Bilfinger SE (GBFD.XC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this special industrial location, and welcome to the special occasion for us here, presenting our Capital Markets Day 2025. My name is Anette Weidlich, I'm heading Group Communications, and I will moderate you through your day today. Also a warm welcome to all our guests dialing in via the webcast online. Good to have you here. You will be, of course, able to ask your questions via the chat. And also greetings to our colleagues that follow this Capital Market Day via the webcast around the world. Good to have you all here. Before anything happens, safety happens. So in case of an emergency or if you have to evacuate this location, please make yourself familiar with the emergency exits. The first one is at the end of this fitting row on the left side, next to this very beautiful bioreactor. And further emergency exits going down the hall after the exhibition area. And of course, in the entrance where you came in. The exhibition, yes, that's also part of our safety. So please be aware of all the barriers we set up. We have our industrial climbers and all our colleagues showing all these things. So please let's make together sure this is all safe and secure for everyone attending. We have a lot to show you here on stage. We have a lot to present you in the exhibition, and I will come later on to that. And to be honest, we also have a lot to be proud of. And for that, I want to show you -- we want to show you a short video. Thank you. [Presentation]

Your performance is our business. That's our motto. It's relates, of course, to our customers. It relates to our employees. And maybe hopefully, it also resonates a little bit to you today. So let's have a look at the agenda, what we will present to you today. Here on stage today. I also welcome my dear colleague, Jasmin Dentz, from Investor Relations, following the Q&A session with you.

Good morning, everybody. Hi.

In this morning, we will have presentations by our Executive Board, by our Group CEO, Thomas Schulz; and our Group CFO, Matti Jakel. And during the lunch, you will have the chance to visit our exhibition, and I will explain a bit further on that later. And in the afternoon, we will have further deep dive from our top management from the segment, from HR, HSEQ, and from Sales. So let's get started, I'd say. And so I hand over to our Group CEO, Thomas Schulz. Please give him a warm welcome. Thank you.

