application intensity focus of the business, just leaves us unique.
From that base, we really think we'll separate and scale the way few other people have been able to do, and we think that over time, that market space can be as much as very high single digits to 10% of the units sold over the long haul.
Yeah, I think it also depends on the infrastructure. We expect there to be continued shortage of labor, especially for this type of work. And so I think at a minimum, I think if we think about 10 years from today, what's my expectation? I think if you leave out the lower-end Class III trucks, the pedestrian Class III trucks, I won't be surprised if in 10 years, 25% of the trucks we're shipping are automated.
David, say a little bit, if you would, about the evolution that we're focused on toward easily implementable solutions as opposed to complex custom solutions.
Yeah. So I guess the prior comment was about having all the pieces in place to scale, but then the technology. This year, we'll be implementing a next-generation technology that we think is really gonna make the ease of installation a whole another thing. Yes, you need a lot of handholding, but the next-generation technology is gonna make deployment radically easier. We know the commissioning process is gonna be third expensive, and that's important. But just as important, any lift truck that you have, a great performance might be 97%-98% missions complete. There's always some contingency that happens that will freeze the truck, and that needs to be rescued. That ease of installation, just as critically, is ease of rescue. So if a truck happens to stop, somebody can jump on it, get it going in no time at all.
It's gonna help drive adoption in a very market way.
At this point, we think that our strategy is relatively unique, that others are not moving in that direction as fast as we are. David, is that correct?
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think most of the competitors are smaller technology companies, and you look at their deployments, they are very bespoke. They're not really designed for kind of broad scalability. They're being mostly in that proof of concept mode, but they're not really designing for scale.
Mm.
That's really where we started our position from the very, very beginning, and that's what, again, just one more factor of why we think that's gonna drive that forward.
If I could just add one thing to that. I think many of the competitors in the space are these smaller automation companies that are typically acquiring a chassis from a lift truck company. They don't know the material handling industry, they don't know how to integrate into the lift trucks very well, and they certainly don't have a presence in the market, nor a distribution network to support it. So while there are a lot of players and everybody's, you know, out there, you know, marketing and trying to position and develop, at the end of the day, I think it's the OEMs that are gonna be in the best position to deploy what is essentially just an automated lift truck. And we're already in that industry. We have the network to drive it.
We know our customers, we know the problems, we know how to solve it, right? And when we look across our other competitors, they're not taking the same approach that we are to making this a very practical and easily adoptable and deployable technology.
Mm.
I think that's the advantage. So, you know, it, it's going to grow, and when it does, I think we're gonna be in a very strong position.
I think you have to look at the past to get an understanding of the future. So we were here, I mean, you know, for on telemetry in 2012, 2013, and there were at least 80 companies in North America that were developing telemetry, some form of telemetry for lift trucks. And we talked to all of them, and there was a lot of fear from all of them. And in the meantime, we tied up with a partner, implemented our own telemetry, and 95% of those companies no longer exist, whereas we have over 65,000 telemetry systems in service, and now we're selling around 25,000 a year. So I think, as I said earlier in the presentation, our distribution is one of our superpowers.
Anything we do that doesn't enable those 3,500 salespeople and 11,000 technicians globally is not leveraging our superpower, and that's why we've had to develop our own automation. That's why we've had to develop our own OA, you know, Operator Assist System, our own telemetry, because they're all designed to leverage that superpower.
Any more questions in the room? Oh.
Yeah. How's it going? Justin Landsberg, Brightline Capital. So you've talked a ton about modularity, fewer parts, all of that, with this latest generation that you're trying to phase in, of electrified stuff and all of that, and that's all great. I was just thinking like, is there a possibility that there is, you know, with the older generation of stuff that's out there right now, less aftermarket intensity with this, with the new electrified units? There are just fewer parts. You're saying someone mentioned there are only 12, you know, or, or, something like that. So is it possible that you just see, not quite as high touch potentially, and that just reduces the frequency of your aftermarket throughput?
Yeah. You know, that's certainly a concern as you electrify, because if you just take parts, that's not the full aftermarket, right? But parts, certainly, electric trucks consume about two-thirds of the parts that internal combustion engine, because the rest of the truck's still a lift truck, right? Still has a pretty big hydraulic system. There's still seals, hoses, tires. So, that's true. But then, when you put smart batteries in, when you put fuel cells in, then that's where the service opportunities are. You know, you sell those with service support, maintenance, data provision to make sure that those batteries... You know, it's very easy to kill a lithium-ion battery. And so those are the aftermarket potential. And then you go to OAS systems and automation, they'll also come with service charges.
Telemetry.
Yeah, telemetry. You know, there's a monthly charge.
Can we get a little bit more expansion on that from maybe a tech perspective? I don't know if David can do that. I'm just not quite understanding what that-
Yeah, so-
touch would actually look like.
