Good morning. My name is Devin, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Trimble to Acquire Transporeon conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question at any time, again, press star and then the number one. Thank you. I now turn the call over to CEO Rob Painter. You may now begin your conference.
Thank you everyone for joining us today. I'm Rob Painter, CEO of Trimble. With me today are David Barnes, our CFO, and Stephan Sieber, CEO of Transporeon. Before I get started, I'll call your attention to our presentation, which is available on our website. I ask that you refer to the safe harbor language on slide two, and I'll begin my commentary on slide three. The transportation industry represents one of the largest opportunities available to Trimble. It's a market that is large, global, underserved, and under-penetrated, and it is undergoing a secular adoption of technology to improve productivity and sustainability. Yesterday, we announced that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Transporeon, a leading transportation management software platform that enables automation, real-time insights and collaboration, supporting shippers, brokers, carriers and load recipients.
Transporeon's global platform possesses an expansive customer reach, executing over 25 million transports per year and processing over EUR 48 billion of freight spend per year across a network of 1,400 shippers and retailers and 145,000 carriers and logistics service providers. Transporeon's modular tools and services support customers selling and procuring freight services, executing transports, and auditing freight payments. Transporeon has delivered strong and consistent financial performance at scale with high growth in margins since the year 2000. In 2023, we expect the business to achieve EUR 190 million in revenue, delivering approximately 25% growth and a 30% EBITDA margin. More than 90% of that revenue is recurring revenue, and the business has consistently delivered over 110% net retention. This is a compelling business model that is perfectly in line with our strategy.
We've kept our eyes on this business for years. We are building a business for the long term. Assets like this don't come along often. We kept our balance sheet in a position to be able to act on opportunities like this. When we got approached, we quickly engaged. I'll take us through the strategic logic for the deal. David will cover the economics, and then we'll turn it over to Stephan to walk you through the market needs, the solution offering, the business model, customer ROI, and pertinent facts on the business. I'll come back up to wrap the call. Let's move to slide four and start with the strategic logic. The headline message is that the acquisition of Transporeon accelerates and strengthens our Connect and Scale industry cloud strategy, both across Trimble and within our existing transportation business.
The strategic logic for this transaction sits on three pillars: platform, market, and business model. Let's walk through each of them. First, Transporeon has built a scaled and cloud-based transportation management platform that connects key stakeholders across the industry life cycle to positively impact the optimization of global supply chains. This fits perfectly with what we are doing at Trimble in each of the key industries we serve. Evidence of scale comes in the form of the number of industry participants and freight moved through the platform. Evidence of platform comes in the network ecosystem of 3,000 global ERP, warehouse management systems, and transportation management systems where Transporeon has integrations. Second, the Transporeon team has built this business into a growing and profitable leader in an attractive market with low penetration that continues to have digitization tailwinds.
The upfront investment for both carriers and shippers in adopting Transporeon is modest, and the customer ROI is compelling with a quick time to value. Transporeon's market leadership position, scaled network, and robust data ingestion create greater opportunities to efficiently provide customers with the best outcome. This acquisition increases our addressable market access by approximately EUR 5 billion. Third, this deal is financially and strategically compelling to Trimble shareholders. As mentioned earlier, we expect revenue in 2023 of $190 million, which would represent approximately 25% year-over-year growth in line with its historical growth. More than 90% of this revenue is subscription or recurring transactional, and the business has consistently delivered over 110% net retention with its unique multi-sided monetization model.
The business is growth in a margin accretive for Trimble and the transportation segment. We expect to be non-GAAP EPS neutral in 2024. Looking further into the future, we see significant opportunities for a larger and more global transportation business with meaningful synergies in the years ahead. Stephan and the existing Transporeon management team will join Trimble. They are excited about accelerating their business as part of the Trimble family. In summary, Transporeon fits the mold of a Trimble business, consistent with what we know and have had success with in the past. Let me now turn to David to walk us through the pertinent economics of the transaction, starting on slide five.
As Rob mentioned earlier, we are purchasing Transporeon for EUR 1.88 billion in cash. We expect to fund the purchase with a combination of cash on hand and new debt.