Thank you, Anette. Good morning to everybody here in the room or in that fantastic nice hole, and of course, on the webcast. I will take you with me and with us on a journey up to 2030 for our company. And this journey is of a company with more than 140 years' experience, with more than 32,000 competent individuals in U.S., Europe and the Middle East. This is a company which offers to our clients' efficiency improvement at any time, at any asset they have as long as it is process-related. When you look into us, we have 90% customer retention rate. 80% of that, what we do for clients is more or less the same. It doesn't matter if we help to produce, catch-up, treat nuclear waste, doing oil and gas, doing anything in pharmaceutical products. That is our competence, to deal with liquids and gases in processes, and we are really good at it. We are market leading in a lot of geographies. We are market leading and a lot of technologies. We got a lot as awards, no matter if it's EcoVadis or recognition in the stock market. And we are asset light, what we like a lot. As Matti from time to time, says, it's asset like and not only asset-light. We are organized in 3 segments where you see, by far, the big business and the majority reported is in Engineering & Maintenance Europe and then a little bit lesser in Engineering & Maintenance International and then the segment Technology. The main 4 industries are energy, chemicals, petrochem, oil and gas and pharma, biopharma, but they are by far more industries, what we serve, like mining, cement, food and so on. If we look on that slide, this describes everything what we do, what we did and what we will do. A good company has a strategy which fits on one slide. That's the slide. And on that slide is our vision: to be the #1 for our customers in enhancing efficiency, and with that, sustainability too. On that slide is the journey, what we are on since '22, but it shows mainly the 2 main directions what we have in strategy, operational excellence, which is improving our own efficiency and market expansion positioning, which means that we bring more of our good products and competencies to our existing and new clients, but it shows our financial ambition too. And we are, at the moment, and that's the expectation for this year on EUR 5.4 billion in revenue, 5.5% in EBITA and a cash conversion, which will be for that year, around 110%. We are on a good way to fulfill our midterm targets for 2025 to 2027. And when you're on a good way to fulfill your targets, you have to think about the next targets. It's one of the arguments. If you have changes in the market, you have to rethink about your targets, I think we can agree we have that. So out of that, our ambition for that what we want to do is based on that what we already delivered. We delivered up to today, 8% growth per year. This is the organic growth, the biggest part, self-propelled plus the M&A growth. We delivered from 3.2% operational adjusted to 5.5% for this year, and we have a cash conversion close to 110%. The target set for 2030 is 8% to 9% EBITA, 8% to 10% growth and a cash conversion in the north or equal of 90%. Before I go into the journey, how we will realize it, and you will hear a lot about the little changes we have to say, what we have to do to achieve that and what we want to do to achieve that, some proof points for that, what we already delivered. On the strategy, the achievements efficiency program, done. Second, the operational excellence, roughly 50-meter of 100-meter is done. And then the market expansion, roughly 20%, 25% done. That is where we are. First, for Matti, myself and the whole team, the whole gang, the bar is of interest where the dark color is not on it. What we can get more where we are going. This is the most important. Financially, we improved revenue since '22 by 25% EBITA, close to 300%, and cash close to 150%. But equal important, maybe more important, we return to the MDAX and the STOXX 600. We returned to investment grade. We returned to shareholders confidence. It's a completely different thing to meet you today than when I joined Bilfinger at the beginning of '22, and I will not talk about that any longer. And we outperformed actually the indices quite a lot. We -- you see that on the left, we have a peer group where we have customers and peers from the global business against us. And all these indices we've performed, but -- and that's the part, this is actual and history. Now it's about future. And the future looks like this with trends and drivers, actually not really a big change to that what we enjoy for several years. Some are more, how to say, into our pace, some a little bit less. Climate change is less discussed nowadays in the world. Still there. Customers are still running for it, but volatility in the market is there. We have over regulation. We don't see any reduction in that. Digitalization, a lot of things. And for us, all of that brings challenges and opportunities, that's the most important, the opportunities in it. Which kind of drivers are important for us, outsourcing, efficiency. The whole thing with artificial intelligence, energy cost, training for our people. There's a lot of trends in it where we can participate in making actually business out of it and offering advantage as efficiency improvement to our clients. And of course, in the trend, we see the difference between how Europe performs in the industrial sector versus the rest of the world. But at the end of the day, it is important to understand that the Bilfinger group, we earn money with companies expanding, and we earn money with companies heavily under pressure because we offer efficiency improvement. And companies under pressure, it takes longer time for decision, but they need efficiency improvement. And we are there to support and to help. The market where we look into is, of course, divided by 4 main industries plus the adjacent part. We had a disappointing development in our end market from '22 to this year. And that market, what we defined at the end of '22, beginning of '23, we actually only see a growth in the market of less than 0.5% when we believe it should be 2%. We were not alone with that belief, by the way. So we decided to expand the market, especially in the oil and gas and the chemical and petrochem part. And in that part, what is now EUR 210 billion and bigger as an addressable market, we see a growth of 1% to 2% up to 2030. On top of it, we have an outsourcing potential in the market. And the outsourcing potential that customers give that, what is noncore for them is for us a big business driver which makes another 1%. But when we look into the opportunities what we have, I will not go into each and the list is actually longer: data center, hydrogen, nuclear investment, global investment for clean energy, aging infrastructure. These are things where we are driven by. This is where we jump on it, where we have what we call niche growth, no matter what the industry does. On top of it, we have, of course, and that's not listed. When we go into areas where infrastructure is completely demolished as it is with the horrible war in Ukraine. This is where we are building. We still have people there, still have people there. We will be part of it to help to recover and build it up. We have multiple opportunities. The customers are looking for multi trade. What does it mean? It means that when they buy from someone, they would like to buy several products because the whole systematic to buy something from a company is so complicated and overregulated that they don't want to have so many sub-suppliers any longer. So out of that opportunity, we were sitting there in the top management and listening into our organization, what to change, what to do. And you have that, you have to listen to your people. You have to listen to your customers. You have to listen to the society you work in. And we identified if we would go, as you see here on the slide, with that kind of a line, with that ring on top of it. If we would go on as we did before, yes, we will deliver the midterm targets to '25 to '27 with 6% to 7% EBITA. But we will deliver that then all the time around 7% up to 2030. This is not enough because when we build up what we all can add, which kind of niches and growth and competence areas we have, we can go higher. But we have to change here and there, not the strategy, but making an update, update on the strategy and update on the structure. And then we are definitely able to go to 8% to 9% EBITA and definitely 8% to 10% growth. Despite the fact that the volatility in the market gets bigger, but we earn on it. When customers are scared because they don't know what to do about the high energy cost, we can come in, we can lower it, and we can lower it fast. So what are we doing? One part of the strategy is the operational excellence, our internal efficiency. And you see here 4 strategic levers, and we will talk today about that. We have Mirja with us, our group HR, HSEQ manager. She will talk about people, why that is good to invest and what we get as a return. We will talk about the standardization, procurement and, of course, about the derisking. And you see the bar how far we are already in working through that levers. And then you see there is still a way to go. If we then look into that with the standardization, which is one of the levers, the global product centers. We had 9 before, we reduced to 5 to get more efficient. But you see the figures what we delivered. We delivered a 25% more innovations, what we bring to the market per annum. We delivered an update and upgrading of our products, 30% of our products since a few years are upgraded. And on top of it, 250% growth to get new products alive on the customer, that means we implemented it at the customer side. When you see these figures, you see this is an innovative, forward, technology-driven company. And not as I heard in '21, '22, you go to a simple service provider. No. You are here