Good morning, everyone. I'm Elsa Ballard, Vice President of Investor Relations and Communications for World Kinect, and I'm so excited to welcome you here today for our 2024 Investor Day. For those of us joining us here in person today at the Essex House in New York, we'd appreciate it if you'd just take a moment to mute your laptops and cell phones. A copy of this deck will be found on our website, at ir.worldkinect.com. Before we begin, please note that certain statements made today, including comments about our expectations regarding future plans and performance, are forward-looking statements that are subject to a range of uncertainties and risks that could cause actual results to materially differ. Factors that could cause results to materially differ can be found in our most recent Form 10-K and other reports that we've filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
We assume no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of revisions to these forward-looking statements in light of any new information or future events. This presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included in the appendix of this presentation and also on our Investor Relations website. So I'm joined here today by our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Kasbar, John Rau, our Executive Vice President of Global Land, Aviation, and Marine, and Ira Birns, who's our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. So, Michael, as you all know well by now, has spent his entire career in our industry. He co-founded Trans-Tec Services, a global marine fuel services company that was acquired by World Kinect in 1995. He has been our CEO since 2012.
Previously, he served as President and Chief Operating Officer, responsible for driving our company's aggressive acquisition strategy and quest for operational excellence. John, who leads the three of our aviation, land, and marine business segments, while this might be the first time many of you within the investment community have met John, he's extremely well-known to our customer and supplier partners. John has extensive experience in our industry, both on the supplier and the fuel customer side. Prior to joining World Kinect in 2011, John was responsible for jet fuel procurement and management, transportation, and management of the Supplier Diversity Program for American Airlines. Before that, he was responsible for jet fuel purchasing and managing a jet fuel trading subsidiary for United Airlines. Then prior to United Airlines, John worked in supply, scheduling, and marketing of fuel products for Koch Industries.
Last, and certainly not least, Ira has been World Kinect's CFO for 17 years. He joined World Kinect after a career of equal length at Arrow Electronics, which, while it's a different industry, is a similar company with similar supply chain challenges and opportunities. Ira is responsible for all of our finance functions, including non-fuel procurement, corporate development, and investor relations. So Ira is really who you should be calling if you don't like these slide decks, not me. So for those of you who are new to the World Kinect story today, Michael is going to begin by reviewing who we are and our overall business model. John will then follow with a more detailed review of our operations and our growth opportunities. This will be followed by Ira, who will review our business through a financial lens and present some financial targets.
There will also be a 15-minute break after John's comments, and then again, after Ira's comments, we will host a Q&A session with Michael, John, and Ira. For those of you in the room, we ask that you hold all questions until the end of this presentation for this dedicated Q&A session. So for everyone joining us remotely on the webcast, you can ask a question at any time during this presentation by clicking the Question Input box on the upper right-hand corner of the webcast player on your screen, and then click Submit. Reminder, you can ask a question any time during this presentation. Just as a note, Q&A is not open to anyone in the media who may be present. Now, to kick it off, I'm gonna turn the day over to Michael Kasbar.
Thank you, Elsa. Okay, good morning, everyone. I wanna thank everyone for joining us here in person today and to all of those virtually on our webcast. It's been a while since we've had an Investor Day, and much has changed, and we're looking forward to sharing some great content and a few videos to help explain who we are, what we do, and why it matters. As Churchill once said, "The further you can look back, the further you can look forward." So from our humble beginnings as a broker and simple reseller and secondary finance company to the global industrialized distribution, the global, industrialized distribution business we are today, we're a story of transformation. We're also a story of innovation and developing a robust global operations business to more fully satisfy our customers and supplier requirements.
A lot has changed, in just the last 10 years, from the dramatic impact of the shale oil revolution and the subsequent implosion of the market in 2014 and 2015 to the often confusing energy transition to the massive disruption of the recent pandemic to wars and the splintering of the global economy. All were tremendous shocks to business and required considerable change management. If Churchill was right, our future looks bright because today's world is a world in greater transition and change than ever before, and one thing we've been able to demonstrate is the ability to adapt through it all. From those simple roots as a basic intermediary, we have demonstrated our ability to grow our products and services and diverse global platform to provide essential and often mission-critical value to a broad base of commercial, industrial, and governmental entities.
What we do matters a great deal because it allows our customers and suppliers to focus on their core competencies of moving people or manufacturing and moving goods. Now, with the innovation of the energy transition, our global distribution platform and business model is perfectly positioned to support and complement our customers' and suppliers' requirements and therefore drive increased shareholder value. We have handcrafted our decades-long journey in aviation and marine, creating world-class value-added distribution platforms, and we're making strides building a companion global platform twin in land-based conventional and renewable energy products. While we're doing that, we are building organizational momentum and adding greater value to our marine and aviation businesses. We're leveraging our common operating model and creating internal synergies, driving operating leverage, and enhanced value for customers, suppliers, and shareholders. To kick us off, let's roll a video.
Our world is constantly moving, with goods and people taking millions of journeys every single day by air, land, and sea. There's one thing that links them all: energy. At World Kinect, we bring that energy, sourcing it, delivering it, and providing it more sustainably. We operate at the intersection of energy, transportation, and global commerce, connecting global supply and demand with the multimodal distribution platform that delivers seamlessly every day. Fuel and energy producers rely on World Kinect to balance supply and fulfill demand by moving fuel from refineries through pipelines to terminals and then delivering directly to storage tanks, ports, and airports, keeping transportation moving. Cargo ships run on low-sulfur fuels, improved by lubricants, and purchased by lines of credit, all delivered by World Kinect, ensuring a smooth passage.
Trucks refuel at our retail and card lock sites using our network charge cards, all managed through our automated digital systems so they can keep operations moving. Manufacturing businesses rely on the continuous supply of natural gas and electricity, procured and managed by our expert energy consultants, so they can power their production. Business people fly to critical meetings on a moment's notice using business aircraft fueled with sustainable aviation fuel that we supply, from trucks that we lease, flown on routes planned by our teams and paid for with our cards. Passengers travel to cities around the world on aircraft powered by jet fuel we supply so they can reach their destination. Our clients are now lowering emissions guided by our global sustainability experts, harnessing our renewable energy, and using solutions from our carbon team so they can decarbonize their operations.
At World Kinect, we operate in hard-to-abate sectors as a mission-critical partner using a durable, resilient platform, distributing 1 million barrels per day, powering operations for over 150,000 customers each month, facilitating nearly 7 million transactions per year, all to keep you moving forward.
Okay. Too bad we didn't show that before the Academy Awards. All right. So, let's now talk about our business model. We, we take great pride in the fact that we provide value for both buyers and sellers. In many ways, we're a marketplace. We provide rateable offtake for producers and sellers so they could focus on their core competencies and flexible, comprehensive solutions for buyers. John will go into more detail on this in a few minutes. It's an important distinction in who we are and how we operate to add value. Our common operating model is the essence of our success.
It may sound trite to say that culture is our strategic advantage, but there's nothing more important than our team, our global talent, our processes, and ways of working that allow us to efficiently move and support the efficient movement of molecules and electrons between buyers and sellers. Our core distribution platform is comprised of readily deployable commercial capabilities and people. We set up responsive local networks. We deploy distribution assets, manage inventory. We use standard processes and operating systems, all which allow us to give robust and comprehensive fulfillment capability with digital engagement around the world. This allows us to ramp up opportunities as they emerge and dial down when markets change. And our geographic and market diversity makes us more resilient than we have ever been before.
In addition to our talented team, processes, and culture, the institutional knowledge and capabilities that we possess and have refined in underwriting, risk management, transaction management, and standardized global functional support creates efficiency and execution capability, enabling us to seamlessly and efficiently support our customers around the world. What we do is very focused. The vast majority of our business, about 89% of our gross profit, is from our core distribution platform, our critical and unique ability to satisfy both customer and supplier needs globally and across every fuel type and customer. It is a flexible commercial model that works just as well distributing jet fuel as it does renewable diesel. Furthermore, you'll see in greater detail in Ira's presentation how we have sharpened the portfolio to core synergistic businesses with the goal of driving more predictable results and operating leverage.
We serve three customer segments with strong market share and deep domain expertise in our aviation and marine businesses and a growing opportunity in our land business. We have the ability to leverage and bundle our offerings, or we can simply provide guaranteed, reliable fuel delivery and nothing else, or we can outsource to customers' entire procurement function and can manage everything from ordering, billing, and sustainability reporting to name just a few. John will go into this in more detail later on. We operate in the commercial aviation market, serving passenger, cargo, and government aircraft, and we do this at 4,000 airports around the world. We serve the largest commercial and cargo airlines. We are a strategic supplier at many critical locations in their network, including some of their largest airports and hubs.
In private and business aviation, we service more than 8,000 flight departments and 76,000 business and commercial aircraft, as well as specialty aircraft such as air ambulances and firefighting, really anything that flies. In aviation, we've deeply penetrated the value chain and provide some of the most comprehensive solutions in the market. For example, we operate our own proprietary closed-loop fuel card where customers can obtain on-demand fuel and related products and services from every major business jet destination to local airports around the world. We also provide trip support for corporate and commercial aircraft, including landing fees, overflight permits, ground handling, crew, anything you need to operate globally. We also supply a full turnkey solution of bulk fuel and products and services to more than 600 private business terminals at airports, what is called FBOs, which stands for Fixed-Base Operators. John told me an interesting factoid last night.
When the industry started years ago in private aircraft, you'd fly and there you'd have to stop to go get fuel, and a truck would have to drive out to meet that aircraft that landing strip. And as those landing strips became, I guess, more popular, they created a fixed-base operator, and that's what FBO stands for, fixed-base operator. We've been doing this for a long time, a lot of interesting history to it. We're also a strategic supplier to many governments and militaries with a dedicated team of professionals to address both their everyday needs as well as mission-critical operations. Some may say our transformation in this segment from a pure intermediary to a full-fledged strategic supplier is nothing short of remarkable.
Turning to marine, we supply fuel and fuel management services to container, dry bulk, tanker, and cruise vessels at 1,250 seaports, serving 2,200 customers, really anything that floats anywhere in the world. At numerous port locations, we are a strategic supplier providing tailored fueling solutions to address specific customer needs. By nature, the marine fueling industry is volatile, and we've architected the platform to navigate the highly cyclical nature of the business to achieve acceptable returns in any market condition. Ira is going to give a little bit more color on this on marine, later on today. The marine business requires solid quality, technical, and operations expertise, and we have a long legacy of in-house talent, a key differentiator to our customers.
Moreover, the transaction size for this business is substantially larger than a typical plane or truck fueling, so being a reliable financial counterparty is critical to both buyers and sellers. Let's talk a little bit about future fuels. While a good amount of effort is needed to solve emissions in this hard-to-abate industry, in the interim, we are sourcing and facilitating the supply of renewable energy while partnering with innovators to facilitate the development of these longer-term solutions, just as we supported pioneers bringing SAF to the aviation market by leveraging our broad range of business development capabilities so they can focus on their mission. Moving on to land, we have a national footprint in both the U.S. and the U.K., with a regional footprint in Brazil and a growing presence in other select countries.