We have committed debt financing from Bank of America and expect to put in place permanent financing closer to transaction closing in the first half of 2023. We expect pro forma leverage at the close of the transaction to be roughly 3.5x net debt to EBITDA. We remain committed to maintaining our investment-grade debt rating. Our plan is to delever to achieve net debt to EBITDA at or under 2.5x in 18 to 24 months. To achieve this objective, we will temporarily suspend our share buyback program and limit further acquisitions in the near term. Rob covered some of the pro forma financial aspects of the transaction. Based on those factors, we expect the acquisition to be immediately accretive to Trimble's organic revenue growth, gross margins, and operating margins.
From a non-GAAP EPS perspective, we expect the acquisition to be roughly neutral in our first full year of ownership in 2024. While our outlook for synergies is modest in the first 12 to 18 months of Trimble ownership, we see significant upside potential from revenue synergies over time. Our valuation is rooted primarily in the growth and margin profile of the Transporeon business in its current form as an independent business, and the potential for synergies represents upside to this base case. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of next year, subject to regulatory review and customary closing conditions. I'd like to now turn to Stephan Sieber to tell you more about Transporeon.
Thank you, David. First, to give you some background on myself, I have been the CEO of Transporeon for the past three years. Prior to Transporeon, I was the CEO of Unit4, a private European software company. Prior to Unit4, I was at SAP for 13 years in a variety of leadership positions. I was excited to become the CEO of Transporeon for many of the same reasons I believe it is an excellent partner for Trimble. As both companies believe in the value that the connection of the physical and digital worlds brings to improve the way our industry works for the benefit of our customers, society, and our planet. The last two years were a curse and a blessing for our industry at the same time.
Never before has the transportation industry brought so much attention, but we all also learned how structurally inefficient and full of bullwhip effects this industry still is. Lack of transparency and visibility, a low degree of digitalization, and too many decisions based on gut feelings and historical experience are the main reason for this. The transportation industry is digitally underserved, and the physical world of moving goods is only partially, if at all, connected to the digital world. Therein lies a massive opportunity to reduce waste in global transportation processes and achieve significant financial and environmental improvements. Slide seven. Transporeon is a global transportation management platform that solves freight problems where they occur, in between companies and trading partners, instead of being implemented to the sole benefit of one party.
On our platform, we provide roughly 10 applications, solving freight problems 360 degrees along the life cycle of a freight transaction. On this platform, we connect shippers, brokers, forwarders, carriers, and load recipients that we equally serve as customers. Our offering is modular, open and API-based, connecting, integrating, and coordinating with nearly every ERP, WMS, and TMS systems at our customers. Instead of replacing software, we first and foremost make sure that technology that is already in place collaborates and communicates better and allows our customers to benefit from rapid value. All our customers connect once to our platform, and with this, get access to one of the largest transportation networks worldwide. The modular nature of our offering has enabled our strong net retention of more than 110% consistently over time. Moving to slide eight.
The Transporeon business model is best characterized with three aspects. First, a rapid time to value for all customers. Second, mass micro monetization of all sides of the network. Third, a scalable cloud-native platform for all customers, leading to attractive network effects. Every month, we are adding carriers to our platform. Their onboarding process is highly digitalized and self-service. They can join our platform and start doing business in under one hour. For shippers, we usually have project durations of weeks rather than months. Even the most complex and large global industrial firms can rapidly benefit from our platform, enabling us to benefit from the ROI which the customers realize without friction from a long selling process. We strongly believe in a transparent and open-book transactional monetization model. This model best aligns the interests of all our customers in our network and ourselves.
Our ability to monetize all sides of the network as a natively built-in platform capability gives us an opportunity to accelerate and drive adoption by incentivizing the right behavior on the platform. Last but not least, running all customers on a set of native cloud applications integrated in one cloud platform gives us network density and attractive unit economics. This also allows us to co-innovate with our customers at pace and support their continuous improvement cycles with data, insights, and benchmarking. Slide nine describes how Transporeon solutions provide enormous benefit for our customers and generate tangible return on investment. We are helping participants in logistics networks by supporting and automating decision-making, providing connectivity, digitizing process workflows, and increasing trust. For example, Transporeon has been a trusted logistics partner for Knauf, a global leader in building materials, for more than 20 years.