with an efficiency enabling competence company. So what are we doing on the market expansion before we call the positioning because the first step was to position ourselves. Now it's about expanding. People who know me or us a little bit closer, we are doing things and steps because it never ever works that you do everything at the same time, and it especially doesn't work if you promise everything at the same time. So we do it in steps and the speed, how competent and how executive our people are in the company actually gives us as management the possibility to update the strategy. And I have the best team ever in the Bilfinger group with more than 32,000 competencies. And when you look on these levers, sales, Gerald will talk about it, the same as about performance partner, mergers and acquisition and digitalization, and I will talk about that. Yes, we have mergers and acquisition a little bit lifted up out of the growth story because it's already in. We had an 8% growth per annum, including acquisitions. This year, we finalized 3. And when you look on that slide, you have on the right side, what is actually the opportunities what we look for. We divide the world, of course, into the regions where we are, Middle East, United States and Europe. And we look into the share of wallet, that is the amount of money, what our customers invest in our market and how much percentage we have of that. That's the share of wallet. I'm personally not believing in market share. The share of wallet is what we know, the customer tells us what they invest. And I would like to have 100%, but will not be happy possible. But we work in that direction. Why is that important? Because in a decreasing market, you actually can go grow when you look into the share of wallet because in a decreasing market, the customer doesn't -- they don't stop to invest. They invest different. It takes longer time, and I would like to have a bigger share of that. Second, the offering what we have. All the products, what we have, how much of that are we selling in that market. And then the market in itself, how much addressable is in it. And you see United States, good market. Our share of wallet is very little. And the offering is actually quite good, what we can do. So focus on larger acquisition. Then you have the Middle East. There, the share of wallet is bigger. We are better in that. Offering is good. Market is great. So larger acquisition. Then we have Europe. In Europe, our share of wallet is quite good. We are actually, in some areas, leading. Offering is quite good because it comes out of Europe, most of the products. The market is not the greatest at the moment. So more on bolt-on acquisitions. And these bolt-on acquisitions, to make it clear, is not to add revenue at the top. If we get the company for EUR 30 million, EUR 40 million top line, that's not the issue. But it unlocks further potential, which means with that product range, I'm able to sell 3, 4, 5 other Bilfinger products to an existing or a new customer group. So there's a multiple in the revenue recognition. That makes it so difficult for us to tell you what the self-propelled growth and what is M&A growth because there is a hell of an overlap, and it shouldn't -- should be like that. So what are the main selection criteria? It is total shareholder return and period, and that's it. I'm -- Matti and myself, we are not fenced on big synergy cases or we buy that because it's available or so. Apps, we did enough M&A in our career. And I can tell you, some were really not good. And I learned my lesson out of it. It has to add value. It has to add value for the shareholder. It has to add value for the customer. It has to add value for the people we get and it has to add value for the people we have. If that is not fulfilled, it's a small matrix. It's a one pager. We look on it. We can decide within an hour if a company is of interest or not. And on top of it, they are willing to join us, welcome. If they don't want to join us, don't touch them. So strengthen the core, our core. We will not go into rocket science. We will not build electrical vehicles. So we go in the core. I got companies offered where I had to read what the hell they do. I never heard about it. So it is important that we understand that. This is our cookbook and every proposal, and it's a very, very long list because the market is favorable for M&A since years. It's a very long list, and quite a lot are falling through because they are not fulfilling that, and we will not give up to have that. So out of that, we go into digitalization. There's a lot of talk about digitalization. What is the talk about it? Can you do this software or that and selling it? We don't earn the money by selling software, but we earn a lot of credibility, and we earn a lot of efficiency improvement for our customers if we utilize it in a proper way. And that is what is digitalization about. And we drive -- last year, we said we have 5% of that what we offer is with digitalization in it. Today, it's 15%. And in 2030, it has to be more than 80%. It doesn't mean 80% is software sales. Absolutely not. We are not a software company. But we are capable to utilize the competence and the technology of other industries to go in, to combine it and doing something out of it. And here are some examples. And let the guy on board -- here, he is [ Max ], a colleague of us. And that is actually the best example of what I have, what we as Bilfinger do -- hello? What we, as Bilfinger do in digitalization. This is a partnership with a German-based company for using these kind of robots. It's a robot from an American company, and the software comes from another German company. And we, as Bilfinger, are in cooperation with them. We don't build these. We don't do the software. It's not our job. But we use the sensors we have, partly self-developed, put them on it with our competence how to do maintenance. We can send that colleague in into areas which is dangerous or we can send it in just 24/7 to analyze and giving us data to predictive maintenance to tell the client in 4 weeks, in 3 months, this and that has to happen, give us the order, we ramp up. And when -- before it happens, we change it. This is predictive maintenance. This is digitalization, and it's beautiful. We have drawn technology. We use artificial intelligence -- are you leaving me here alone. We use artificial intelligence to optimize customer response, to optimize our own working, to get things quicker done and more reliable. Out of that, back to the ambition. These are the ambitions for 2030. You see on the left side, the revenue growth. We delivered up to now 8%. The market will bring us 1% to 2%; the self-propelled, 3% to 4%; and the M&A, around 4%. The level between the interaction between market and self-propelled is quite overlapping. It's not a clear line. Because if we expand into a new niche, a new geography like France, Luxembourg, Canada, of course, it's self-propelled because we do it. The market doesn't come to us, a customer doesn't come to us. Then we have M&A. And M&A, to say 4%, yes, the 4% is partly with that what we unlock with M&A, too. There are bits and pieces. If we have it in our hands, actually more customer doors open. That's the growth potential, 8% to 10% for 2030. Then on the EBITA margin, we improved 230 base points in it, adjusted if we look back to the year 2022, only for the ones looking into it. The operational excellence, what we do with ourselves brings 1% to 2% and the market expansion, another 1% to 2%. And that brings us to 8% to 9% on the next journey. But if you want to do that, if you target sales, digitalization, people and so on, more updated, a little bit changed here and there, of course, we look into our own structure. And when you look into the Bilfinger structure today, this is the picture on the left part where you see our current segment structure then regions and business lines and then business units and then down the line, you have the customer. And the color code gives you, if that organizational structure is by geography, that means region, by product or by industry. And you see that the current structure is a hybrid as we call it. For everyone who has people responsibility and business responsibility, avoid hybrids because it's difficult to manage. Why is it difficult? Because you can have different interests. And interest, if I take engineering and maintenance in Europe, it's a product. And Europe as a geography, what do I maximize, the product or the geography? That's a big question because the way how you manage, the way how you set ambition has to be simple and clear, and you run for one target in that part of the organization. Further, we have an unbalanced situation. And you will see that on the next slide regarding how transparent we are to the capital market. For that, we decided to reorganize still the 3 segments, but driven by geography because our business is local. We are with most of our colleagues by far, the majority is on customer side, not in Bilfinger offices. On customer side, it's a local decentralized business. And we divide into Western Europe, into Central Europe and into international. No matter that the change looks quite big, but it isn't. Because we have already the regions, we put them together. The link into customer and so is not touched at all, but it gives us and it gives you a better transparency. If we then look into what we are doing here to achieve the midterm targets for 2030, we come out of the current structure, where 69% is E&M Europe, and 15% E&M International and 16% Technology into Western Europe with roughly 35%, Central Europe with around 45% and International with 20%. And Matti will add another factor, another parameter into to read us better. So that you see the performance we promise and we deliver that you can benchmark us easier with the industry peers, customers and so on. And out of that, where we talked about Matti. We welcome him. Thanks a lot.