We're simplifying the land portfolio, focusing on core offerings to achieve operating leverage and best-in-class service levels. Within our land business, we provide bulk supply to retail gas stations where we continue to expand our customer base, most under long-term contracts, which is a testament to our reputation in the space and the deep relationships with the supplier brands we represent. We provide fleet fueling at our unattended gas stations, known as Card Locks, as well as with mobile fueling trucks. This business was supersized by virtue of our recent Flyers acquisition. We also supply power and natural gas to commercial, industrial, and institutional users such as food and glass manufacturers, energy-intensive businesses, and hospitals. We're making strides in our land business, emulating our success in aviation marine, utilizing our common operating model, and redeploying internal executives with experienced, acquired talent.
Our responsive logistics orientation gives us the capability to provide highly reliable contingency supply for backup energy and emergency support activities to government agencies and critical infrastructure activities such as data centers. Moreover, our land offerings are complemented by a growing sustainability and renewable energy business. One of the ongoing challenges our customers face today is the need to source and consume a diverse energy diet that is affordable, reliable, and increasingly lower carbon to achieve their sustainability objectives and regulatory requirements. This is a logical extension of our core capabilities into a rapidly evolving market where renewable molecules and electrons are the center of the chessboard in the energy transition. With World Kinect's expertise and deep expertise in the energy value chain, both upstream and downstream, we are uniquely positioned to play a key role supporting both our suppliers and customers in a changing world.
While still a small percentage of our overall business, our sustainability offerings will continue to grow and will represent a greater contribution of revenue, profitability, and shareholder value. To further illustrate why this space is important, let's look at how energy demand is expected to evolve by 2050 in a market like the U.S. As you can see, renewables will see material growth. However, while the market is shifting towards cleaner fuels and alternative energy sources are expected to experience unprecedented growth, the energy transition will take time, and the majority of global energy demand through 2050 is expected to be met through traditional fuel sources, truly more of an evolution than a transition. We're certainly helping it along. Worth noting, biofuels are becoming a bigger component of the fuel diet.
Biofuels are drop-in fuels, meaning there are little to no operational or physical equipment changes required for our customers to use these fuels, and our core distribution platform is already distributing these fuel types all over the world. Interesting factoid, 50% of renewable energy today is comprised of biofuels, so it's a very meaningful part of the solution. What does this mean for us? Our core distribution platform positions us well as lower carbon fuel and energy types become a larger part of the energy diet globally. The trend is not just in the United States. It's already a global phenomenon. Brazil, India, Indonesia, huge amounts of biofuels being produced, and the US is, you know, a leader in it as well. As part of our continued evolution, we renamed our company, World Kinect, a little under a year ago.
Our previous corporate name, as you all know, was World Fuel. Our sustainability division was Kinect Energy. We merged these names to reflect the breadth of our offerings under one seamless provider. Many of our fuel businesses will still operate under the World Fuel brand, and some of our other businesses, like Flyers, will operate under their name. However, all are endorsed brand a World Kinect company. We have a strong market share in our well-established aviation and marine businesses, which are with approximately 10% global market share in both. We are one of the largest players in the space, market positioning well-earned after years of customer satisfaction and consistent value creation. Our land business, with less than 1% market share, represents a key opportunity for us to grow both with the market and gain incremental market share.
As I mentioned at the start of my comments, we are achieving a higher level of geographic and market business segment and product diversity, leading to a more predictable path to growth. The added benefit of these businesses is they often have been proven to have countercyclical, countercyclicality. Our business is well-positioned to benefit from a variety of market dynamics. Diversity breeds stability, first rule of ecology. Before I turn it over to John, let's hear directly from one of our customers about the value of the World Kinect model. Thanks very much.
The way we started with World Fuel Services, when I came into this role, we were already working with World Fuel Services on a relatively small scale, you know, a few small deals, some trading, some bunkering. Then, slowly but surely, we really transformed into being strategic partners, in various endeavors.
You see us, you know, in global deals, supplying our ships all over the world, places like Europe, places like Far East. Then, we have some of the very strategic relationship and some of the very strategic key sourcing initiatives like Port Canaveral, where Port Canaveral is on track to become the busiest cruise port in North America and probably in the world. So, at some point, we got into difficulties supplying the ships. Because we had a relationship with World Fuels, I asked them to step in and help, because, you know, we couldn't operate cruises, obviously, without fuel. That relationship grew tremendously, and we're now supplying several ships. Like I said, the port is very big, and I think that initiative was very, very good for both of our companies in a very long run.
We need really premier partners supplying this fuel, and World Fuel Services has been one of the top. In fact, World Fuel Services several times won our top supplier prize, top supplier award, for being, you know, most on time, most reliable partner in this procurement process. In terms of sustainability, we have very ambitious goals. We've always been a leader in sustainable cruising. We have the most efficient fleet in the industry. We have the most modern fleet. We've been innovators in testing new fuel types. World Fuel Services has been actually our partner. Last year, we were the first cruise line in North America to sail using sustainable fuel, sustainable diesel out of Los Angeles. And it was actually a difficult sourcing endeavor, and World Fuel Services has been our partner with that too, like with many conventional fuels.
Working with World Fuel Services, for me, feels like working with the people that I know. We work with my contacts, and we work as one team. It's a very, very customer service-oriented business with a very strategic view on our customers.
Thanks, Michael, and thank you, everyone, for being here today. You heard Michael say that a key aspect of our business model is that we provide value to both customers and suppliers. Having personally been on both the supplier and the customer side, as Elsa said earlier, I have a unique perspective on the value we bring to both sides, such as removing their pain points, being an extension of their operations, and many other things. This enables both our customers and suppliers to focus on their core competencies. Let's now review in more detail how we deliver this value. Let's first look at the supplier side. We're a strong financial counterparty. We're a channel partner providing rateable offtake, and in some instances, we even provide technical support. The types of suppliers you see here are major oil companies, traders, national oil companies, independent and regional refiners.
And to our customers, we provide competitive pricing, security of supply, network coverage, lines of credit, and 24/7 support. Customers here range from commercial airlines to corporate jets to shipping companies to retail stations and truck fleet operators, as you heard before. Now, let's see how we participate in the supply chain to deliver this value. Let's start on the supply side. Here's a typical supply chain. It starts at the refinery. The fuel then goes into the pipeline, into a bulk terminal, and then the truck into what we call the final distribution point, and we call this our last half mile. And then a final transaction occurs with the customer. Now, we can participate anywhere in the supply chain, so let's review a few examples. So this is where it all began, where we intermediate a transaction. Basically, that's providing credit and convenience.
Now, 15 years ago, this represented the majority of our activity. While this is still a core part of our offering, we were limited on how much we could grow. So then we moved up the supply chain into the final distribution point. And again, we call this the last half mile, and I'll talk more about this later. But what did this do? It enabled us to capture more value in the supply chain, and it expanded our customer base because we're now seen as a strategic supplier because we're now in that last half mile space. And finally, we can go further up the chain and all the way even up to the refinery where it makes sense both strategically or economically. We can participate anywhere here. Let's turn to the customer side.
We have invested in the ability to provide additional value to our customers so that it's not just about price. Here is a basic transaction providing fuel and sending an accurate invoice, the most basic thing you need to do. Now, many suppliers would just stop here, but we said, how can we provide more value? So we added things such as online portals, enhanced reporting and invoicing capabilities, and various complementary products and services. Now, we can go even deeper with products like fuel management, which is a complete outsourced solution. So to summarize here, we move deeper into the supply chain and deeper into the customer side. And what enables us to do this is our core distribution platform. Now, I'd like to walk you through the four key value propositions of our platform. First, it's our network coverage. We operate in over 200 countries and territories.
Second, our deep supply and logistics capabilities in selected markets and complementary products and services, which give us additional profit streams. And fourth, our ability to support the energy transition. Now, I'll discuss in more detail each of these, starting with our network coverage. The customer who most values this is someone not operating on a schedule and has variable demand. This could be a private jet, a cargo airline, or a tanker. They're traveling around the world with no set itinerary. And what they're looking for is a trusted counterparty to supply them wherever they're going because many times they're someplace else that they're not, you know, used to operating in. Or there can be a cell phone tower operator needing supply for backup generators in multiple regions.
So to service these customers, we require a network of supply as well as 24/7 support to respond to their needs at a moment's notice. Now, let's look at our network coverage by segment. Here's our aviation network coverage. And as you can see, it's a broad global coverage. So anyone flying into any of these airports on a private jet, for example, could get access to fuel. Marine, most every major port in the world. Land, as Mike had said, we're primarily in North America and in Europe and in Latin America. And then here you can see the total network, quite comprehensive. Next is our deep supply expertise. Now, who's a customer who values this is someone operating on a schedule with specific volume requirements. And examples here are a commercial airline or a container ship or a cruise line or a large truck fleet operator.
What is important to them is a cost-effective, secure supply for their larger volumes. And as Elsa said, I was with a few airlines before, and I should, you know, know this because I was one of these customers who absolutely required this. We had a saying in our department, "No fuel, no fly." So this is the most very critical. Now, I want to talk about the participation in the last half mile, which is a critical element of our deep supply capability, as you can see here. So when I said earlier, this is the final distribution point right before fuel is delivered to the end customer. You see that there. Our participation can range from simply holding inventory to owning distribution assets such as an interplane truck or a bunker barge or a Card Lock. And so what does this mean? Four key points.
We now have the flexibility to source from multiple supply options. It provides us competitive pricing and secure supply. It's not just one supply chain. We can receive from multiple supply chains in any of those segments. The location must provide a strategic advantage to make any investment. And now we become a much more strategic supplier to our customers. Now, let's take a look at a few examples. An aviation last half mile example is Luton Airport outside of London. As you can see, a nice sunny day in London. We have both the airport storage and interplane fueling operations here. What did that do? We became a strategic supplier to a large airline on the field, which has resulted in an even broader relationship with them beyond here. And as a result of our success in Luton, we continue to expand our physical footprint throughout Europe.
Now to marine. Our marine last half mile example is Gibraltar. We provide both bunkering and lubricants operations. You can see here the dedicated dock here at the end. That is for the fueling superyachts. It's a great location for vessels to fuel before crossing the Atlantic. Next to land. A land last half mile example is Card Locks. This has expanded significantly with the acquisition of Flyers a few years ago. Here's a look at our physical footprint. The technology here makes it very easy and efficient for us to integrate new sites. A great example of this was a recent acquisition in Michigan. Now, we have various brands depending on the region, such as Flyers Quick Fuel app that you can see here. Now, let's take a look at a video highlighting our Card Lock business, which is a Quick Fuel branded site.