With our platform, they've achieved 97% accurate ETA predictions, 10% improved turnaround time, and assignment and acceptance of contracted transports in less than one hour. Slide 10 describes the diverse nature of the end markets, customers, and geographies we support. Any industry in which large quantities of bulky goods are produced that need to be continuously transported over a certain distance is an attractive industry for us. We are therefore industry agnostic. Our largest industry combination is consumer goods and retail. For example, we serve Kellogg's, Kimberly-Clark, and Kraft Heinz to optimize distribution of their products into retailers all across Europe. Overall, we serve customers in roughly 10 verticals. The pie chart in the middle of this slide describes the revenue distribution based on the headquarter locations of our shipper customers.
Many of our customers operate across national boundaries, and our multinational customers use our technology to optimize transports all around the world. Over the last two years, around 80% of our growth in terms of new transports on the platform came from outside German-speaking Europe and about 40% from outside Europe. This demonstrates truly global potential of our platform. Today, we support our customers in more than 140 countries and in close to 30 languages. We are excited about the increased global presence the combination with Trimble is bringing to us as a company and to our customers, many of them multinational organizations. Our business model is strongly about recurring technology revenues. More than 90% of our revenues are either subscription or usage-based transactional revenues.
Slide 11, I'd like to comment on the performance of our business when macroeconomic conditions have been challenging. Here you can see some data from the last two periods of meaningful macroeconomic dislocation, the global financial crisis and the COVID pandemic. During these difficult periods, overall freight volumes in Europe were indeed down, but our business continued to grow. We achieved double-digit revenue growth consistently, and our net retention never dipped below 110%. We believe this experience will play out again going forward as our platform delivers productivity and cost savings when businesses need it the most. Our business model ensures rapid time to value at marginal upfront investment. Let me now turn it back over to Rob.
Let's transition to slide 12. While the Transporeon business is strong on a standalone basis, we believe that the combination of Transporeon and the Trimble transportation business will yield meaningful synergies over time. From a geographic perspective, the North American centricity of our current business complements Transporeon's European-centric footprint. The combined business will be more global and focused on a meaningfully bigger total addressable market. Trimble's strong technology footprint with carriers and our technologies in mobility, enterprise software, and maps will complement Transporeon's historically shipper focused solutions and create significant opportunities for cross-sell and higher network density. Finally, the acquisition of Transporeon will enhance the recurring revenue profile of our business and accelerate our progress towards our strategic goal of growing a trusted industry platform that transforms and optimizes workflows. Moving to slide 13, the key message is that Transporeon greatly advances our sustainability strategy.
Lots of companies talk about sustainability. We can actually deliver it. Transporeon improves matching and reduces underutilized carrier capacity and empty miles. Beyond that, it gives customers an easy, transparent, and data-driven ability to manage emissions management across all modes and workflows. Finally, Transporeon gives customers the ability to choose the greenest option based on price, capacity, and sustainability. Let's begin to wrap up on slide 14. We have a credible track record of creating shareholder value through major acquisitions. In our Investor Day presentation in September, we showed you some data on the cumulative performance of the largest acquisitions over the last several years. These deals, the largest of which was the acquisition of Viewpoint in 2018, have meaningfully contributed to the power of our Connect and Scale industry platform strategy and have accelerated our transition to recurring revenue models.
From a financial perspective, we have doubled the ARR of these businesses since the time of acquisition, while increasing operating margins from 17% to 28%. We have the proven track record of de-levering following large deals. We closed the Viewpoint acquisition in July of 2018 and committed to reducing our leverage in subsequent quarters. By the end of 2020, our leverage came down to 1.6 x. We project our leverage following the close of the Transporeon acquisition will be approximately 3.5 x, and we are firmly committed to getting our leverage back at or below our 2.5 x target in the next 18 to 24 months. Before opening up the line to Q&A, I'll close with a short summary. I'm excited to welcome Stephan and the Transporeon team to Trimble.
I'm excited at the opportunity in front of us to transform the way the world works as we execute our Connect and Scale strategy. Our level of conviction and commitment is high that we can deliver extraordinary value to our customers and our shareholders. Operator, let's open up the line for questions.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star and then the number one on your telephone keypad. Our first question will come from Jerry Revich with Goldman Sachs.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone.
Hi, Jerry.
Rob, David. Hi. Rob, David, I wonder if you just spend a minute talking about why Trimble was the best owner for this asset. You know, as I look at your performance on e-Builder and Viewpoint, you've really been able to accelerate the recurring revenue growth under your ownership. Can you just talk about that opportunity set? I know you're not counting on it in the base case, but it does sound like that's part of the value proposition. Can I just get you to expand on that?