Yes. Thanks a lot, and good morning. I will continue, as you would expect from the CFO, with other numbers. Our journey so far, navigating growth, margins and cash flow. So I go back to 2022. That is where we -- Thomas and I started, with a revenue of EUR 4.3 billion that has grown to EUR 5.4 billion, which is, Thomas said it a number of times, 8% CAGR combined of organic growth and M&A. The EBITA margin went up by 230 basis points, from 3.2% to 5.4%. So for those who look into records, they will find that the reported EBITA in '22 was 1.8%. The difference is just the provision that we took in '22 on the efficiency program, well known. And the cash conversion went from 97%. Then because of this efficiency program, lower to 64% in '23. This year with at least one major onetime effect up to 110%. So for about EUR 330 million when you take the midpoint of our updated guidance. Looking into the next few years, we did a lot of financial modeling around the parameters of growth, organic growth, external growth, profitability. We will grow in the next 5 years by 8% to 10% per annum. Hence, we're accelerating our financial performance. I think Thomas explained it very well how we are going to do this, expanding in core markets, in adjacent markets, and we built on our proven M&A track record. Profitability. Right now, we had 5.5%, so fairly and squarely targeting our current midterm targets of 6% to 7%. But for the next 5 years, we see growth potential to 8% to 9%. That's another improvement of 250 to 350 basis points. Free cash flow. Free cash flow conversion. We had a target of 80% midterm right now. We believe that with further improving our trade working capital efficiency, we can exceed 90% in the next few years. What is the composition now of the updated organizational structure and how do they contribute to growth on the top line and the bottom line? Western Europe and Central Europe, we see growth rates of 6% to 8% per annum over the next few years. And international, and I think that's very consistent with what we have communicated over the last few years, the growth potential in North America and the Middle East is greater than in Europe, and that's reflected by the growth rate that we are expecting for the segment International. Profitability-wise, our services, what we call industry agnostic. We can deliver any service within our 4 core industries across those industries. So we don't have products that have a certain margin here and another margin there. So we believe that our segment will deliver, and that's the plan, 8% to 9% each in the course of the next few years and to get to that level of profitability. So we're not dividing or making a difference between Western Europe, Central Europe and/or International. The segment structure will certainly provide, and I heard the comment already this morning, better transparency, easier to read and particularly easier to follow, what are the drivers in those geographies. If we look into the components, in the last 3 years, we had expected a market growth of about 2%. As a matter of fact, and doing sort of the calculation backwards, it's less maximum equal to 0.5% per annum. We achieved with our M&A, a growth component of about 4%. And the self-propelled, everything that we did ourselves with the strategic levers, adds up to about 3% to 4%. If you look at the color coding here, it is a blend. And as Thomas explained, we make an acquisition and that unlocks potential, and that is what has happened over the time. So we take an acquisition in the year, it's M&A growth. But when the unlocking of that potential happens in the future, it's self-propelled growth. Going forward, we see market growth of 1% to 2% based on the fact that the market -- the addressable market is larger than what we had so far. And the components here on M&A, again, we expect about 4% and 3% to 4% from self-propelled. For those who like math will figure out very quickly that 4% on [ 3.7 billion ] is a lot less than 4% on EUR 5.4 billion. So while it doesn't look like we are really accelerating, but we're coming off a higher base. Consequently, the contributions from those components is certainly higher than what we have seen so far. An important component, sustainability. When the EU taxonomy was set up, they forgot industrial services provider. And consequently, we had to come up with some measure, how the -- we can be read in terms of what's our contribution to sustainability. And we -- I wouldn't say invented, but we took something that is already out there in the market, the ABCDE category that everybody knows when you go out and buy a washing machine, a dryer, TV set or the like. So the A category is the highest impact into the environment. These are plans, our customer plans that -- where the energy generation is by renewables, a hydro power plant, for example, a plan that deals with circular economy or direct CO2 reduction. So those are the plants that have the highest direct impact into the environment. Whenever we enhance efficiency, particularly when we perform insulation work, that's Category B. And then all the industrial services that are not directly covered on A and B but support is -- there's always a sustainability impact in there. There's always a positive environmental impact in there. And then we have category D, which is coal-fired energy generation and/or oil-fired energy generation. And that are the areas where we want to phase out over time because we are not able to make a positive impact on sustainability and CO2 reduction. If you look at the growth rates, we achieved a higher growth per annum in the last 2 to 3 years on the A and B categories, and we expect this to continue for the midterm. On the profitability, coming off of about 3%, exactly 3.2% EBITA margin in 2022. We added about 1.5% to 2% by way of operational excellence. So everything that we did to enhance our own efficiency and about 0.5% through market expansion, 0.5 percentage point to be exact. Now taking the 5.5% EBITA margin as we have today and developing it forward, we've will add another 1 to 2 percentage points through further operational excellence. We have updated our levers, and another 1 to 2 percentage points by market expansion, be it organic albeit to M&A growth. An important part of the EBITA margin and gross margin progression over the last few years was derisking. And we have discussed it with many of you many times what we did when we went through our entire portfolio. Until now, we have reported our revenue share between projects and framework and service contracts. We were not happy with it, to be honest, because it doesn't really show the risk profile of a contractor and its contract portfolio. What determines the risk profile really is how we are being compensated for our work. And from next year on, we will report our revenue by remuneration model, meaning how are we being paid for our services. About 44% right now this year is so-called time and material contracts, where we are being paid for the input that we deliver plus a margin. On unit rates, we're also being paid for the work that we do based on quantities where the productivity risks and opportunities lies with the contractor. Then we have, what everybody knows, as fixed price or lump sum, which is about 20%. And then there is a number of mixed remuneration forms. Typically, we have a fixed component, a small fixed component on project management and we have all the rest on time and material or unit rates. So looking at it in totality, if you add time and material unit rates and the mix, about 80% of our work is what's called reimbursable. And that gives you a very good picture on the risk profile of Bilfinger. A number of peers use the same methodology. So you can compare us much better to other market players that are out there. On the lump sum, and we have reduced our risk tolerance substantially in the last 3 years. Where we are entering into lump sum, we preferably -- it doesn't always happen. But preferably, we are involved in the design and planning and engineering phases of those projects or contracts. Because then the risk allocation is a lot fairer between the client or customer and ourselves and the contractor. If the tender is out there, where the only question is, give me your lowest fixed price on something that somebody else has planned and developed who are very, very reluctant to do that. So lump sum is not lump sum. You can make a lot of good money out of lump sum when you know how to do it. But the key is you have to be involved in the development and the planning of the contact or the works. Totally different components or part of operational excellence is procurement. Our procurement spend is about 40% to 45% of our revenue. So our own value creation is 55% to 60%, and the rest, we purchase. We do purchase a lot of labor resources, but we also purchase materials and typical subcontracts. So what have we started to do in the last few years? Using AI to optimize procurement processes. We have a few bots at work. We already have AI agents at work, and there's the potential to reduce the admin work by 25% to 30% over the next few years. That's an enormous impact that we will deliver in our procurement operations. Global sourcing, Thomas said it, our business is very local, very regional, but we source globally, be it on materials, like insulation material, like pipes, anything that is out of steel, stainless steel, carbon steel, we source globally. Workforce, a very important component. We're not just waiting for people to show up at our doorstep. We go out and go to those countries where we can find workforce. And we have our own workforce that we can mobilize and travel throughout Europe, but we also go to countries. Lithuania is one. Turkey is another one where we find partners where we can source workforce also. It provides access to [ MAX ] and other technologies. Obviously, anytime you can lower your number of suppliers, you're doing a better job. So supplier development reduces the sourcing effort and it increases the quality of delivery. With the many acquisitions that Bilfinger has done over the past, we have bought a lot of so-called workshops, prefabrication facilities and so forth. We find that there is a good opportunity to consolidate a scattered footprint to generate synergies. But this is only half of it. We also purchased those services, prefabrication. And here, we are very disciplined in looking at make or buy, how much of prefabrication do we want to do ourselves and how much can we source from the market. So another component that helps us in the supply chain in procurement to add 0.5 to 1 percentage point into the EBITA. Over to my most favorite subject. Cash flow. Last year, we introduced NTA over revenue as a KPI, and we set ourselves a midterm target of about 8%. We've done very well in the last couple of years coming off of about 12% in 2022, down to 10% in 2024. Now it looks like we're getting to 8.5%, 8.3% is the current forecast. So we're getting to achieve our current target of 8%. And when I introduced the subject, I showed that the average of our peers is at 6%. So we always want to be at least as good as the average of our peers and oftentimes better. So until 2030, we want to improve our working capital efficiency. Again, focus is on accelerating billing, collection process, invoicing, but also the derisking I spoke about really helps improve working capital efficiency, which will then enable our cash conversion rate to grow to 90% and above. So what are we going to do with all the cash flow that we will generate? We have priorities in our capital allocation, and they remain, in total, unchanged. We have a dividend policy of paying 40% to 60% of the adjusted net earnings. With earnings growth comes dividend growth. We will fund our organic growth, be it in sales, be it in people, what we hear about more this afternoon. We saw innovation and digitalization already. So we will fund our organic growth. We will put more emphasis on M&A, be it in the core business with bolt-on or core geographies, with bolt-on adjacent geographies and intent industries. And then we were very happy to return to investment grade this year, and we want to keep the investment-grade rating going forward. All of you know that we have a shareholder -- a share buyback program running. It will complete at the end of this year before Christmas. We have no plans to set up a new share buyback program, but those optional shareholder returns are always in the toolbox of a company of the CFO to see what we can do, but it will be purely optional. Our leverage is down to 0.5, 0.5 by the end of this year. When we received investment-grade rating, we set ourselves a threshold, so not a target, a threshold of 2.0 as leverage, which gives us quite a comfortable headroom to fund growth, particularly into M&A when it's -- when the opportunity is right, when it happens. So we're very well placed to exploit all the opportunities that we have shown you and we'll continue to show you this afternoon. We have a very strong balance sheet, financially very well sound or very sound. And to sum it up, Bilfinger is a very attractive investment case. You would not expect me to say any different here. But since we are going to increase our sales, I have to do my part. An industrial or an asset-light industrial service provider, that is what Bilfinger is these days. Our customer retention rate is 90% plus. So when we work for a customer, we do it not just for one, we do it for many years and many times. The 8% to 10% CAGR is an ambitious growth rate, but we will do it through market expansion. The EBITA margin progression to 8% to 9% is what we do then sustainably. Talked about the strong cash flow generation and our disciplined and transparent capital allocation, and I believe strongly that these 5 components make Bilfinger a very interesting investment case. With that, thank you very much for the intention so far. And I turn it over to Jasmin for our Q&A session.