Energy needs keep evolving, demanding focus, market experience, and sustainable solutions. At World Kinect, we're here to help businesses optimize all facets of their energy management, including on-site fleet fueling and fuel hedging strategies. Fleet managers play a critical role in optimizing operational costs and safeguarding fleet assets. Fuel is the second largest cost of operating a fleet. For heavy-duty trucks, fuel spend can represent 60% or more of the total cost of operations for a fleet. Some studies show that fuel theft can account for up to 6% of a fleet's total spend. To address those challenges, implementing fuel management systems can lead to cost-effective fleet management. World Kinect's uncrewed and always open Quick Fuel sites are part of the largest Card Lock network in America. Designed specifically for commercial traffic, our Quick Fuel sites offer convenience and commercial fuel at a cost savings.
Wide islands can easily accommodate commercial-grade vehicles, and we're open 24/7 so drivers can safely and quickly refuel anytime. Our high-grade fuel is treated to adjust to temperature and has better diesel additives than available at most major chains. High-flow fuel pumps and DEF get drivers back on the road 20% faster than standard convenience stores, increasing a fleet's revenue per truck. Each clean, well-lit, and secure location offers multiple payment methods. Most sites are set up to accept fleet cards, RFID, or the CFN Mobile Pay app. While a printed receipt is available, receipts can be emailed at the moment of fueling. Detailed reporting helps track activity by vehicle or driver. Spending and product controls can be set up to reduce fraud and misuse. Our portal gives you 24/7 visibility of your fuel spend across your entire enterprise.
The security of it, being able to know exactly what your drivers are spending on a daily basis. Again, the convenience for us has been great.
Hopefully, that gives you a better perspective of how the whole Card Lock system works. We need to get each of you a fuel card. Now, I always have to say subject to credit approval, though, so. All right. Well, let's look at our overall network coverage map that we saw earlier, which you see actually is up here now, you see. Now we're going to see how many are our physical last half mile locations. So it's quite a change from 15 years ago, and we'll continue to expand in this area. The next feature is our ability to capture additional profit streams by providing complementary products and services, and it's to our core fuel offerings. Some examples here are de-icing fluid, lubricants, trip support, fleet cards, and tank monitoring. And you see a picture of our aviation charge card.
If you need an AV CARD, let me know for your plane. I could spend the rest of the time talking about the various products and services, but I want to highlight an example in our land business. Fred Smith's a construction company with multiple sites, but we not only provide them fuel, but additional products and services that you can see here. Why don't we hear from our customer?
We use approximately 2.5 million gallons worth of fuel, and we can't do what we do without fuel. Fred Smith Company relies heavily on the fuel that World Kinect provides us. My name is Gray Smith with the Fred Smith Company, and I'm our fleet manager. Fred Smith Company receives approximately 85,000 gallons worth of fuel at our main tank farms. From there, we have seven internal fuel trucks that will deliver fuel to our asphalt plants. We have five locations with satellite tanks. We also fill our own equipment and our rental equipment of approximately 1,000 pieces. The tank monitoring system that Fred Smith Company uses is a World Kinect product, and we can be very hands-off with it because it works so well. We have vision of it. World Kinect has vision of it, and we autonomously get fuel. Fred Smith Company uses CFN cards.
We can be pretty spread out on our job sites in central North Carolina and parts of eastern North Carolina, so it allows our field supervisors to get fuel without having to travel all the way to Raleigh. Life before Fleet Kinect was very different. Now we've been able to save time and money from being able to utilize and implement World Kinect's solution to go and fill all of our off-road equipment and a lot of our on-highway equipment with that solution. The benefits of using World Kinect as our sole provider allow us to have a one-stop shop, one representative, one place to go for all of our fuel needs from inception to death. They are in that business every day.
A great example of a customer who's using many of our products and services besides just buying fuel from us. You can see here too, there's a lot of technology associated with supporting these customers. Fourth, we are well positioned to support the energy transition by supplying these lower carbon fuels through our same footprint as well. You heard from Mike earlier the term drop-in fuels. Again, what that means is the renewable fuel can be supplied using the same infrastructure as the conventional fuel. We can use our same platform to supply these fuels. This is an important point. It's just on the same platform. In aviation, we're deeply involved in distributing a distribution of SAF in the U.S. and over 30 airports across Europe. The picture here is a SAF delivery at Bremen Airport in Germany.
In marine, we've supplied renewable diesel to some of our customers. The picture here is a delivery to Royal Caribbean in Los Angeles, which you heard on the previous video. We supply renewable diesel to many of our land customers. A great example in supporting the energy transition is our long-term relationship with World Energy. They are the first commercial-scale sustainable aviation fuel producer. We help them facilitate the construction with their facility in California by completing an offtake agreement. Since 2016, we've been working with them to provide both SAF supply and logistics to the aviation customers. The SAF is a 50/50 blend, so we also provide the conventional jet fuel as well. The relationship remains strong as we have recently completed a six-year supply agreement with them. Now, let's hear from World Energy.
Good afternoon. My name is Scott Lewis, and I'm the Managing Director of World Energy's Sustainable Aviation Fuel Program. I have been in the renewable space, low-carbon fuel space, for well over 20 years. In 2018, we purchased the Paramount, California facility, which is the world's first commercial-scale sustainable aviation fuel production facility. It's really great to be able to find partners in a space that is as new as sustainable aviation fuel is, that are willing to embrace they come from a more traditional petroleum jet fuel supply and distribution business. And when they saw the future, they really wanted to be at the forefront of it. And so starting in 2016, they were effectively our first customer. And the relationship has really grown to where they support us on so many different fronts. They both supply us with the vast majority of our jet fuel.
Jet fuel needs to be blended with sustainable aviation fuel to make it a drop-in fuel for aviation. We're not a logistics company. We're not a distribution company. World Kinect's expertise is something that provides an invaluable service to us. We undertook a $3 billion expansion, which will be completed at the end of 2026, which is going to allow us to produce 25,000 barrels per day. When we started talking to World Kinect about this, they immediately wanted to be first in line to be able to sign up to show that kind of support and make that commitment. Sustainable aviation fuel is really the only way to mitigate carbon emissions in aviation. We were the first SAF production facility in the world. We're still only one of two operating in North America.
There are things that have to be overcome because there are just situations that have not been encountered before. And the ability to have an open relationship, to have them know that we can call them, be completely transparent when we need something, deliveries that need to be either sped up from World Fuel or slowed down, or they've been so flexible with us.
So it's been a great relationship with them. It's quite fitting what his background was, considering it's a renewable fuel, so. So we're supporting the energy transition, though, in another way as well. And what we've done here is we've extended the platform into our sustainability offerings. And again, we provide value to both suppliers and customers here. Let's review this in more detail. So to our suppliers, just like in fuel, we're a strong financial counterparty, and we're a channel partner for various products. Suppliers here are natural gas producers, utilities, green power producers, power traders. For our customers, we provide deep market knowledge, and we have the ability to supply various sustainability and energy strategies for them. And we provide competitive pricing for the products we provide. Customers here are hospitals, commercial building owners, universities, industrial facilities, airports, and municipalities.
As Michael mentioned earlier, this is about 11% of our gross profit, and we consider it a real growth opportunity. Now, just like the supply chain we walk through for fuel, we can participate in the energy supply chain in different ways here as well. Instead of refineries and terminals and trucks, it's wind farms, power lines, and natural gas plants. Just a different supply chain. Here we can provide just basic brokerage services. We can also move up the supply chain here as well, providing energy and sustainability solutions. In some strategic locations, we supply power and natural gas. Again, we can participate anywhere in this supply chain, just like I showed earlier on the fuel supply chain. Now, let's take a look at our network here.
We have a strong presence in the U.S. and in Europe, and we're expanding into Asia, South America, and the rest of the world. So a growing network here. Now, let's take a look at an example here from a customer who's benefiting from our solutions. So here we provide a comprehensive sustainability and energy solutions for Toyota in the U.K. Let's hear from our customer.
Toyota UK was established in the early 1990s. Our engine plant in North Wales manufactures a hybrid engine, which goes into our vehicle here. Toyota has a global strategy looking at how we manufacture the product that has minimal, if no impact, on the environment. Our challenge is to reduce to zero by 2050. More than 10 years ago, we pretty much had a fixed-rate contract that was then put away in a drawer for 3 years and forgotten about. And so we looked basically to World Kinect Energy Services to be able to give us that guidance and a steer on what we should do and when.
World Kinect Energy Services' understanding of the drivers that are pushing commodity prices is very useful to us, but also their insight as to the non-commodity price changes that we can expect help us to be able to predict what the budgets should be in the future. I think the people at World Kinect are the most valuable of their assets. They've always spent the time to understand what we need as a customer. I'd have no hesitation in recommending the services that we receive from World Kinect Energy Services. Their assistance in helping us to conduct tenders for future contracts has been extremely useful. We've always found their responsiveness and proactiveness helps us enormously.
So again, another great example how you can support the customer with their energy needs. I think one of the common themes across all the examples we gave is that we're providing services or products to them so they can work on their operations and work on their core competencies. We reviewed a lot of things, but I want to leave you with these key points. Our model is to provide value to both suppliers and customers. The last half-mile strategy enables us to capture higher value in the supply chain. Our core distribution platform is flexible and scalable to meet the changing needs. The platform supports our customers' current needs while positioning us to participate in the energy transition.
So before we end with the video from one of our customers, I want to thank all of you for your time and want to thank all my colleagues for everything they do to support our customers and suppliers every day. Now, let's hear from Skyservice, who uses many aspects of our platform.
Skyservice is the largest private aviation company in Canada. We have close to 70 airplanes in our management fleet, and we are the largest charter operator in the country. Our planes are flying 24 hours a day all over the world. In order to achieve that record of safety and compliance and service to our customers, we rely heavily on World Fuel Services. Our relationship started about 8 years ago when World Fuel purchased the assets from Imperial Oil. At that time, we were working with them to manage fuel farms. They were controlling supply to our customers. That relationship had kind of morphed into looking at different ways to create value for both World Fuel and for Skyservice, whether that was through leasing us trucks, supporting us with equipment.
Then as we started to learn more about World Fuel, we realized there were all kinds of other value-added streams for our customers where we provide tip-to-tail aircraft management services and we provide charter services. World Fuel helps us with our trip support and some of the digitization of our FBO operations. World Fuel is a really important part of our day-to-day operations where our planes are traveling all over the world. I'm very proud to say, through our partnership with World Fuel, Skyservice is the first company to introduce SAF into Canada. Skyservice has put together a very aggressive ESG initiatives for the next 10 years. Embedded into that plan is our relationship with World Fuel Services to provide sustainable aviation fuel, also to help us educate our customer base on the use of sustainable aviation fuel.
Along with all the things that we're doing in the day-to-day operation of our business with electric vehicles, offsetting our carbon footprint, working with World Fuel Services is going to be paramount to us achieving our ESG goals over the next 10 years. What I can say is it started 8 years ago, but now we are a vertically integrated partner with World Fuel Services and continue to be the market leader in Canada for business aviation.