Sure, Jerry. This is Rob. I'll start. Hey, we see this as a perfect fit for the Connect and Scale strategy. You know, Connect and Scale is very much about building industry cloud platforms. When we look at this business and this market, you know, it meets our criteria that it's the right market, the business has the right underlying fundamentals and has a strategy to competitively differentiate and win. At the intersection of those, we see that Trimble becomes the right owner for this. It very much is in line with a Trimble business that's connecting work in the field, work in the office, connecting the physical and the digital world. It's solving customer problems around areas of productivity, efficiency, and sustainability.
It's an underlying market in transportation that is underserved and underpenetrated by technology and is going through a fundamental digital transformation. It really checked a lot of the boxes for us.
Rob, can you expand on the opportunity to essentially do something similar to what you did on Trimble Construction One with the cross-selling opportunity? It sounds like North America is at the top of the list on bringing this platform over. Can you just expand on that part of the opportunity set?
It's a great question, Jerry. What I'd start with is Transporeon brings a level of scale, scope, and geographic reach, which is quite complementary to our business. I'll anchor on platform for a moment. 'Cause platform, if you're gonna really have a platform, I think that implies having density and reach and very much an API mindset. Transporeon has 145,000 carriers, 1,400 shippers and load recipients in the network, 3,000 integrations with API-based integrations with ERP, TMSs, and warehouse management systems through its customer base. There's a scale and a scope and a reach through that. Transporeon's business historically has been European centric, Trimble, North American centric. Our roots started in carriers. Transporeon moves towards shippers.
Transporeon's roots historically with shippers move towards carrier-based solutions. We see a complementary set of capabilities that we can bring together, I'd say in both in the near term and in the long term. You think about like, to an analog of Trimble Construction One, we can increase the breadth of the offering we have on a global basis. We can increase the density of the data that runs through the network. We see opportunities with the Engage Lane product we've talked about, in North America, where we could be better together through increased levels of density. We think we've got some underlying, say, capabilities and costs that we can be moderately more efficient, with some of the underlying technology capabilities.
It's really, you know, as we move forward, it's about bringing the benefits. For sure, it's about bringing the benefits together for a global network of supply chain participants. Certainly from that aspect of global, we become more global on day one after the close of this transaction.
I appreciate the discussion. Thanks.
Thanks, Jerry.
Our next question comes from Kristen Owen with Oppenheimer.
Hi. Good morning. Thank you for the question. Just wanted to take a little bit of a step back 'cause Rob, you said, you know, assets like this don't come available very often. So I'm wondering if you can walk us through some of the background on the transaction, how long you all have been in discussion, any commentary on the bid process and really sort of why now, why this transaction now?
Sure. Good morning, Kristen. I'll give you some background. History is you know, Transporeon had transacted a few years ago, and we had paid attention at that time. I can give you just a rewind of the clock that we had looked at the business a few years ago, and we've certainly kept our eyes on this business for the last few years. Stephan and I got to know each other early this summer, this past summer of 2022, before the sellers kicked off a process, which I think was based on a fair amount of inbound interest.
There's a long thread, let's say, that of interest that we've had in the business, and once the sellers decided to run a process, we quickly engaged because we see assets like this as being very scarce in the market. You know, to your question of why now, I think about that from a strategic lens as well as a financial lens. Strategically, Transporeon is the leading transportation platform, and that brings us that scale, that density and attractive unit economics. To us, that was one of the many things that was very attractive about the business. If I look at the financials of the business, we think this is a world-class business model. This is accretive to Trimble growth.
This is to total revenue growth, accretive to Trimble recurring revenue growth. Remember, we posted 16% organic ARR growth last quarter. Transporeon's been growing even faster than that. It's accretive to profitability. It fits with our asset-light business model so that, you know, that delta to operating income is very low because there's low CapEx. This is a pure software business. One other thing I would say that I probably should have said in the comments is when we look at the 2023 revenue forecast, that EUR 190 million, more than 90% of that is supported by revenue that's been realized already in 2022.