That's true. So thank you so much, Matti. Thank you, Thomas. So we are now happy to take your questions first from those present here in Fredenhagen. And in the meantime, our virtual guests can, of course, type in their questions using the chat function. So Thomas, welcome on stage again for the Q&A. So who has directly a question? So there's one from Michael Kuhn from Deutsche Bank.

Yes. I think I'm ready. One on, let's say, your elements of growth. Obviously, you've now broken out in more detail what you expect to be contributed from M&A going forward. Still, there is this -- those 2 elements, OpEx -- operational excellence versus market expansion. And I think you delivered more growth-wise and also margin-wise, via operational excellence so far. So maybe just a few additional words on, let's say, how you want to improve the market expansion element going forward even more probably by intensifying your customer interaction and so on.

Yes. The -- when you look into a typical industrial service provider, you work with most of the doing on existing customer assets. And the customers there and the responsibility, what you take actually doesn't give you a lot of time to go to the next side, which is maybe only 500 meters to the left or right to look for a new client. So that kind of in the business embedded DNA to work on existing customer base, we will break through with a dedicated sales force in the different segments and business units. We actually create, on the top management, what we call Group Executive Management, a Chief Sales Officer to support all the local entities and customer approaching entities to build up sales structure, sales strategy and enforcing that. The -- when you look into my vitae, you see that I come actually from very much engineering product and service companies. And products have, per se, always a very strong sales force, always. The Volvos, the SKFs, the Sandviks, the [ FLSmidths ] and so on. And we in the industrial service part, the amount of sales force, what you have there, is fairly limited based on the nature of the business. But in a time where we have markets like in the Middle East or markets like in U.S., where we have more and more of our well-known blue chip customers going in and asking from us more service, we have opportunities to go outside the fence and selling more of our products. We did that in some parts in the last 12 to 24 months, very successfully. Another element in it is we showed -- I showed one slide with the 9 niche things like data center and so on. There is by far more. And for that, you need dedicated expert teams going to the client to convince them. Last but not least, I'll make an example for outsourcing. You have a company with 5 plants, and we have an own maintenance team of, let's say, 500 people. And you do on these 5 plants, the 500 people. I guarantee you, a company like us, we don't need 500 people. And you need regular, significant less. But when you have a turnaround, we can ramp up immediately because we have more than 30,000 people. Own companies producing can't have that. They have only 500 people. So why not to outsource it? Why not to give it to us? You actually save the money for the 500 people plus HR, finance, facility management, IT cost, whatsoever. And we take over and with digitalization, we can prove to the client that we each year improve efficiency. That's the outsourcing, but you have to go aggressive on yourself, customers normally don't come to you. I generally don't believe that customers come to a supplier. You have to go there. This full-stop warehousing where customers come to a supplier, forget it, never sold them more than 35 years.

So please, Olivier. Go ahead.

Just one on your targets for 2030. Are you penciling anything from German infrastructure spend in your current organic growth targets? That's the first one.

The -- I know that the question will come. I was so close to mention it on the opportunity slide. I said it on the day when it came out. We, as Bilfinger, will not have a direct advantage out of the infrastructure package as well as the defense package, but we have an indirect one because our customers have an advantage out of it. If someone builds a power plant in Germany, of course, we are able to offer quite a lot, but we will not do everything. We are not the contact partner for the government. Second thing is because -- typical for stock market, such an announcement comes, everyone goes rocket high. It is a political decision to invest taxpayers' money over 10 years into the market. There is a time line on it. In industry, we talk about months, maybe quarters. In politics, we talk a little bit longer line, years. And we said that we don't expect anything than coming through our customers on us before the end of '26. So there is only indirect and little in that outlook. And to give a little bit of base on it, we had 8% growth without that, where actually the investment out of Germany was more into things which were not so much for the infrastructure.

Olivier, you had a second one, right?

Yes. Just one on the rate of growth. On one of the slides, you see like an increasing arrow. I was just wondering if there was an acceleration in the rate of growth that you foresee? Or is that more even?

The only -- in mathematical terms will have a linear thing. It's always a bumpy road. But when you take that what we said about M&A, unlocking, of course, you get an acceleration in it. I take an acquisition, the -- everyone was happy that we acquired Stork. Actually, our Stork people were very happy and we are very happy to have them. So -- but what we see is on day 1, they unlocked a lot, but they unlock more and more into the future. That's explaining it, but it's not a hockey stick to make it fairly clear. It's the only thing what it should show is this is not exactly the same percentage.

I saw Craig raising his hands. So Craig, please.