Whenever you put in a telemetry solution, an OAS solution, there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into that deployment. So for example, you saw a lot of the Amazon warehouses, deployment centers, fulfillment centers doing that. In order to put in place the wideband solutions and all of the beacons to make that technology happen, there's a whole frame of infrastructure that's got to be in place, and we provide that from a full project management standpoint to deploy that into these sites. So that's a big element of beyond the actual device and truck. And then, as others have said, there's a connectivity piece of it, where the communications part of telemetry is a very robust and profitable monthly service stream for those pieces. So it's connectivity, it's also-...
site-level infrastructure to make those technologies happen, which generally centers around some level of connectivity and power management, be it lithium-ion charging, hydrogen fueling stations, and the like.
Got it.
So just to give it some tangibility in terms of telemetry, it's not just about the data that's gathered and communicated over the network that David was describing. So what do you do with it? Which operators are causing are getting into collisions or going too fast? Telemetry will tell you that. Telemetry will tell you when certain components are starting to fail or when there's a need for to do certain kinds of maintenance. The opportunity that lies ahead to enhance our customers' profitability or productivity by really analyzing that data and helping them get better solutions is very significant. And there'll be upcharges in all the telemetry as we provide more solutions through the telemetry to those customers.
Maybe that gives you a little feel for how that business can grow and why we have to think about that aftermarket business in a much broader way than simply the parts of old and, and really enhance our overall position.
And-
I was just gonna say, and what Al described is really converted into a monthly service revenue that comes part of that stream.
Yeah, but if you just take the simplest one, right? Moving electric truck to lithium-ion batteries, a lot of our customers would like our telemetry system to track how the battery is doing, both from a just day-to-day charge, discharge cycle, to what's the quality of the battery? What actions can they take to enhance the life of the battery? Those are all going to be services that we provide our customers with a charge.
Yeah. And one last one for me. Don't mean to hog, sorry. Capital spend journey, where are you guys on your automation of your footprint right now, like % progress? How would you-
Yeah. I mean, right now, our focus is to automate majority of the welding and painting we do.
Okay.
So, that's where we're investing the most money, then it's going to be around material handling. We will generally move to more kitting and delivering, you know, material to the side of the line through automation. We're testing these at some of our plants. Assembly is always gonna be manual intensive, but we are taking a modular approach. We are trying to break out subassemblies, which can be assembled with a person and a cobot. So we're kind of experimenting with that. So that's kind of the journey, and we'll see, I would say within the next three years, majority of our welding, painting will be automated, and we'll start to see some assembly with cobot assists.
We shouldn't expect, like, a major step up or ramping up of spend to accommodate those last few legs of the-
No, just generally what we've guided as our-
Okay
... capital investment each year.
Okay.
Can't let you guys go to waste. I wanna keep going on the, technology and, automation and, you know, the customers and such. You know, it's, obviously, that's where the market's going, and as you go to that front, how does it apply to your, your dealer network, to your distribution? You know what I mean? Is the something that you're gonna have challenges with in terms of bringing them along with this? Or is this something that you're gonna sidestep them and just take it on your own?
Let me start and let you complement that. So it's a very integrated approach. So the very initial deployments, take a look at or consider Amazon's fulfillment centers that you saw. There's you know dozens of those around the U.S. that's really occupied us for the last couple of years. The very first few of those we did ourselves, hardened the solution. By the end of our deployments, that's really 75% dealer, 25% us. As the solutions evolve, we'll always be doing and hardening the initial deployment and having that bulletproof, and then we'll systematically bring the dealers along and get them engaged to scale. So that operator assist is an example where that's about 75%-80% now deployed by dealers. Telemetry, it's you know it's probably 95% on that.
What kind of, I mean, is it difficult? You know, is there a new skill set that they need? It's not just guys fixing engines and stuff.
It's, yeah, well, it's a different skill profile, right? So it's folks that are more comfortable, you know, engaging with various connectivity elements and electronics of the product, rather than more the engine side of it. So it is a slightly different skill set, but it's a skill set that the dealer base makes rather seamlessly. They understand how that works.
Well, the other... Sorry. The other thing is, you know, the mantra that I preach to the teams are: if you think it's simple enough, simplify it some more. So part of it is we need to bring down the complexity of what's required to install these systems, and that's the key reason why we're doing these ourselves because that's not what's happening in the marketplace. Marketplace is going the other way. And so I, that, you know, as I keep repeating, and I'll keep repeating it until... No, I'll just keep repeating it. Our network is our superpower, and if we can't enable that, we're wasting our time, so we have to do that.
... Yeah, I guess, just to build off of that, I mean, our dealers, one, you know, from a technician standpoint, they, they're challenged to bring on the technicians they need to, because most technicians, you know, and now don't want to be working on the internal combustion engine trucks. They want to be in this technology space. So our dealers are, you know, they're eager to be bringing on the type of talent that's gonna help them move, you know, into this next level of material handling. And they themselves are very eager to see the model continue to evolve. They themselves are exploring how they're gonna apply further technology in their businesses to try to drive value to the customer, and, you know, it's our job to provide that leadership there.