That's really important for us to be able to convey that level of confidence and conviction we have in the 2023 model, because I appreciate the questions of why now would correlate to the macroeconomics conditions that we're talking about. We have that line of sight. That's the beauty of the business model. Let me also say, I talked about the strategic and financial aspects, but let me also talk about the team. I've been so impressed with Stephan and his colleagues who lead this business. I have rarely come across a team of this level of quality and to me, this also potentially increases the DNA and the gene pool of Trimble through bringing this team into Trimble. That's the things I'd want you to hear on that, Kristen.
That's really helpful. If I could ask, maybe this is a basic question, but the business model around micro monetization, just help me understand what you mean by that and how that is supporting some of that line of sight that you described? Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, sure. I'll let Stephan answer that because he's been part of creating it, if that's okay.
Thanks, Rob. I think there's a few different aspects to that. First of all, we monetize all sides of the network. Right? We basically look at the interactions in our network, and we monetize based on interactions rather than usage. We tie the price tag to where usually the value of a given interaction and of a given transaction sits. That gives us a number one opportunity to, as I said before, accelerate adoption of our network. For a network, adoption is everything. Number two, it also gives us a very well-diversified and well-distributed revenue profile, which of course gives us also financial strength and resilience.
Great. Thank you so much.
Our next question comes from Jonathan Ho with William Blair.
Hi. Good morning, and congratulations on the transaction. How much overlap is there between your existing Trimble solution capabilities, as well as customers, you know, with Transporeon? I know you said this was very complementary, but, you know, is there any sort of overlap between your existing solutions today?
Hey, Jonathan. Good morning. This is Rob.
Mm-hmm.
I'll answer the question. I'd actually say the overlap is quite minor when we look at the combination of the business and the concentric circles of that. You know, there are a set of carriers where, you know, global carriers where we have certainly a bit of overlap. A few of the shippers, you know, some of the multinationals would be the same. We also have a business in Brazil. We have Trimble's had a business, a small business in Europe as well over time. It's greater than zero overlap, but it's not really a fundamental overlap. I call it more complementary. If you think about it from the existing capabilities we have in our transportation business today, we call it the TMS, the Transportation Management Systems.
Think of the scheduling dispatch, ERP system for trucking companies. We do on telematics on highway. Transporeon does not do telematics. The underlying routing, mapping, navigation, engines is something we do, Transporeon doesn't, but they need those maps to positively affect their solution. We see a positive point of connection, there. Think about going forward for common customers, where we can bring a broader offering, and that actually is quite a bit out of the playbook that we've taken in construction, as we brought Viewpoint and e-Builder into Trimble and have connected the capabilities. We broaden the capabilities with those acquisitions and then have moved to connect the capabilities and really transform the workflow for the customers.
Got it. That makes a ton of sense. Can you maybe give us a little bit more color on the long-term potential synergies that you referenced and, you know, maybe what has to happen in order to realize those synergies? Thank you.
Sure. Yeah, let me break the synergy question into two phases of time. I guess it's a two by two because you'd have cost synergy opportunity, revenue synergy opportunity, and you'd have short term, and you'd have mid to long term on that. You know, our focus right away in the business, and I'll reference 2023 after the closing, is we don't want to do anything to disrupt the momentum that the business has today and their ability to execute on that. We're not confused at how important it is that we hit the commitments that we've made out of the gate. I mentioned that 90% of 2023 revenue where we've that's supported by the revenue that's already been realized in 2022.
We need to stay with the team focused on continuing to book new business in 2023 to support the 2024 and beyond business. It's really important for us to get out of the gate in a very positive way. We look for the low-hanging fruit, as you can imagine, where we have opportunities to say, bring some of the capabilities together to be more efficient and to provide customers a better solution. That's very much short term. I know you asked really more of the long-term question about I think cross-sell, and that mid to longer term capability. Cross-sell that's supported by underlying integrations, supported by underlying workflow transformation. Again, I go back and I look at what we're doing in the construction and agriculture businesses.
Construction, you hear us talking more about very much the same thinking. It's connecting users, data, and workflow across the industry into the lifecycle continuum and across the stakeholders that are inside that industry. That could manifest as a Transporeon team reselling, cross-selling our Engage Lane solution or our Telematics solution. It could involve cross-selling of carrier solutions that Transporeon has and shipper solutions, sorry, into North America. In order to realize that opportunity and time, you know, we need to start to get the teams together. Our due diligence work over the last weeks and months gives us conviction that there is an opportunity to do that. We see the synergies as upside to the valuation of the deal.