Craig Abbott from Kepler Cheuvreux. The word -- can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. The word adjacent markets appeared quite frequently, both on the product side and geographically. I just wondered if you could maybe be a little more specifically. I mean, geographically, i.e., have you already identified some markets. Would you be leveraging existing customers to enter these markets? Yes. If you could just maybe just shed a little bit more of your current thoughts on how -- well, how significant this component is likely to be and how you want to go about it?

The -- we have, of course, 3 dimensions in it: industry, geography and product for adjacent market too. What we show as core industry, that's the industry dimension, is the business in an industry with over a longer period of time, more than 10% of the revenue line. So that's the thing. We -- of course, when you look into and you have beautiful examples here with a bioreactor. It actually looks like any processing plant, but quite small because it's bioreactor. So the process industry, and I don't joke when I say ketchup, shampoo, oil and gas, district heating, it's only the size of the plant. District heating is hundreds of square kilometers. A biopharma plant, square meter. So that's adjacent industry. Second, geography. We are not -- if we talk about adjacent geography, we are not talking about China or Peru, to be fairly clear or South Africa or something like that. We talk about neighbor countries where we have existing customers having plants there and actually asking us to join them there. And we will push more that we join them by force, which means we offer them, but that we go with them into France, Spain, Northern Italy and so on. That's adjacent geography. And then adjacent product. Adjacent product is -- we acquired some companies like Rodoverken. We are an expert in district heating. And we know -- and I'm very specific now, Ukraine has a lot of district heating setup. And we are great in district heating, but we needed some competence in Nordic district heating as well as in the tank design. That unlocks a lot. So Rodoverken brings us this into the group or brought us this into the room, this is adjacent product. It unlocks more potential for us.

Maybe one more to add there, Craig, is -- so the Stork acquisition, we are now in a position to do a lot more work on sort of reengineered turbo blades, for example. So when the time is over for the OEM to supply spare parts and service, but the equipment is still running for another 10, 15 years. That is service that we learned from the Stork people is not only a very interesting service, but it's also from a margin perspective, quite higher or quite a bit higher than what we do with say, routine maintenance. So that would be something that we call adjacent products or service. And there's quite a bit of potential for growth there as well.

And customers really demand that -- it's not only that we would like to do it. Customers, they sit in the seat of a client. You want to give any little order. You have minimum to ask [ 3 ] suppliers to get a quotation. Otherwise, it's not with the governance and compliance. Then you have [ 3 ] possible suppliers. You have to -- you have to look into what is their track record, sustainability, governance, compliance and so on, financial strength and so on. If they have child labor, you can imagine. And then you have 5 or 6 things to buy, that's a nightmare for the procurement department. So what are they doing? They look for companies being able to have 2, 3, 4, 5 of the products then instead of having 15, 25, 36 companies to scan, they have them [ 3 ]. And then a company like us comes around and says, actually, as more products we add as more, you have a benefit and the efficiency improvement because we influence more so you get a bigger advantage out of it.

So the next one comes from [ Nicolas Demeter ] from Metzler.

I have one question to the profitability improvement. I know 1.5 years ago, we were here, and there were a lot of stuff to do, and it seems like there were low-hanging fruits like standardizing businesses and everything. And now my question is, what do you think now it's -- now again, 3% to 4% improvement in EBITA, how easy is it to increase the profitability? What is the role of pricing? And would you say it's now harder to get to this target? How predictable is it?

At first, the -- and this is really as it is, it is never easy, to make it fairly clear. It's never easy. Gerald will come with sales and performance partner there pricing and so on. He will talk about that. The potential what we see to improve the profitability, as Matti lined it out, what we will do in the different segments and so on, is completely backed up by as we are conservative people and plans in steps. We proved that the organization is realizing that what we have in the plan. We see it in the market as an opportunity. We see that as more we go that way, we play more the product mix. As we saw in the quarter 3 in last year where we had 6% operational profitability, that was product mix. That all is what we run the company more and more into it, which gives us, of course, an opportunity in a nutshell to raise profitability.

Do you have another one? So are there any other questions here? Please, Olivier.

Yes. Just one on sort of M&A. You specifically sort of mentioned the U.S. and Middle East as a target geographies, but they are very different. So what can you tell us about sort of target size or any specific industries you can elaborate on, and that would be great.

No, I can't do that too much because then I raise the bar, if we have to give a bit -- to make a fairly clear, you know how the world works. But it is clear that we are in U.S. and in the Middle East subscale. And size matters for Bilfinger. If you only have 10 people on the site and a big deal comes, you are not getting inquired. That's as simple as the world is. On the other side, the bigger things are the ones where we can add the most efficiency improvement, means we get the highest profitability for ourself out because the customer has a significant bigger value base improvement. So from that point of view, it is clear that we look for something which fits to us, and I would not underestimate that the people, we have to see that they want to join us. We are not acquiring factories with robots. We would like to have that people join us. And if they are dead against it, not a good idea.

So also, we will have another Q&A session in the afternoon. Are there more questions? Please, [ Chard ]. Go ahead.

First of which was excellent. I just wondered, just in terms of the States, you were talking about share of wallet, and it seems to be one of the biggest opportunities out there. So in the context of growing organically and with acquisition in terms of how you deal with the EPCMs, which -- they seem to be quite important in terms of consulting procurements in the States. And the second thing is just on bundling. You mentioned it in terms of bundling products in the context of your new sales strategy, I just wonder if you could just give us a little bit more detail on bundling?

Can you take the EPCM? Okay. The -- when we look -- let me start with the bundling part. If you go around here, there's not one product, what you see here. We call it product, the service. To make that clear, we call everything what we sell a product. The reason for that to explain that is customers like to have standardized offering. Then you offer the standard and then there's a -- great. I take the standard, but can you change this and that never ends. So at the end, it's more customized than ever before. And we try to push that we go more like this. In that case, the example is the software industry where you buy actually a software and a service from Microsoft, which is actually fairly standardized, no matter that it's -- that you talk with people and getting a people service. And that is the way we push for. The good part in it is the top management of customers would like to have it because it's easier for them to place orders, to compare, to follow-up and so on. The challenge is a little bit our own people because we have -- thanks, God, we have a lot of creativity in our group and we have a lot of creativity on customer side, too. So they meet and they say, "Oh, we make a standard deal." And then you look into it and then you say, "This is not standard at all." So this kind of bundling actually highlights that we give to our people and with that to the clients, packages where we say, "This is what you need to do." We offer you, for example, [ free statues ]. You can have the bronze, the silver and the gold [ status ]. And bronze, this is in it and then you go on. And as more products you can add in it, you actually can prove that you influence the work and the asset performance more with that, you have more potential to reduce cost means to improve efficiency. Days out of the equipment business, where it was quite a long time in with reengineered products, too. Actually, more than 35 years. If you improve one unit, your improvement potential is roughly 5%. If you improve several units in a process, it's up to 20% in total. It's the biggest improvement. So we look into -- and if we say we make maintenance for you more efficient, then we are not looking only to one issue what the customer has at the moment. We look for all the points, what we can influence with maintenance. And then telling the client we bundle it for you, and this is your improvement potential. And with digitalization, with colleagues like him, who is sleeping. With colleagues like him, we can actually show the client business where you are today, and this is where you are tomorrow. Value-based selling. That's the big thing. What was the first question?