All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. That was fantastic. So we're just going to take a quick break, get some coffee, refreshments. We have coffee over here in the lobby. For the webcast viewers, we're going to restart this program at 10:20 A.M. Eastern. So 10:20 A.M. Eastern, we'll be back online. In the room, please get some coffee. Thanks for being here. Yeah. No, no. We already called To.
My mic on? You turning me on? Slides aren't moving, Elsa. No. Testing. One, two, three. Can you hear me? Everyone would make your way back to your seats, or we're going to get started again. Back to my pockets. Nice and quiet. All right. We're ready to go, Elsa. We're good to go? We're online? Great. Well, good morning, everybody. Nice to see you all. I'm probably the one person that knows maybe most of the people in the room.
So I really appreciate, personally, all the folks that made their way to the hotel here this morning, those of you that are online, whether it be folks from the investment community or even the banking community. We have a lot of our commercial bankers in the room as well. So we appreciate all of your collective support. And when we get to the balance sheet discussion, I'll throw you guys a bone or two on the banking side for supporting us with the $2 billion term loan and revolver. So without further ado, you've heard some great stuff from Mike and John. I will tell you before I get started that those guys did a great job supplying you with a lot of videos. I'm going to supply you with a ton of footnotes. Thank you, Mike Tejada, our Chief Accounting Officer, for that contribution to today's event.
So looking at our business through a financial lens, John and Mike took you through the history, the story. John did a great job talking through what we do day in and day out. Some of those videos, hopefully, added a lot of value in terms of hearing from our customers, in terms of how we support them, and even someone like World Energy on the supply side. So if there is one goal that we had for today, or I had for today, is having some of you that have always claimed certain levels of confusion walk away with the feeling that maybe the story isn't as complicated as you thought. So one of the key goals is simplifying the story. We'll try to reinforce that one last time in the next several minutes.
I'm going to talk a bit about our focus on driving operating efficiencies to enhance operating leverage. That's one target we've had out there. So that won't be a new story today. But I'll talk a little bit more. I'm looking at one particular person in the room that's always saying, OK, that's great. But how? And try to elaborate a little more on how we think we're going to get there. We've talked about. Elsa introduced our capital allocation framework about a year ago with a bit more clarity. We're going to add even more clarity today on what does that really mean, and what are we going to try to accomplish over the next several years. Our improving cash flow profile with $271 million of operating cash flow last year is contributing to a strong liquid balance sheet.
We can talk a little bit about our historical cash flow and where we think our cash flow may go over the next five years. And then also EBITDA, doing all the right things. How is that going to contribute to EBITDA? Where do we think that might go? And hopefully, if we accomplish all of that in the next few minutes and the next few years, we'll be driving improved shareholder returns to all of you that are already invested and those that are considering investment, someone that I just spoke to. So this slide is not meant to be drawn to scale. My goal, we had very neat designers, was to make this look even messier, right? There's a lot of things that we've done in the past that potentially added to some confusion for some folks. They weren't bad things by any means.
Some of these things that have been unbelievable contributors to our bottom line, to our cash flow, our balance sheet, and our business in general, some of them were really small. If you take something like propane, where it's a good solid business, but there are folks out there that do that in a much, much bigger and arguably better way than we did. When crude became the soup du jour in the U.S. several years ago, we played in that space for a period of time. We owned some convenience stores and had to deal with potato chips and cigarettes and cigarette taxes, not something we do anymore. Many of you know we were in Afghanistan for many, many years servicing the U.S. military and NATO and others. That was a very valuable part of our business. But it had a sunset, and that sunset has passed.
But over the 10 years plus that we were in that space, we generated a lot of cash. And I'm not sure if our balance sheet would be where it is today if it wasn't for that particular business. So this isn't meant to say all this stuff was bad. A lot of it was great. Some of it, like Multi Service, was more valuable to someone else than it was to us. And I'll probably repeat this a few times. It was competing for capital with our core businesses. And you can see the center, that's the core that John and Mike have alluded to over the past hour. So present, I've got to click this a few times to get the point across. All that's gone.
By the way, there were two little pieces in that pie that I didn't refer to that said Avinode and aviation FBO software products. For those of you that checked your phones last night, we've announced that we've just sold that. Using that as a prime example of the things of the past, one of those things is about to be a thing of the past. Why the sale of Avinode? Again, Avinode's a global platform for sourcing basically private jets with tremendous market share around the world. Strong business, another example, like Multi Service, competing for capital with our core activities, worth a lot of money and a lot of strategic value to someone that plays specifically in the software space.
For us, it unlocks a tremendous amount of capital on a relative basis to the size of our balance sheet to repay debt or reinvest in our core. It's immediately accretive to earnings per share. 10 years with Avinode, great business. We wish that team everything, all the best. Very proud of what we've accomplished over the last decade with that business. But $200 million was a bit tough to turn down. Someone asked me earlier a couple of additional facts that weren't shared in last night's release. The combination of these businesses represented approximately $40 million of revenue in 2023 and $11 million of EBITDA. I'll let those numbers speak for themselves. When we do close, we'll be reporting an after-tax gain of somewhere around $75 million-$80 million, which will obviously be a one-time item.
But clearly, that contributes to our balance sheet, contributes to our liquidity. And in the short term, we'll be using the incoming cash to pay down debt, which will reduce our run rate of interest expense in the short term by somewhere around $10 million-$11 million. So great opportunity for us to continue sharpening our portfolio. You've heard that line over and over again this morning. On the flip side, if you go back to the Multi Service story, which we sold in 2020, it was similar, right? That was also a great business that we were able to unlock a lot of value, sell it for a large gain, bring in a lot of cash. And at the time, that cash was very valuable to help us fund the Flyers acquisition, which was the largest acquisition we've ever completed.
That would have been a bit more difficult for us without that Multi Service sale. So you've heard John talk about Flyers. Flyers came on the beginning of 2022, significantly expanded our higher margin Card Lock network. You saw the video. And that's just a great business. You don't have to sell the potato chips and the cigarettes. You saw the trucks just pulling in, doing their thing, and leaving. It's a very low-cost model. So we've learned a lot from the folks in that business. And we're actively trying to grow that network organically. And I'll share an example of a bolt-on acquisition in a few moments. It meaningfully expanded our presence on the West Coast. And simply transformational, I would say, for our land business in the first two years under our ownership. The results have been strong, even considering some difficult weather conditions in early 2023.
Great shot in the arm for our land business. We're in the process of working through integrations and getting the two pieces, the old legacy liquid land business in the U.S. and Flyers, to work more tightly together over time. In 2020, we also completed a nice transaction. We timed it perfectly. We closed about 25 minutes before COVID started. We bought a business for almost $160 million that, within a couple of weeks, had no business. But if you fast forward four years, great further expansion of our higher margin fuel business, principally focusing on private and business and general aviation, complementary footprint to what we were already doing.
We've bought several companies like this over the years, which has contributed to a much larger aviation contribution coming from business and general aviation than what one might have been accustomed to years ago when we were probably 80% commercial passenger and cargo. Higher margin, lower risk, solid, ratable business, great business for us, great team operating that business. So despite the slow start because of COVID, we're now well exceeding expectations that we initially had when we bought that business at the beginning of 2020. So two really good stories on aviation and in land. And they've contributed, as I've already mentioned. If you put it in a unit margin perspective, if you look at aviation first, aviation's margin in 2022 is $0.05 a gallon. That was impacted by about a penny from that favorite word that everyone has, which is always tough to say correctly, backwardation.
So we had severe market backwardation after the invasion of Ukraine. So that impacted us somewhere around a penny, right? So we were at $0.06 or so on an adjusted basis in 2022. And then interest rates started climbing. And we became more and more focused on returns. And we improved our margins in 2023 effectively by about 10%. $0.06 of a penny doesn't sound like a lot. But when you're selling billions of gallons of fuel, it adds up to a lot of incremental profitability. So great job by the team there. I'll talk about the working capital part of that story a little later. And of course, UV has always also been contributing more and more, higher margin business, some fuel and non-fuel added business that's also contributing to a healthier margin. Another question we often get from the analyst community: Are these numbers sustainable?
We believe they are, again, because the business has shifted to a more cost-effective model. If you look at land, similar story. By Flyers coming into the mix, we were at somewhere around $0.057 a gallon in 2021 before Flyers. And now in 2023, we're at $0.072. So we've got, again, more higher margin activity there on the Card Lock side. As you can imagine, historically, something we still do very well is we sell fuel to c- stores that are owned and operated by others. Great business for us, great cash flow, low risk. We've been doing that for many, many, many years. But we don't get the same margin as operating the location ourselves.
But operating a Card Lock is a lot easier than operating a convenience store with all the employees and all the products and the merchandise in the store that other folks do very well as their core business. So both aviation and marine, margin is moving in the right direction. And there's a reason behind it. And I'll try to give you some of the highlights as to the why. Now, marine's different, right? Marine does not have the same level of predictability on unit margins. Why? First of all, in land and aviation, we have more contracts. So we're locking in a margin for a year in aviation in many cases. In land, that convenience store example, in many cases there, we're locking in a contract for 7-10 years.
So if we're a branded distributor for Exxon in Chicago and someone's operating an Exxon station, their contract's coming up, they come to us or one of our competitors. If they lock in, we're tied together for a very long time. Marine's more of a spot business. And it's a larger bulk transaction. So we're selling in metric tons instead of gallons. And every fueling, effectively, is a separately negotiated transaction because they're big dollars. They're in different ports. There are different logistical issues related to just about every transaction there. So that allows us to be more nimble and price each transaction to the market. So if you look at what happened in 2022 after the Ukrainian invasion, marine bunker prices went through the roof to record levels. Our margins were really, really strong. And we had a record year.
We delivered results that were four times our plan going into 2022. 2023, the margins came down as prices came down. But despite the variability in margins, the cool thing about marine, as you can see on this slide, is we manage this business today with literally no working capital. 2022 and 2023, the number was negative. Strong operating margins, I'm going to get back to that in another context in a few moments. But it's not competing for capital with aviation and land. So sometimes it's going to contribute an outsized result. Sometimes it's going to deliver an undersized result. But at the end of the day, it's generating cash for us. And it does not involve a tremendous amount of capital. There's very little physical assets in that business.
We just have a great team that we have. John's done a great job with the team in getting efficiencies in that business over the years to put us in a position that it's generating these returns. And it has this working capital profile. I'll talk a little bit more about marine in a couple of minutes. So I've touched on, in one way or the other, all three businesses already. But I'm going to go through them all again relatively quickly. I won't talk about the charts. So again, aviation migrating to a higher value, higher margin offerings. You heard John talk about the last half mile. We were just talking to someone about that during the break. That's where we're the guys at the airport handling the logistics of the fueling, which is earning us a higher margin. We have to make some investments on the ground.