I would want to put that out there as well, is that we saw the transaction as it sits, as being able to be supported by the existing fundamentals of the business where the synergies provide upside to value creation.
Great. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Tami Zakaria with J.P. Morgan.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks so much for taking my question. I have one quick one, a more high-level one. Transporeon increases your TAM by, I think you mentioned EUR 5 billion. It seems like it mainly serves the European market. What's the incremental TAM if you were to penetrate Transporeon in the U.S. market? Can you give some details on who are the current players in the U.S., how fragmented or not the U.S. market is, and what could be Transporeon's differentiation versus the existing players?
Hey, Tami. Good morning. This is Rob. I think probably some combination of Stephan and myself would be best served to answer your question. On the incremental TAM, we saw that $5 billion as a global number, so the sum of North America and Europe. It's certainly a majority Europe. What we didn't do, Tami, was take the $11 billion of TAM that we've talked about in North America and turn that dial up for what we think the new capability is. I think there's actually upside room on that addressable market expansion defined specifically as North America.
In terms of the nature of the Transporeon solution, I think you're asking about North America specifically and what's the nature of the market and what we can bring. Is that right, Tami? Make sure I understand the question.
Correct. Yes. Yeah. Correct.
Actually, Stephan, do you wanna give a perspective you have?
Sure. First of all, I'd like to probably comment, yes, indeed, our current business is predominantly in Europe, but our platform works globally, right? As I said, we are supporting our customers, our shipper customers in more than 140 countries around the world. There is enough proof points of the global potential and the global viability of the product and of the offering. Now, to the North American market specifically, it's highly fragmented. There is no direct like for like competition, at least not at that scale. What is missing for Transporeon as a standalone entity is a large carrier network in the United States.
This is something that really differentiates us in Europe and gives us this competitive advantage when we approach new prospects and customers. I think this is one of the big opportunities that this combination holds, right? As Rob pointed out, Trimble starting on the carrier side, moving more and more towards the shipper side and us actually coming from the opposite direction in those two geographies is almost a perfect fit.
Got it. That's super helpful. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Rob Wertheimer with Melius Research.
Hi. Thanks, and good morning. I wonder if you could expand a bit, maybe you just touched on it, but expand a bit on the competitive landscape within Europe, the market penetration and development within Europe. I don't know if you know, there's 10% of the fleet is converted over to the services you provide. Then just whether you see similar products currently on offer in the U.S. or whether bringing it over, you know, more robustly in the U.S. would be a new market development here. Thank you.
This is Rob. Good morning, Rob. I'll turn to Stephan to answer the question. I'd say focus on the European competitive landscape and the level of penetration in Europe.
Yeah.
I'll probably start with the competitive landscape. I said in the call before that we provide roughly 10 applications, 10 solutions on our platform. Of course, there is a best-of-breed market for each of those application spaces, right? If we provide these applications in a modular way on our platform, then obviously we are competing against those best-of-breed vendors. Sort of our direction is that we want to be at least at par with the best-of-breed market. Through the fact that we provide these applications as part of an integrated platform, with like a strong data lake, having access to millions of loads and, well, actually literally 110,000 transports every day, that gives us this additional differentiation, right?
There is a set of digital brokers or forwarders that to some extent are pivoting towards platform. None of them has, at this point in time, the scale that we have. Of course, there are sort of certain application spaces like visibility providers, real-time visibility providers that also try to build large networks and to some extent can compete with parts of our offering. To the penetration in the market, I think it's actually best to look at how many transports, like what's the percentage of the transports that we think is in Europe runs on our platform. The biggest market we are serving is the full truckload segment. We're also playing in the less than truckload, as well as full container loads and less than container loads.
Those are the four types of transports that make up the biggest part of our business. The full truckload segment is by far the one where we have the deepest penetration. We estimate to cover about 12% of Europe's full truckloads on our platform.
Well, it's fascinating. you have a very good, let's say, scale, and yet the market's not totally there yet. could you break down the sources, you know, roughly 25% growth, and maybe I'll stop there?
Sorry, I didn't get that acoustically.
I'm so sorry. Could you break down the 25% growth? Is that, you know, expanding to current customers? Is that largely new customer acquisition? Is it the 12%, you know, continually rising every year? Maybe just break that down. Thank you.