What was the first -- I think it was on EPCM as part of our service offering. Is that what you...

It's more a question of -- let me just go back to my question here. So yes. Just EPCM, the engineering, procurement and construction management consultants in the States seems to be -- they play an important role of where customers actually buy their industrial services. That's my understanding of it. So when you were talking about more wallet share in States, what's your strategy with them, especially if you then bolt on M&A buying a target in the States. Is that a consideration which you have?

Engineering, procurement, construction management, we have already in our portfolio as part of the service offering. It's more prevalent in, let's say, U.S.-dominated markets. So North America, obviously, but also in the Middle East. And we play to some extent there. The sourcing of industrial services in the U.S. works a little bit different from Europe, and I think that is what you're referring to. We have spent the last 12 months at least to take a very deep look into the U.S. market and the M&A opportunities there. If we had come to a conclusion, we would have probably made a deal already in 2025. So we're still in the process of figuring out what is the best possible option for Bilfinger to position it. In general, and that's more for our entire service portfolio, we prefer to work directly for the end client without an engineer or an EPC contract in between. It's not always possible, and we have to adapt to the market circumstances. But our preference, and that also applies to possible M&A in the U.S., is to buy business where most of the business is directed with the end client.

So we do not have any questions from our virtual guests yet. So again, an invitation to type them into the chat function, and we will latest respond to them then in the afternoon. Are there more here, [ Nicolas ], we want from you.

I have one question to the CapEx. You said it should be around 1.5%. My question was what is the main driver there? I think right now, it's like scaffolding or what is it actually?

In terms of share in the CapEx, it's replacement of scaffolding, mostly what we have in our business. Do we invest in some form or fashion in our workshops? Yes, we do. From time to time, we invest in machines that we need for installation, material and so forth. But it is, as we said, we're really asset-light. We prefer not to own real estate. It is what we use every day in our operations.

We have a Q&A in the afternoon.

Exactly. As I said, we will have another Q&A that afternoon. So Anette will now explain you how our guided exhibition tour works during lunch break, and see you then all in the afternoon. Thank you.

Yes. Now that we are heading into a lunch break. You all -- or some of you, as you already registered up for a guided tour have a colored dot on your name tag, and we have a slide explaining our guide tour. Maybe we can see that. So -- Yes, thank you. So we will start with the green and the blue tour, and you will meet in around 30 minutes, so you have enough time to get something to eat first. We will meet -- the blue tour will meet behind the exhibition area and blue tour -- Now I'm getting completely confused. You get it better than I do. Maybe, yes. So we'll start the blue tour behind the exhibition area, and the green tour meeting here upfront. We have a lot to see. We have -- from nuclear fusion from bioreactor, we have a gas protection track. We have free engineering turbo blades. We just talked about it. So please welcome us in our exhibition, and our colleagues are more than happy to explain everything to you. Thank you, and see you soon again for lunch at 1:30 -- after lunch, get back on stage. Thanks. [Break]

Welcome back from our lunch break. I see last colleagues, people coming back. Wait for you. I hope you enjoyed your lunch, and I hope you enjoyed experiencing our exhibition our colleagues really did a fantastic job putting everything together. And I hope you had some inspiring talks and took away some insights there. So now we will move on with our deep dives. The first one will be presented by Jürgen Liedl, our Segment President, Central Europe, on the business in the segments. So please give a warm welcome to Jürgen Liedl. Thank you.