But they're not massive. You look at our PP&E in our balance sheet. It's really not a big number. So that's become a bigger piece of the pie. We're doing that last half mile example, like the Luton example, or I always use Nice as an example because I like that airport. I've only been there twice. That is where we're the guys on the ground. We're getting a higher margin. And we're doing that over 100 locations, most of them in Europe, some of them in Canada, is another example. We've worked hard to restructure our customer portfolio, especially in the light of rising interest rates. So being more religious about minimum return thresholds in a 7% incremental funding environment for us today. Hopefully, that'll change soon. If anyone knows anyone at the Fed, please call them on our behalf.
That's helped improve returns, reduce some volatility, and tremendously improve our working capital efficiencies in that business, which has contributed to improvement in our cash flow profile. We believe we still have a lot of solid opportunities ahead in aviation looking forward on the back of the mix of business that we have today and all the good things we have going on around the world, thanks to John and a great team of folks throughout our family on the aviation side. On land, again, I won't dwell on Flyers and that piece of the puzzle that I've already talked about. On this slide, I'll talk a little bit about the growing suite of complementary sustainability products and services. This is for you, Pavel. That's an area that is the newest piece of the puzzle.
Although we've been doing it for a while, it's still small. Our customers have evolving needs. You've seen some examples on the slides today or on a couple of the videos. That's an area where we continue to invest. But we're not investing in inventory. That's where the more of the investment there is in people. We brought a lot of great people in from different walks of life that have those types of experiences behind them that are helping us accelerate growth in some of the subsets of that area that we're playing in today. So Land, I think, is on a path to perform a lot better. The growth opportunities are getting clearer. We'll talk about the efficiencies in more detail in a couple of moments. Everyone still here? OK, great. Marine, I call 2022 a bonus opportunity, right?
So Marine is always going to produce a certain level of profitability, again, with a great capital model. But it isn't always going to produce a tremendous amount of profitability. But when something happens in the world and there's a lot of volatility, Marine has the opportunity to drive significant incremental value for us, significant incremental cash flow. And 2022 is the best example of that ever. I think we could continue to maintain the efficient capital model that we have today. And then there are always niche expansion opportunities for us, Tampa being an example. You heard Royal talk about Port Canaveral. We're expanding the facility in Gibraltar that you saw on the screen earlier. So the team's always looking for opportunities to take our expertise worldwide and find new ways to apply that in different ports around the world.
So our operating margin target, getting into a bit more of the numbers, we've been sharing this target for, also, a bit over a year now. We troughed a bit during COVID at 20%, 21%. If you look at the blue bars, those are the adjusted bars. The bars on the other side are from Mike Tejada. And those are the gap numbers. We bounced back in 2022 as we got very serious about focusing on driving efficiencies. Made a little more progress in 2023. So we came out of 2023 at 26%. And we've been using the term our medium term target is 30%. We're being clearer today. We're saying, what does medium term mean? That's 2026. So we think we could achieve that 400 basis point improvement in the next few years. And then Ben and others often ask me, well, how are you going to do that?
So what we'll spend the next few minutes on is trying to give you a little more clarity on where we think that's going to come from and how fast we think we could start making real progress. So if you look at this slide, kind of interesting, right? Marine, you already saw this earlier, 42% five-year average operating margin. Aviation, not too far behind at 39%. Land only at 2022, that's a five-year average. But 2023 was about the same number. So if you want to look at the baseline, you could look at it both ways. It doesn't matter. It's about 22% either way. So maybe a little bit of a coincidence, maybe not. But a big part of how we're going to get the corporate 30% target achieved is by land achieving the same 30% number, right? And how are we going to do that?
So unlike aviation and marine, that are pretty mature businesses, have been around for decades, land's our teenager, if you will, right? It's still a teenager. It's about 16 years old. And it's been the amalgamation of a lot of acquisitions in a lot of different parts of the liquid fuel space. We've morphed into power and gas. And now sustainability-related services are part of that mix as well. We've always joked that if it doesn't fly or float, it's in our Land business. The good news is that slide earlier, I would have flipped back to that with the funky pizza pie. There's a lot of other things that were in that land business that are now gone. So now it's more natural gas, diesel, and gasoline, diesel, power, and natural gas. So Land's really grown by acquisition.
So we still have a lot of work to do on system and infrastructure consolidations. We've acquired a very efficient platform from Flyers. We still have a bunch of other legacy acquisition platforms that we're in the process of integrating. That's going to bring synergies for us. There's still a lot of heavy lifting to do there. That's not all going to happen overnight. We're not jumping from 22% to 30% overnight. That's why it's a three-year target. John and his team are very heavily focused on improving asset utilization. That's not necessarily a G&A type cost improvement. That improves our cost of sales because if we're being more efficient with every truck on the road, it's going to drive a better gross margin for us, which is going to help us move these numbers in the right direction. Continue sharpening the portfolio of activities.
Again, shedding some of the miscellaneous pieces of the puzzle that you saw in my first slide and focusing more on the core things that we do really well. The Card Lock business is fantastic, in my opinion. We're doing that in a bigger way on the back of Flyers, what we call retail, where we're selling fuel to C stores under long-term contracts. Those two pieces of the business represent a significant portion of the profitability in land today. We're going to continue to focus on how we could grow those businesses organically and through whether it be a bolt-on or larger type acquisitions. I'm going to provide, again, an example in a moment. Clearly blocking and tackling, just focusing on driving efficiencies across the land business.
Synergistic acquisitions and integrations, something we've done really well. UV is a good example in aviation, where we were able to integrate that business very, very effectively into the platform we built over many years. We've never really had that in Land. So we went out and bought a company. It kind of stayed in its own private Idaho for a while until we could figure out what to do with it. Some of them are still in their own private Idaho because we haven't integrated them yet. With the Flyers platform on the Card Lock side, if you go out and buy some additional Card Locks, you have a very easy integration opportunity. And the issue is finding the opportunities, right? So we found one. John mentioned it earlier, Van Manen Petroleum in Michigan. So it's small. So I don't want to overstate this. A small transaction.
But we were able to instantly integrate that onto our Card Lock network. No real cost comes along, a modest amount of cost comes along with the transaction. So all the GP or gross profit that we acquired, almost all of it drops to the operating income line, in this case, 80% of it, right? So of course, this is something, if we could do this every day, we would. It doesn't involve a lot of management attention. I haven't used that term yet. My favorite term is ROMA, Return on Management Attention. Try to focus more on what's important and not redirect our attention or distract ourselves with things that are less important. So these are deals we could do without distracting ourselves in a big way that are additive to the land business. And these are opportunities that we really didn't have before Flyers.
So we welcome the Van Manen Petroleum to the family. We hope that we could continue to find opportunities like that as time goes on. The other piece, a lot smaller. But I'm corporate. My line is I'm from corporate. I'm here to help. But I also cost you money. So the business says, how do you cost me less money? John says that every day. So that's about 10%. It was about $111 million last year. That doesn't get allocated to any of the segments, but sits on the P&L that you guys see when we release our results. So we're looking to get that down to at least 100 basis points. How do you get there? We have an outsourced provider in the room that's going to tell me how we're going to get there. I wish they kept Gemini guy.
So things like automation, digitization, continuous cost management, the opportunity to accelerate offshoring, as an example, we have a few hundred people in Costa Rica that are in a shared service type environment that we established many, many years ago. We've been building the level of competence and skill sets in that jurisdiction for a long time. That's obviously saved us a lot of money. But we also have some really great people down there. So we're looking at more types of opportunities like that to leverage the cost of the biggest part of our expense side of our P&L, which is people. So you'll hear more about that as time goes on. So this is part two beyond what I already talked about in Land. So Land gets us a big part of the way to the corporate goal.
Corporate gets us into the red zone, if you will. There's always a little bit of pruning that we could do in the rest of the business, namely aviation and marine, that gets us into the end zone. So again, this is a bit more. Ben probably wanted to hear even more. But it's a bit more clarity on why we think we could get there. Is it simple? Are we going to get there with simplicity and no focus? Absolutely not. It was a tremendous amount of effort, especially on the Land side. But John didn't talk about a lot. But we have a newer team running the Land business that bring in great experience from different walks of life. And I think that's already making a big difference.
And we'll continue to increase our odds of driving more improvement in Land more rapidly than we have in the past. And again, 30% is still not where Aviation and Marine is because they're closer to 40% on average, right? So we're saying we only need to get half of the way to Aviation and Marine's efficiency to put ourselves in a much better position and meet these 2026 goals. Elsa introduced this slide. She loves it. So of course, I had to use it, our capital allocation framework. I'll talk more about our balance sheet and liquidity position on another slide. M&A, a lot of people ask us, where are the M&A opportunities? And you saw Mike's slide where we have 10% market share, give or take, in Marine and Aviation, but only 1% in land, with most of that 1% being in the United States.
We're starting to find opportunities in countries beyond Brazil and the U.K. where we've operated for a long time. We're very, very focused on trying to stick to our knitting, find opportunities that play into our core competencies, that drive operating leverage, that drive cash flow, that aren't high risk. Maybe something that we were saying for years and years. We weren't always walking that walk. We're trying to walk that walk in a better way than we have in the past. If we do that well, we're going to drive additional efficient growth, profitable growth. We're going to improve operating leverage, another way that we're going to hit that target and improve returns. Then buybacks and dividends, probably the favorite question for most people in this room, except for commercial bankers. I'll talk a little bit about that as well in a moment.
So that's the framework. So this is a bit of history for the last four years in terms of the amount of capital we've returned to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. Probably not the number that some of you would love to see. But then you have to remember the size of our balance sheet is not as big as some may think. So for us, these are pretty big numbers. And 2023, by a smidgen, beat out 2020 for the largest number that we've returned in a year in our history, just under $100 million. So while this isn't the only place we plan on allocating capital in the future, it is an important piece of the puzzle. And we're trying to provide some more clarity on that today. Our dividend, so we had the Avinode announcement last night. Elsa's been busy writing press releases, by the way.
So everyone should thank her later. Last Thursday, we announced a dividend increase. So we're never going to be, for those of you that are interested in dividends at all, we're never going to be the company that has increases annually like Clockwork. But as you can see from this slide, even though they're not as timed as some others have increased their dividend every single year for 30 years, the increases are significant, 14% compound annual growth since 2020, 21% increase in the latest announcement. You could see our dividend payout ratios. And Glenn Klevitz, who's here, our treasurer, and I were talking yesterday. And don't ask me why. I guess we were bored. We went back and looked at what our dividend was in 2015. And if you look at that number, the new dividend is almost triple where we were just 9 years ago.
So we've had a significant focus on making this a more meaningful piece of our capital allocation framework. It's not a massive amount of dollars. But it means something to a lot of our dividend-friendly investors. And we're happy to be supportive in that way while providing a significant amount of incremental capital through cash flow to do other things as well. So speaking of cash flow, this is probably my favorite slide in the deck. But that's just me because I'm weird. Some people said to me as I was preparing this slide that you shouldn't show 2020 because that's an aberration. That was COVID, right? And I'm actually showing this slide mainly for that reason. So what do we mean by that? In 2020, all of a sudden, COVID hit right after we bought UV. Planes stopped flying. Ships stopped sailing.