I mean, I would say that, you know, at least 2/3 of our future growth is coming from existing customers, upselling and cross-selling. This is one of the really strong aspects of Transporeon, that even customers that are with us for 20+ years, like that have been literally there from day one on, keep on rolling out our solutions. Most of our customers, as I said, are large multinationals, and they tend to be also consolidators in their industry. Of course, if you run a platform like ours, then there is a lot of value proposition in running this across all the operations, across all the countries, across all the divisions, business lines, whatever you have, right?
Over the last few years, we have rapidly expanded our functional footprint, our functional offering, the breadth and the depth of our offering. That gives us a lot of cross-selling opportunities. We've a very clear view on the biggest and the most promising cross-selling opportunities that are there in our customer base. So we do expect, as I said, at least two-thirds of the future growth to come from existing customers. We continue to win new customers. We continue to win new names.
Specifically this year, in terms of order intake, we've seen a super strong year, and that gives us the confidence that a large part of the 2023 revenue is actually already secured in the books, contracted, on the line with rollout plans, agreed with customers and for us to really be delivered.
Hey, Rob, and others on the call, one thing I'll add to that is just a parallel to other industries we're serving, and I'll start with construction as the example, as a parallel and an analog. As Stephan talked about multiple applications that work together, that are modular, that work together, and where the business wins by being better together, being integrated, and being in a platform where there's cross-sell and upsell opportunities. That's exactly what we've been talking about with Trimble Construction One for the last number of quarters. Really think about that same mindset and playbook applied in the transportation market with now an increased ability to really affect that to success.
Our next question comes from Erik Lapinski with Morgan Stanley.
Hi, team. Thanks for the question, and congrats on the deal. I maybe just wanna follow up on those somewhat competitive comments you just mentioned. I guess when we think about the complementary nature of the solutions, but maybe it seems like some of the capabilities may be similar to what you discussed when you acquired Kuebix. Is this the type of solution that you're seeing existing transportation customers asking for already today, and now you have a growing competitive advantage in providing? Do you anticipate some effort around customer education on just how this improves the solution you can offer?
If I, if I make the comparison to Kuebix, it's the difference between what was a startup, as was, I should say, a startup business and what is a scaled asset, with, you know, going on EUR 190 million of revenue next year. That to me is the first distinction I would make between the capabilities of the respective products. There's still a few other differences and other things that we've gotten out of that Kuebix acquisition. From a customer standpoint and what they're asking us, you know, hey, what customers are asking us is to help them be more efficient. They're asking help to be more competitive. Many of them are asking for help to be more sustainable.
A question I think that the folks would have would be about the overall market conditions and transportation and if they're tightening and, you know, where we might be in a cycle there. When times are tight, as a trucking company, you need to be more efficient than ever if you're that carrier. If you're that shipper, you have the same needs to be more efficient in your supply chain. We have a set of capabilities, whether it's standalone or combined, that enrich a value proposition. I start with solving the customer problems, really understanding what problems they're trying to solve and what needs they have to address. When you can do that, sure, there's a bit of education that comes along with it, but show value, deliver value.
One of the things we like about the Transporeon business model is there's very low barriers to entry, low barriers to adoption, fast time to value, and there's some really good lessons for us to apply to that and to our existing business.
Thanks. Congrats.
Our next question comes from Rob Mason with Baird.
Yes, good morning. Rob, or Stephan, can you speak to what the incremental fall through looks like in this business from, you know, a margin standpoint, 80% gross margins, 30% EBITDA margins. You know, how should we be thinking about the incremental margins here over the next couple of years? Maybe as you try to I don't know, what level of investment may be contemplated as well.
Hey, Rob. The short answer would be think about 40% incrementals.
Okay. Okay. Then the, you know, just trying to get a sense also maybe as a starting point, you know, where you reside from a penetration level with your shippers. You talked about maybe 12% of European truckload freight on the platform. From a shipper standpoint, any sense as to how much of a, you know, the typical shipper's freight spend is running across your network? Are there any, you know, structural limits to where that can be?
Stephan here. First of all, no, I don't think there are structural limits. As I said before, even the oldest cohorts or the most long-term cohorts in our customer base continue to grow and continue to grow at like high single digits or even sometimes double digits, depending on the company and depending on their own expansion path. You know, within a given, we call it decision-making unit, right? Depending on how a large shipper organization is structured, let's say they're broken down into geographies. If one geography then decides to use a platform like ours or our platform, then it's usually quite fast that we get 100% of their transports onto the platform. We are touching the real life, right?