So we've got a good partnership, and they're ready to work with us along the way.
So I'd add one thing that I think is extremely important to that, and that is, as Tony has suggested, we're very, very aware of what those capabilities need to be in our dealers. And Tony outlined our movement to dual ownership of the Hyster-Yale brand and consolidation of dealers. The consolidated dealers are larger, they have more financial strength, they run their businesses more professionally, and probably that goes along with the talent that is needed to drive those organizations to do the job.
In that sense, I'd say that the day of the small mom-and-pop dealer, to the extent they still exist in our network in some areas, particularly in Asia Pacific, it's gone in the sophisticated areas, and it's moving away in all areas around the world because this is the future that David and Tony outlined, and we have to have that capability from our dealers. And the good ones can, and the big ones can do it.
My next question is just. Didn't want to leave Bolzoni out of the whole equation. You commented in your presentation about you had a bunch of, I think the term was legacy, you know, products or revenue that was lower margined, and over time, was gonna be moved over to higher margin stuff. I wonder if you could spend a little time talking about what's gonna be happening with regards to your revenue mix that's gonna drive your margins higher. What are you shedding, and what are you replacing it with?
Okay. Legacy, when we start the operations in Sulligent, legacy was already in place, of course, transmission, drive axle to supply to Hyster-Yale directly.
So I think maybe Roberto, I'll just give you a quick background. So Sulligent was a Hyster-Yale plant, and it made transmissions, axles, steer axles, cylinders. When we bought Bolzoni, we felt that cylinders were good fit for Bolzoni, and we also felt they needed a big plant in the U.S. And our new design at that time, which was now, is now the A/N, was going to move the axles away elsewhere and move the transmissions to the assembly plants. So that's why we moved Sulligent to Bolzoni. But along with that, went the legacy transmissions and axles, which we asked Bolzoni to continue producing. Now, they don't get a lot of margin for that-
Yeah.
because it was all designed by Hyster-Yale, was being produced by Hyster-Yale, and Bolzoni just took it over. The last, for our 1-3.5-ton internal combustion engine truck, which is around two-thirds of the legacy product, will be out of production by the end of 2024.
Please continue.
No, just to make an evaluation, you know. If you don't consider our operations, you know, here in the United States, in terms of impact on our business, the Bolzoni group, except Americas, we have an EBIT of 9.7% because the margin that we are able to generate in the attachment is quite good. Said that, I'm very more than happy, you know, with this change here in, let me say, in United States, because I am here. I set up the company in United States in 1989, you know, and then was struggling, you know. Also, we start a manufacture in Chicago, and so on and so on.
But finally, right now, we have the real chance, you know, to be successful because working with Hyster-Yale, working with the organization they have here, talk about independent dealers, you know, they are moving a lot of attachments, you know? And then, Hyster-Yale is supporting Bolzoni to gain business inside these organizations, you know, and this is going to change completely our future. The legacy are going to phase out. More business about attachments are coming in with a very good margin, and this is going to be, you know, the to realize the dream. That was my dream when I set up the company here many years ago. Finally, the dream may become true.
Yeah. So we expect the legacy products to phase out and additional attachment business to come in. Some of it will be from Hyster-Yale. For instance, Bolzoni is going to produce the carriages that go on the A/N Platform. They're going to produce some of the mast components for our reach truck, but also for other people. But then on top of that is the attachment growth potential that you saw on the graph.
One last question to wrap up this Q&A session. Thank you, everybody, for all the great questions. So, Rajiv, how are you managing this growth now versus what we saw back in 2018 and 2019? Back in those years, we were only at 3%, whereas now we're closer to 5%.
Yeah, I think it's the strategic initiatives. I think we've touched on it. You know, we are bringing our break-even point down. That's through SG&A control, which is, you know, something that we talked about. You know, we are really very conscious of the work that's done locally, globally, and then what can be offshored. So we're trying to do the right work at the right place, at the right cost, and then we continue to optimize our global footprint. The other thing is, when you have scalability in products, as Tony said, you're not selling your premium products at standard or value application at a discount. Our customers are very wise. They know what they need, and they go, "Hey, we love your premium trucks, but we can't pay you the premium money.
Actually, our application is low, and so that's what we can pay for." And under those circumstances, we get a lot of margin compression. But when you have full scalability, you can position the right truck at the right price with the right margin, and that really kind of inflate, you know, supports the full margin. Now, A/N is new, but in the heart of our market, we've had scalability now for the last three or four years, with our premium trucks were the FT/VX, our standard trucks were the XT/MX, and our value trucks were the UT/UX. The unfortunate thing was they were on three different platforms. Moving forward, all those three will be on the one platform, the ANN. So that's how it's happened and how more of it's gonna happen.
Well, thank you. That ends our program. Thank you to the panel. Thank you for everybody attending. As I said, lunch is available as you walk out. We really appreciate you guys being here.
Thank you.