Cars stopped driving unless you needed toilet paper or paper towels. Then you got in the car. I got two laughs for that, though. Our business shrunk, right? Volume went down 26% overnight. GP went down, or gross profit went down 23%. For those of you that remember, April 20th of 2020, the price of crude went to -$37. So the cost of the product that we sell went negative. So a testament to the liquidity of our balance sheet, we generate a lot of cash. Some people were struggling and running out of cash. We were generating, excuse me, generating a lot of cash. The cool part about this story is within two years, the world came back. Our volume returned to 94% of what it was in 2019 by the end of 2022.
Our gross profit returned to 100% of where it was in 2019 by the end of 2022. And oil prices were $80. So if you were just a mathematician and weren't focused on what we do, you'd say, OK, well, that $600 million came in. And it probably just would have gone right back out. And that would have been easy to explain. But it didn't. We generated more cash, not as much, in 2021 and 2022 because our trade cycle before COVID was about 8-8.5 days. After COVID, by the end of 2022, it was down to 4. So we cut our trade cycle in half. We improved the mix of our business. We got more religious on things like collections and terms to our customers as interest rates really barely started to move by the end of that period.
It wasn't really an interest story. While we generated less cash because we did give some of that $600 million back, we still generated cash. If you look at that three-year period, the COVID period, we still generated about $300 million a year. Then you get to 2023, which was the first year that was a bit more normalized. We generated about the same amount, $271 million in cash. I would say this is a fair way of saying that we've done a good job with our balance sheet. We've improved our cash flow profile, which again has made us more confident to increase our dividend, buy back some more shares. Free cash flow yield, for those of you geeks in the room that are into that, 13%.
We haven't really talked about free cash flow historically as much as we've talked about operating cash flow. But that's important as our CapEx number has grown a bit, as we have more assets on the ground. And of course, we're managing that carefully as well. So we wanted to show that number. And you'll see why in a moment. But that number was almost $200 million last year as well. 2-second time out. OK, what's next? So on the basis of that background, we decided that we would introduce a target for the amount of free cash flow we think we could generate over the next five years, $900 million-$1.2 billion. If you look at that and you look at the result last year, we're basically saying we could continue to do what we did in 2023, maybe do a little bit better.
It's not necessarily always going to be ratable, or it's going to be the exact same number every year. But we think over that five-year period, we could generate at least this amount of free cash flow. And then what are we going to do with it? So we're estimating about 40% to be allocated to buybacks and dividends, with the rest of it focused on investing in our core business, core, the core piece, not the old pizza pie, the core, and strategic investments, bolt-on deals like Van Manen & maybe something a little larger. And then in years where those opportunities may not be as evident, we could always pay down debt and reduce interest expense. I think I mentioned it earlier. I'll repeat it again.
With the money coming in from the Avinode deal, it's another opportunity for us to reduce our run rate of interest expense, which has obviously been elevated in a higher interest rate environment. So that's the one new target that we wanted to share with you today. Back to the balance sheet. For the commercial bankers, you could all wake up. This is for you. Thank you. I've talked about other elements of our balance sheet and cash flow. Here, I want to talk about the health of our balance sheet from the standpoint of having a term loan and revolver that we value very much. Thank you, Nicole and everybody else. $2 billion package, if you will, that doesn't mature until April 2027, which gives us a tremendous amount of flexibility.
It gives us flexibility to sell some of our receivables on top of this facility, which is an off-balance sheet structure. Then I think most of you know that last June, we for the first time stepped out of our comfort zone from basically having a capital structure that was always a bank loan and did a very successful convertible offering for $350 million. And that doesn't mature until June of 2028. So we have no real debt maturities until 2027 or 2028. We had over $1 billion of available liquidity at the end of the year. The other thing that people ask us about a lot, and those people are the ones that are in this room, is what's your comfort level with leverage? You could see that we finished the year at 2.3x debt to adjusted EBITDA.
Our comfort level has always been keeping that number below 3, which I believe we've done pretty successfully for many, many years. By the way, on a pro forma basis for 2023, if you factor in the sale announced last night, that 2.3 would drop down to 1.9 and bring us below 2 for the first time in quite a while. So would we ever go over 3 if there was the deal of the century that showed up? Of course. But from a general standpoint, we always work hard to keep that number under 3 x. And Glenn reminds me of that every day. Minimum cash balance, we're not necessarily looking to keep a tremendous amount of cash on our balance sheet, especially in this interest rate environment where you have negative arbitrage between your borrowing rate and your investment rate.
But we generally try to keep that number at $250 million or higher. And you could see it was a lot higher pre-Flyers. We used some of that cash. But we kept it around $300 million the last couple of years. So that's another financial policy statement we wanted to make today. And the next target, so if you think of all those efficiencies, if we could achieve the 30% operating margin by 2026, which again, heavy lifting, won't happen overnight. But we feel more confident than ever that we're equipped to get there. That's going to take us part of the way towards this adjusted EBITDA goal that we're now sharing for the first time as well. And then growth gets us profitable growth gets us the rest of the way. So we finished 2023 at $386 million.
The goal we're setting for ourselves and the target we're sharing with all of you is $480 million-$520 million. That translates to 8%-10% compound annual growth, which isn't crazy. We're playing it down the middle to a level we think we could really achieve. Again, the efficiencies alone that I discussed earlier between land and corporate get you, call it, $40 million of the way there. And then you've got to get the rest of the way through it there by growing volume, growing gross profit, managing expenses carefully, et cetera. This is something we'll now talk about on a more regular basis. Now that we've put that out there, it puts pressure on all of us, Mike, Ira, John, Glenn, everybody, Elsa, to make sure that we're moving in the right direction to get our P&L as healthy as our balance sheet.
So operating margin target, well, I think I have a slide on that again. Elsa told me if you're sharing targets, repeat them over and over again so everyone remembers them. So you're going to see like five more slides on these targets. So this just puts it all in perspective, 30% adjusted operating margin target for 2026, which we've shared for a while. We've made progress. We're at 26%, $480 million-$520 million EBITDA target for 2026. And then the five-year target on free cash flow of $900 million-$1.2 billion. It's not on this slide. And it's not a formal target. But our return on invested capital hasn't been exactly where we've wanted to be. It's been in single digits for quite a while now. And if we could achieve all of this, it will definitely put us into double digits, right?
So there's no commitment there. A lot of it is math. But we certainly think we could bring that number back into double digits again within the next couple of years. Again, hard work, keeping that working capital discipline really, really strong, keeping our focus on expenses strong, and finding opportunities to grow. One more repeat on returning capital to shareholders. So again, you already saw the $94 million of free cash flow I'm sorry, $94 million of capital returned to shareholders in 2023. That was actually 51% of 2023 free cash flow. And again, we're saying that we think we're going to try to target 40% or so of future free cash flow for buybacks and dividends. The 21% dividend increase was a 70% increase from 2020.
Our dividend yield is now, again, for those of you that are excited about dividends, now a more respectable and healthy 2.8%. We actually hope that that 2.8% drops really low, which means our stock price goes up a lot. But for now, 2.8% is, I believe, Glenn, the highest number that our yield has ever been. One more time, right? So is this simple? No. It's not simple at all. It's actually very hard. But we've given it a lot of thought. I believe, again, that with the focus and the team that we have in place today, the lessons we've learned from the past, fewer distractions, again, that pizza pie getting simpler. This is where Pete, I was going to go backwards. But I don't want to mess you up.
If you just remember that slide where I started, we're able to be more focused on what really matters today, our core distribution platform, our growing sustainability product and service offering. If we could stick to that, there's a lot of opportunities there alone. And again, return on management attention, right? We're way more focused on what we do day in and day out, where we've built core competencies over many, many, many years. So we'll try to remember that every day when we attempt to get distracted. So in summary, again, sharpening our portfolio of business activities is, I just said that, is allowing us to focus on the core and simplifying the story. It's not just the story. It's our business. But we're simplifying our business. That's probably would have been the better word for this slide.
I think our opportunity to drive operating efficiencies is greater than ever. We're equipped with better tools, better platforms, better people. And that's an area that means a lot to me. And we will continue to focus on driving that particular measure in the right direction. We've provided greater clarity on capital allocation with, again, the target for buybacks and dividends, the target for overall cash flow that will allow us to do more of that. And our working capital, Molly, I can't talk enough about how great our team has reacted to the interest rate environment, really, by focusing really, really hard on every dollar of credit. Credit is a value prop to our customers. It's how we use that credit as effectively as possible that's a value prop to our balance sheet, right? So we want to be a good value prop to our customers with credit.
But we also want to be a really good value prop to our balance sheet. So we'll continue to do that. And we'll continue to try to manage our working capital as well as possible. A lot of people would always say, well, what happens if prices go through the roof? You're going to use a tremendous amount of working capital. That's not really true anymore because our net working capital days are so small. So if prices increase, we will use some more capital. But on a relative basis, to the days where our net trade cycle was in double digits, that variation has been muted quite a bit. And we've always prided ourselves on a strong and liquid balance sheet with $1 billion plus of available liquidity. We'll continue to pride ourselves on that. That's always paramount to us.
It's always providing us with the capital we need for an opportunistic acquisition to invest in expanding a business like we have in Gibraltar, where you saw some of those pictures earlier. So we'll continue to make sure that we have capital to do that, opportunistic moves like Avinode to bring in $200 million overnight for a business that was based on the metrics I shared earlier, that was pretty small, great way of further cementing the strength of our balance sheet. So all of this is with the goal of driving increased value for our customers, our suppliers, our shareholders, and maybe most importantly, our employees. So I think, ladies and gentlemen, I think I'm really happy that I'm done. And I think we're going to turn it back over to Mike for a moment before we open it up to Q&A. Thank you.
Good job. Thanks, Ira, for bringing it home. So I hope that you can understand why I'm excited and believe that we've got a tremendous opportunity, the quality of our earnings portfolio, the force multiplier of an aligned team. It's really, I think, exciting times. It's a fun time to be in business today with so much going on and for the global platforms that we've developed around the world. So thanks for joining us this morning. And before we go to Q&A, I want to give a big thanks to Elsa and Rhonda and Pete and Richard and Kate and all of the folks in World Kinect in Miami and around the world that help us put this together. And really, to the team, we are who we are because of who we are. You can quote me on that.
But anyway, our culture, the burning desire to exceed that our team has around the world, is really what makes us who we are. You saw a lot of videos from folks. We've got a deep orientation to our customer and our supply community. We enjoy what we do. We're really committed and focused on taking it to the next level. Great. Let's turn it over to Q&A.
OK. Thank you, everyone. We're going to now begin our Q&A session. So for everyone in the room, if you'd like to ask a question, just raise your hand. And one of our team members will be able to hand you a microphone. As a reminder, Q&A is not open to the media. For those of you joining remotely, you still have time to ask questions. Just click the question input located on the upper right-hand corner of the webcast player on your screen. And then click Submit. So when you've received the microphone, please wait for your question to be called. And please announce yourself and your firm before asking your question. So start off with anyone in the room. Or I can jump to online. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, Pavel.