We're touching the physical yard, we're touching trucks, we're touching loads and transports and goods. Many of our customers then take a decision to roll it out site by site or plant by plant. That's usually then a journey in which we roll out. Once they have the transports on the platform, of course, there is sort of an entry level product which we charge for starting at EUR 1.55 per transport. We can upsell on these transport.
That's basically what I described before, on the question on this mass micro monetization and add additional value to every single transport, attach a time slot, book scheduling, appointment, surcharges, freight settlement, move contracted loads to the spot market, make the whole negotiation autonomous. We can step by step increase the value per transaction to, you know, $10-$11 at least. That of course gives us a massive upside potential on existing loads as much as with new customers and new loads that we bring from existing customers.
Very good. That's very helpful. Thank you.
Our final question comes from Clarke Jeffries with Piper Sandler.
Thank you for taking the question. Firstly, you know, looking through some of these disclosures about the crisis periods for Transporeon revenue, assuming that execution recurring revenue is a fairly good proxy for revenue growth, it seems that growth has improved over the last two years. As we contextualize 25% growth for Transporeon in 2023, you know, where do you expect the business to grow, in a rough level going forward? Will this be a mid-teens or 20% kind of business or any kind of color you could help contextualize where that 25% is from the historical growth the business put up?
Well, as I say, from the business has had a long track record of that strong double-digit growth of 20+%. If we look forward for a few years, we certainly, I'd say a CAGR that averages in the 20%+ range is very much what we have in mind. You know, I'll talk a little bit about that slide 11, which showed the performance in 2008-2010 and 2020-2021 because there would certainly be obvious questions about the economy in the, we'll call it near to midterm. That's important to do a look backwards before we look forwards or to give us conviction in what we're talking about.
It's a value proposition that's secular, delivering productivity, efficiency and sustainability. That business model is recurring in nature, you know, more than, again, more than 90% of that 2023 revenue is supported by revenue realized in 2021, more than 90% of the revenue is recurring today. That's an important metric for us. Look at that net retention ratio, and I think that correlates a lot to the, to the 10 applications, that work together in a modular way that Stephan talked about.
You know, what the company has done is they've done a series of tuck-in acquisitions in the last couple of years that have broadened the capability set, so the ability to land and expand and provide a broader value offering to move from that entry level that Stephan talked about to then be able to upsell. That delta at the entry level of a load value per load to the full potential increases as they've increased the breadth of the applications and delivering them in a platform. As you integrate them and deliver them in a platform, you improve the unit economics, which correlates to the incremental margins that we talked about.
We put those pieces together and look at the cross-sell, upsell potential of that, and that gets to that, you know, that 2/3, 1/3 split that Stephan talked about with existing and new. Of course, those are rough numbers, but we look forward and into the future and map that to the level of penetration and where we believe we stand competitively, not to mention combined competitively. And that gets to that 20% CAGR here for the next few years in our model.
Yeah. My follow-up question was going to be when we think about the growth algorithm going forward, you know, fair to assume that that continued value per load story plays out so that net retention rates could remain above 110%, but that the customer growth would also be a consistent, this sort of supplement to that. Looking back at how consistent the net retention rate had been above 110%, customer growth is the other part of the growth algorithm, and there is not any other factor to start putting together that 20%+ handle.
Correct. Yeah. In fact, that 20% + handle really is predominantly I mean, it's really, think of it as standalone. I'd say upside potential as we broaden that offering with the combined entity. I think your observation of the net retention is extremely important because that's your surest sign that you're providing value. If you look at the gross retention of this business, it's near 100% gross retention. That's an extraordinary level of performance that shows the value that the business and the team is providing to the shippers and to the carriers that are in the network. It's a self-reinforcing network with the density that comes along with that.
That shows the power that comes through the modular applications, that, you know, that are integrated and delivered in a platform where customers have that easy entry point, to move up the stack. We think it's a brilliant business model that's been extraordinarily well executed and a really full credit to Stephan and his colleagues at Transporeon.
All right. Perfect. Thank you very much for taking the question.
No problem.
There are no further questions at this time. I now turn the call over to Mr. Michael Leyba for closing remarks.
Thank you everyone for joining us on the call today. We look forward to talking to you soon. Thank you.