Yep. Pavel Molchanov from Raymond James. Two questions. So first one on the low carbon portion of the business. Kind of conceptually, can you talk about the bonus profitability or incremental profitability when you sell a gallon of renewable something versus a gallon of fossil something? Is there a percentage uplift that we should think about driving that margin improvement over time?
So thanks for the question, Pavel. It really depends. Some part of the renewable marketplace is mainstream, as you've seen from the slides that we've put up. It's a bit of supply and demand to the extent in certain parts of the market where it's been established over many years. Renewables is not a new thing. It's been going on for decades. It's become a commodity. The market has done what the market does, either driven by regulatory or voluntary. As some of the sustainable activities start to emerge, some of them are a bit more rare. There's more effort involved. There's going to be an associated improvement in margin. Depending on what value-added services we add to it, it's going to run the full gamut. A material amount of the activity we have, we do get enhanced margin.
There's also a significant amount, which is pretty comparable to our traditional fuels.
OK. When I look at page 49 with the map of your power and natural gas and sustainability coverage, it is much more tilted to North America and Europe compared to kind of the global footprint that you have for everything else. So to expand your geographic capabilities in these emerging energy sources, is that something you can do in-house? Or does it require M&A?
It's a combination. We started out in 2012. Our ship owner clients and trucking clients wanted us to help them with LNG and CNG. We were not experts at that. We found a company in Minneapolis. We bought that company, a great company, and grew that. Then those individuals that had been in that business for many, many years introduced us to other folks in the industry. We ended up buying a company in Bergen. We actually bought seven companies and put them together. That's where we came up with Kinect Energy. We've grown de novo because we have our global platform in aviation and marine. We relocated and recruited experts in some of those locations and offices. That's why you've got a concentration in North America and a concentration in Northwest Europe. We've expanded into Australia, into Japan, Korea.
We've got a good footprint there, Latin America. So that's an area that I think we have a material amount of upside, both organic and inorganic. John and the team have recruited a number of different experts because the subject matter expertise on this area is really important, understanding the electrons in particular. And the molecules are a little bit easier for us because we came from a molecule background in terms of the biodiesel and all that. There's a lot of second and third generation activity coming out in sustainable aviation fuel and in renewables, where it's not competing with food. And you're getting waste gas. And it's pretty exciting. And my degree was in environmental science a long time ago. So I thought this was a great area for us to be involved.
It's particularly gratifying to me to be in this space, not that my interests matter. In any case, there's a lot of growth opportunity organically. John and the team have done a phenomenal job in terms of growing on an organic basis. John, I don't know if you want to add some color to that?
Yeah. I mean, it's really been the hiring of the folks with that talent and enabling us to expand into the other markets with that talent, along with, as you said, the resources that we originally had. So we've done a great job in that regard. And leveraging some of the customers, many of our customers that we already have, I think, is the other thing that we've done a great job in. So we have a lot of different services that we have with customers. And it's very easy then to layer on an additional product or service on top of that.
It's a great point. We've got an installed user base. So we've got a custom-built account base that's looking for these solutions. And whether it's on-site solar, I mean, we've got a network of 450 developers, solar developers around the U.S., North Europe, Asia, Latin America. So for companies that want to achieve their sustainability goals and they're looking at on-site or off-site solar, we've got the ability to do that. A lot of smart people that know a whole lot about a lot of things. And it's a perfect fit within the mix.
OK. Any other questions?
Ben Nolan.
Thanks. Ben, all you.
Thanks. Ben Nolan from Stifel. John, if I could start with you, could you maybe talk through, for the traditional part of the business, how you see growth opportunities? Is there the potential to gain share in your existing footprint? Or is it really needing to branch out into new locations or do inorganic acquisitions in order to drive that volume growth?
Yes to all the above, I guess. I think that, especially in our aviation business, we've been able to move into other airports. So that would be expanding the footprint organically, actually, where you make a very small investment or you work with an airport authority on some longer-term agreement to manage that facility, et cetera. So we've been able to do that year after year and expanding our footprint that way. You don't have to acquire a company to do that. You just do it in that way. There's always some opportunities within the existing airports. We're always, obviously, having to get the right returns and everything. So that opportunity is always there. And then we'll be opportunistic in any of the inorganic, I guess, opportunities. But that ability to expand with just minor investments, again, that last half-mile concept, we'll continue to do.
In marine, we're a little more selective about what ports we would look to move into, maybe into that physical, because there's a lot more variability too. And whether if a port looks good today, it may not look good tomorrow. So we want to be a little much more careful about how we do that. And then again, opportunities there depending to capture some share just globally in the marine space. And then we've talked a lot about land, how we'll do that. But lots of opportunities, even in land with our existing footprint. I mentioned being more efficient with our assets. It's all about throughput through those assets. I came from the airline side. That's what it's all about. And that's what we have to do with whether it's our trucks or our tanks. And so there's opportunities to grow with just the existing footprint.
We've done a lot of analysis. We've seen where there's some real opportunities to grow volume profitably just by better utilizing our assets.
Maybe this is for you, Ira, or any of you. With respect to the Avinode announcement, you're selling at, I think you said, 18x or $11 million.
I didn't say that. You're good at math.
Yeah. Well, I can key it into a calculator, at least. That's orders of magnitude higher than the share price trades today. Are there other pockets of assets within the company that would be significantly valued greater elsewhere and maybe aren't as mission-critical?
Look, there aren't tons of those. I mean, Multi Service was a great example, which I alluded to earlier. Similar dynamics, large gain, similar amount of EBITDA was a little bit more. Avinode, I wouldn't say we have a ton of opportunities like that. But there are still pieces of our business. I mean, we actually do a quick commercial. We think every part of our business is more valuable than what we're valued at. I'll leave it at that, again. But you look at a business like aviation, for example. We've killed it. We've got global market share in double digits, relationships with the largest and smallest airlines in the world, and a growing service portfolio there. And then you look at the land platform getting a lot healthier. And even we mentioned marine. So that pizza pie, again, a lot of those miscellaneous things are gone.
There aren't that many kind of miscellaneous. Ben said earlier, his first comment was, I didn't even know you owned Avinode. And then I hear you selling it for $200 million. So I wouldn't say there's a lot of that. Multi Service and Avinode were probably the two principal examples there. But it doesn't mean that there's nothing else may not get that multiple for the next opportunity. But sharpening the portfolio is investing, but also looking at anything we're doing, in some cases, maybe something that's actually underperforming that we could get a reasonable amount of money for, even if it's not a high multiple, where we could reinvest in an area like Card Lock or the retail business or parts of the aviation model that are thriving. So that's probably the best answer I could give you to that question.
Thanks. Gentlemen here in the front could go first. And then we'll take Mike after. So I think you had a question right here. Yes. So gentlemen here in the front. And then we'll go with Mike after.
Gentlemen in the front. Who's in the front?
Thanks, Chris.
It's much harder than I thought.
Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the presentation today. John Royall from J.P. Morgan. Ira mentioned being, I think, mostly recovered on the volume side from COVID. But my sense from looking at the data is we aren't all the way there on the aviation side. How far are we in the recovery story from COVID on the aviation side? And just trying to understand the natural growth in volumes that will come from that international piece coming back, if there's any.
I mean, I'll cover the first part of that. And maybe John will chime in for part two. So I would say, in most parts of the world, we're back. In many parts of the aviation landscape, we're a bit ahead of pre-COVID. The obvious area where we're still behind, where I'm not sure we'll ever completely catch up, is in Asia. And then there are some pockets of Europe. Scandinavia is one example that hasn't fully rebounded from where we were in 2019. So most of the world's back. North America, for those of you that flew in here today or flew anywhere in the last couple of years, I mean, the commercial passenger activity is really strong. Cargo peaked during COVID for obvious reasons, but is doing relatively well. So it's more of a regional story of what may evolve in Asia.
Good news for us, Asia was never a massive part of our aviation story. Looking forward, John may want to chime in.
Well, excuse me. I would say that we're focused also on getting the right yields and getting the right returns on the business that we have as well. We're very focused on that. We've done a nice job, I think, in the last year of being able to be at the levels we're at with the hurdle rates and things that we've imposed on the team. We'll continue to grow there where it makes sense economically for us.
Great. Thank you. And then my follow-up is, maybe you can talk about how big of a piece of the pie sustainability can ultimately grow to. And how much of the growth side of that 8%-10% CAGR is in the sustainability business?
So it's a great question. The beauty and the challenge of the new economy is, and as I made reference to, this is unfolding. What was great last year is not so great this year. And you've got to be really thoughtful about where you see a durable runway, regardless of the regulatory framework, which comes and goes. There is a very strong secular trend that we've seen over the last couple of decades and started even before then. So picking and choosing your places, we understand the merchant side. You've seen the advisory side, intermediation. We understand that extremely well. There's some digital. So you've had winners and losers. It's a bit of the dot-com of sustainability. So you have to be careful in terms of how you pick your places. But we're extremely well positioned. And we're, again, just starting to break into stride there.
We haven't acquired anything there in some time. We started that business in Minneapolis and Bergen and a smattering of smaller companies in between. So that will become a bigger part of it. And our ability to continue to grow that at a healthy clip, I think, is reasonably strong.
In terms of the CAGR part of your question, unfortunately, I'm not going to give you an exact number. It's part of the story. So Mike said it well. There are opportunities there. Tough to nail what piece of that 8%-10% that may be. But it's clearly part of that story.
Thanks, John. Mike?
Thank you. Michael Lake, the venture entrepreneur. Could you talk a little bit about lithium-based EV motors and how that impacts the market, specifically as it gets more speed vehicles on the commercial side?
EV? Yes, about EV. So the impact of EV on our business. Yeah. So listen, you can participate. We are participating. By virtue of the broad range of our participation model, from advisory to call it old-fashioned brokerage or intermediation to actual physical participation, and then by virtue of EV, it's not a form of energy. It's a means of transmission. So it's all dependent on what the energy source is. In France, it's nuclear. In China, it's coal. So in this country, which I believe is probably what you're referring to, although we do have a global opportunity, it's really about the power. Where's the power coming from? Are you going to be behind or in front of the meter? So we've got a great range of participation models. The actual charging unit is not something that we'll provision that.
Really, we're just a reflection of what our customers want and where the market is going and how we fill that gap within the market side. Even the most robust forecasts show that you're not going to get the adoption that we thought. You've got the grid, the challenges with the grid. You have certain locations where you're just not going to see a lot of adapting of EV. The beauty of our model is that we can participate in a lot of regions and geographies, obviously. We can provide solutions all across the board. I don't think you need me to give you forecasts on what's going to happen with EV. We're agnostic. I mean, we're in the picks and shovels business. We're basically just supporting the marketplace and the customers with a diverse group of capabilities that we're pretty good at.
Regardless of which way it goes, we've got a fairly strong participation model. That's a way of answering the question without answering it. That's the only answer I have.
First row, Bank of America.
Hi. Thank you. It's Adam Roszkowski from Bank of America. So looking at the Land segment and how that is a big part of sort of getting to that 30% margin, you talked about 2026. Maybe just focus on that. And what are the organic growth assumptions within that business and the sort of M&A-based growth? And how do you see that sort of piecing together through 2026?
The answer is, it depends on a lot in terms of what those opportunities may be. Organically, I think Mike recently shared a stat that we added several hundred retail customers, long-term contracts, retail gas station-type customers last year. So the team's working really hard to drive organic growth. That's never going to be a massive number, considering the business that we're in. But we're always trying to beat the external benchmarks in terms of market growth. So call that mid-single digits. The Card Lock business, newer for us, we think there are a lot of untapped opportunities to continue building that network out. So those two pieces of the pie are critical. John and his team are working really hard on finding ways to drive more profitable growth in the delivery side of that business, which is more complicated, more labor-intensive.
The good news there, Glass Half Full has a lot of opportunities for efficiencies that could pad organic growth. The inorganic piece is always opportunistic. The Van Manen example I gave, we would do that every week if we could. There aren't thousands of those opportunities. We're trying to find the right ones. There'll always be a mix of those types of opportunities as well. It's both organic and a bit of inorganic. I would say, in that model of those targets, it's mostly assumed to be organic.
Got it. Thanks. Then you focused on sort of the complementary services across different businesses. How should we think about percentage of revenue, GP, margin profile? Is there any way of sort of breaking that out across the businesses and maybe where that could expand to as well?
You have it mostly in our aviation business, where there's whether attachment rate is the right word in terms of the solution. And John, maybe you want to give a more fulsome answer than I will. But in terms of on business aviation, where we've got a broad suite of services, what the conversation is about. In marine, it's less fulsome. It's really focused on developing our physical, as John is calling it, deep supply. Within land, again, we're filling that out to follow the aviation market. Aviation business is really a manifestation of the future of the company, where we've penetrated the supply chain and the value chain in a more fulsome way than we have in the other businesses. I'm not saying that we couldn't do that. We just haven't done that. And then the land side is getting up.
On the sustainability piece, you've got data services, energy reporting, sustainability reporting. These are moving around in a number of different ways in terms of Scope 1, 2, and 3. And you've seen some of the changes in the regulations coming through, energy efficiency, energy advisories. So there's a lot of service component within our sustainability. So between aviation, between sustainability, John, if you want to add some more color to the comparative margin and what percentage of the mix that is. I don't know if you want to give the audience a little bit more color on that.
I don't know if I can give them the mix.
No, you don't have to give specifics.
Yeah. One of the things what I will say is that, in our land, when we talk about the Card Locks, one of our strategies is to look at each of where our Card Locks are and what other products we could be supplying out of that, for example, lubes and other things like that, in terms of you already have the asset there. You have the activity. What else can you do within that? So we're going to see that as a real opportunity for us, as we look at that, maybe have some trucks there as well to supply some deliveries. Again, looking at the network and seeing where we have those assets and make sure that you can supply multiple products in those markets, which would fall into all the complementary products that we talked about.
In aviation, it's the complementary products in many ways, the fuel supply discussion. That's always important to the customer, obviously. But when you start talking about all the other things, and you saw that in many of the videos, where it was a lot of the reporting or the other things that they have, that's so critical to them that then you're going to get the fuel. So the complementary helps on the fuel side too, actually.
Yeah. We generally bundle that together, look at it together. Clearly, the service business, as I mentioned with renewables earlier, is more people. The investment there is people. So if you start with that renewable story, that number is not going to be generating a really healthy operating margin tomorrow because we're investing in people. It's small. We're growing. But that's certainly an opportunity, as we build scale in that space, to start edging that number north. Right now, as you can imagine, it's very low. The people cost is pretty similar to the revenue, as we've started up pieces of that puzzle over time. Some of the more mature trip services in aviation we've been doing for a long time are a really nice return. But again, we look at that together with the fuel offering because they're generally bundled with the same customers.
Thanks.
Great. Again, that really helps the fuel margin when you're doing that. If the customer needs trip support, they're going to need fuel. You naturally get the fuel as well. Really, it's the complementary services. Sometimes we call them complementary to the fuel. In many cases, the customer values that a lot. You get the fuel with it.
Yeah. And just to wrap up quickly, we have a couple of investor questions coming in. I'm going to try to consolidate into one question. So considering our remarkable growth and expansion into such diverse markets, how do we think about operational risk? How do we think about regulatory risk, credit risk, cyber risk? Mikey, you talked about that common operating model. How do we manage that in such a global, diverse company?
That's a great question. So you could argue that we are one big risk management company. We're handling price risk and quality and operational risk for all of our clients and get deeply focused on that. And I talked about our core functional team is deeply strategic for us. So our legal function, our compliance function, in particular, our technology folks that are pretty much constantly looking at what could go wrong in terms of what we're doing. So when we first started, I mean, my journey was credit risk. The margin on our marine business is not a super high-margin business. So every write-off is kind of painful. So we developed global capability in terms of underwriting risk. And we've taken that defense wins ball games orientation. It's not how much money you can make. It's how much you can lose. And you start from there.
You work backwards from there. So I think we have demonstrated, over a large period of time, when you look at what we do and the volume of business that we do and the amount of places that we do and the amount of things that we do, we have a pretty strong risk management culture. So certainly, things will happen from time to time. That's to be expected. And you look to basically make sure that you've got the capability and your balance sheet. I mean, your balance sheet is holy. So it's always about protecting the balance sheet. Ira has done a phenomenal job of that. You see from the way we've managed that. And it's always protecting the enterprise and protecting our customers and insulating our customers and our suppliers. So we play that role in the marketplace.
Risk management is very central to what we do. Hopefully, that's what we're doing.
Just one thing to add to that. You mentioned it. But it's worth repeating. And I'm looking at the fellow in the corner. We talked about credit risk management. Mike heads that up now for us in my organization. And that's a big deal for us because we're selling to customers all over the world. And one of our value props is we're providing credit that they may not be able to get easily somewhere else, billions of dollars of credit. It's something, through great markets or difficult markets, we've managed very, very, very well. One quick anecdote. If you look at 2020, when I was talking and throwing in a bad joke about the fact that everyone stopped moving, planes, ships, cars, we had customers that owed us money that had no cash flow coming in.
Seemed like the recipe for failure, biggest risk, I assume, we're ever going to have in our lifetimes. And we got through that phenomenally well, based upon our historical expertise and knowledge in dealing with turbulent times, our relationships with customers, the value, unless a customer figured they were never going to come back from COVID, we're the last guys they want to tick off. They want to work with us. They may have asked for extended terms, which we granted for periods of time to put less pressure on their balance sheets. And we took a couple of hits, but very, very, very few. Again, that's part of that $600 million cash flow story. So that was our greatest test ever. The financial crisis was the one, probably almost as bad before that, 15 years earlier. And we fared very well there as well.
Even where there's a bankruptcy, Mike mentioned legal, credit, et cetera, we have tested experience. And we really understand how to put ourselves in the best position so that, when something does go wrong, we have the greatest opportunity to still not lose any money, where we might provide someone with credit post-petition in exchange for getting paid for pre-petition debt. And that works very well. And you could see that from our historical write-offs. And I don't want to jinx myself. But they've been very, very low, considering all the different types of customers we're dealing with all around the world. So Mike, the Hodden team do a phenomenal job looking after that side of our business. And again, that's a key value that we're delivering to our customers in terms of giving them a fair shake on credit, in addition to surety of supply.
Of course, price is important as well. That's a big piece of that recipe that we've nurtured over the long term. It's helped build our business to where it is today.
I think we have one time for one question from Peter. Then I think we're going to wrap it up. So Peter, you can get to you. Then.
It's going to be a good one. I'll.
Do the last one.
It's going to be two questions.
All right.
So Peter McNally with Third Bridge. So as you move into this world of electrons, take me to three years from now, when you're at $500 million in EBITDA, the Toyota U.K. example is nice. What does that look like in the electrons business, do you think? You talk about you're in a participation model in that. Would love an example on that. And then secondly, what is your view on electricity demand in the United States? And the context of that is, it feels like we're at the.
Electricity demand?
Early stages of mania about data centers and people freaking out that there's not going to be enough power, just as if we electrified every car and what that would do for power demand. So when you move into this market, where do you see yourself most actively playing and becoming most successful?
I'll take it, John. You could fill in. So as I said previously, our participation model is broad. So you do have the electrification of as much as possible. The beauty of it, obviously, is that your source of energy could be anything. It's not a source of energy. It's a source of transmission. And so that gives us, by looking at that space, advisory. How many people understand their electric bill? How many people understand the complexities of power? So we've got a great capability of participating on the commercial side. We even looked at generation and consuming. Decided not to go into that. But who knows? In terms of where this country is going, we know that you've got significant issues in terms of the grid. Obviously, you've got critical minerals, which are a significant issue.
You've got the intermittency of renewable and certainly of wind and solar and storage. With the $891 billion, most of it is going to stay regardless of what happens with the election. Some of it may get impacted. Who knows? So that's going to continue rolling. It's going to take flips and twists without question. Regardless, we're going to be in that space. And I don't want to say it doesn't matter. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter. We obviously follow it. And we try to handicap where there is a runway for us to participate. And because we've got a broad range of capabilities, it's figuring out which of those in the value chain make sense that have a runway for us, as opposed to a one-off. You heard Ira talked about ROMA, Return on Management Attention. I mean, our people are our greatest asset.
It's also our financial side of it. So I'm trying not to answer the question. But I'm not an expert on it. We have experts that do that for us. And we try to place our bets in the places that we think we can participate and add value, get a return on margin. And they've got some durable runway to it. But it is a little bit of the dot-com. There's a lot going on. So it is following the bouncing ball of these marketplaces. We'll continue to participate in it, not only in this country but around the world. And it's our expertise and our ability to execute. You have a lot of people that could advise. We're combining the advisory with implementation and bringing a lot of core competencies that people don't necessarily have, either on the buy side or the sell side.
So we're filling that gap. We're filling that void in the marketplace and then figuring out, how are we monetizing that? John, do you want to add more color?
The only thing I would add is you referenced data centers. They need backup power, which is usually generators, which is diesel. So even with the electrification and everything, there's still those things. So we supply that. And then instead of conventional diesel, they now want renewable diesel. And so we're actually participating with our traditional fuels business also in these spaces.
That's a great point. They're building data centers where the consumption is greater than the power plants that are being built in the same region. If you look at the country, Singapore, which is an interesting factoid, 11% of that country's energy demand is data centers. It's a big issue. It's a big problem. It's a big opportunity. When you look at renewable energy, a lot of them are basically saying, "OK, we're just going to produce a renewable molecule because we don't know what to do with the energy." You're seeing now this two-way exchange between the renewable molecule and the renewable electron. We're playing on all sides of the table.
Awesome. Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.