Thanks, Anette. Thanks, everyone, for coming back. I saw some very good conversations between you and our colleagues out there where they had the opportunity to share with you all the good stuff that we are selling and that we are executing at the client side. I look forward now, let's say, in the next 20-ish minutes to share with you in further detail how the segments that Thomas has introduced in his presentation, how they are going to look like, in which kind of environment they operate, and how they will operate. Also, why these updated segments are bringing us to the next level of operational and financial performance. As we said, from the beginning of next year on, we will have three updated strong segments, purely geography-led, and each one of them organized towards the requirements of the customers. We will have Western Europe, which currently generates about 35% of our revenue. We have Central Europe, with is about 45% of our revenue; and we have International with about 20% of our revenue. All four of them are offering the services that our clients require from us across the lifetime of an asset of a plant and in the way that the clients also think and act and buy these services from us. So all three of those segments offering consulting and engineering, prefabrication and installation, access and insulation and asset performance. By the way, also those of you who have been in the circle, those are the stations where you have also the client experience in that we are generating and having in all of our segments. Also all -- sorry, all three of those segments is three. All three of those segments are working in all of our core industries, chemicals, petrochem, energy, oil and gas, pharma, and they're working on adjacent industries. How do they look like in further detail? You can see them here on the maps. And the countries that are highlighted, those are the countries where we already have a significant strong presence, where we're doing permanent work, where we have permanent locations, where we have a legal setup to do all kind of work that we want to do there. Western Europe, already strong in the U.K., in Belgium, Netherlands and in France. And one of you has asked a question about adjacent markets. So for example, Western Europe, Spain or Ireland or Portugal is or can be one of such adjacent countries where we are looking at how can we do business with our established clients in these countries that we're not doing yet. Central Europe, active and strongly present in the Nordics, all countries there, in Denmark, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And we're also looking how we can do work and have a permanent presence in Italy. International segment with a broader range. So they are active in North America, especially in the U.S. They are active in the Eastern European countries, the ones that you see in dark blue and also in the Middle East. Again, in terms of volume and seminar that these three segments bring to the market, they are all strong and they're all strong performing. We have between 8,000 and 10,000 own employees in each of those segments. So really, as we said, the size doesn't matter in our industries. And we have a strong size and strong workforce there. We also have, of course, a strong network of subcontractors, and we have access to big labor pools in each of those segments to make sure we bring in specific know-how where required. and also to make sure we can manage workloads, peak workloads with the labor pools out there. Revenue that we are generating in each of those segments is between EUR 1.1 billion and EUR 2.5 billion currently. So also again, significant size. And all of them are already working and operating on a profitable level. So referring to the midpoint of our guidance, it's between 4.1% and 6.6%. So a strong basis for further margin improvement and for further growth. What is the kind of work that we are doing? What's the kind of business that we are doing? You see here for each of the segments, the split of our revenue in the different industries. Again, you see we are already active in each one of the industries. We are successful in every segment and in every industry. We generate significant volume already in each of those industries. But you can also see on that slide immediately the opportunities that are created. So as an example, we generate already 20% of revenue in pharma and biopharma in Central Europe. Compare this with our current revenue share in Western Europe and in International, and you immediately see the potential because the markets are there everywhere. The know-how is also there in the industry. We just need to sell it and bring it to the market, which is what we are doing. Another opportunity is looking at the International segment. You see a very high share of work of revenue that we generate in adjacent industries. So like growing the share in our core industry, that's another big opportunity that we see and that we're working on. Now what are the market dynamics? And with that also the opportunities that we have in these three segments because they are in some way specific. You can see on that chart like the Harvey ball or the triangle for all of those segments. And we are showing here how we assess our offering in those segments, how we assess the market and how we assess the share of wallet. Obviously, the darker blue, they say -- the more -- the higher opportunities are, the stronger our position is. But looking at the market, there is a difference between Europe and the International segment between the European segment and the International segment. Europe in many industries is very much driven by efficiency. So our clients, especially in the chemicals industry, in the oil and gas industry, they request us to come in and from day 1, increase the efficiency, make the plant more reliable, take out the cost, improve the performance. And another thing that comes along with that is that in the European segment in both of them, we see increasing requirements for outsourcing. There is a huge comeback of outsourcing in these industries where our clients see outsourcing as a way to manage the cost, right? Because first of all, maintenance is often not their core know-how. Their core know-how is production. Our core know-how is maintenance. So our clients in difficult times, they focus on those things where they are best and they tend to outsource those things where they are confident they have a better partner, which we are. And so this is what is driving our market in Western Europe and in Central Europe. In the International segment, all of the geographies that we see here, we see -- that we have here, we see very strong investments in all kinds of industries, in our core industries and also in adjacent industries. And this investment is done by local players, by regional players and by global players. And that creates a lot of growth opportunities for us. Of course, we also see investments in the European segments, but there they tend to be more focused on specific industries like energy, pharma or data centers as an example. When you compare this with Bilfinger, again, in Europe, we have a very strong offering already today. And we have also a high share of wallet, especially in Western Europe. We have a few countries like the Netherlands, also Norway is another example where we are the clear and undisputed #1 in the market. So you will not find any other service provider who can offer that broad range of services in these countries and who has that high share of wallet. So we are proving that we are able to be the #1 and that there is a benefit for the client. And we are transferring that model from country to country. So yes, we do already have a high share of wallet, but looking at the overall market size, there's still good room to grow. Compared with international, also there, we have many areas where we already have very high technical know-how and capabilities. For example, our engineering teams in the Middle East or our access services teams in Eastern Europe. They have really very strong reputation and know-how. Plus we are demonstrating day by day that we are able to win new work in these countries. So that is a good recipe also for further growth in these geographies, and that's a good strong basis for success. You also see the different market sizes in these segments. When you compare that with the revenue that we generate, you will find out in Western Europe and Central Europe, we have a higher market share compared to international. We will grow the market share, the share of wallet, I apologize, the share of wallet in all of the segments, but much stronger, of course, in the International segment. How are we going to do that? Those of you who have joined us in previous Capital Market Day will remember, hopefully, that picture in some way or the other. What we are demonstrating with this picture is how strong we are in a different area of our business. You see the different three segments, and you see the business and the services that we are offering. And the darker the blue, the stronger we are in terms of capabilities, the higher our share of wallet. And we have the plan and the pathway forward to close as many of those blank spots that are there. And you can zoom in into any country or any service and you can also zoom in even to our clients, and you will find those different patterns. And what we are doing is we are increasing the share of wallet, focusing on those areas which are light. How are we doing this? In the same way that Thomas has explained in the morning, we optimize our sales. So Gerald will explain more about this one. We're doing M&A, mainly bolt-on in the two European segments, and we're also open for bigger acquisitions in the international segment. We establish ourselves country by country as the performance partner because we are efficient, we are sustainable, we are reliable, we work safely. And we use innovation and digitalization to make our products more attractive, a recipe of success that has been working in the last 3 years, and it will continue to work in the future. So where will this lead us? Profitable growth. You see here the financial targets, ambitions of our three segments based on the 2025 current expectations moving forward to 2030. On the top row, it's the revenue. On the bottom row, it's the EBITDA margin. We are growing and we will grow in the European segments on average, 6% to 8% per year CAGR and in the International segment between 12% and 15% per year on average from this year to 2030. Why is the International segment delivering a higher growth than the other ones? Two reasons. First, the market is growing stronger. And second, we are open for a bigger acquisition. And in the European segment, as we said, we are looking more on smaller specified acquisitions that help us then unlock growth, but it's not that big chunk that we intend to acquire at one point. And in all three of those segments, by expanding our share of wallet, we are also driving self-propelled growth. EBITDA margin, we are starting from a profitable level on all three of them, but a slight difference. We are bringing all of those three segments up to an EBITDA margin between 8% and 9%. With the combination of operational excellence, there is still room to be better. There will always be room to get better, and we're working on that, but also with market expansion. Now obviously, when we're going to new clients, when we're going to new site, when we're looking at an adjacent industry, we want to make sure that this is profitable. there's not a lot of -- it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend your money and time and energy and management attention. Okay, only have 5 minutes left, management attention to something that does not add to your bottom line. And also in terms of M&A, I mean, we have been demonstrating in the past that when we acquire a company, it's either accretive from day 1, but there is a clear plan and execution at to make it accretive in a very short time. And our recent acquisition has proven that. Now a few examples on how we apply this on, where we are applying all of that, what I'm saying. On the left one, another example of the so-called adjacent market. In that sense, here in that example, it's the industry. Since 1.5 years, we're working with the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. They have defined their bridges and locks and other waterway infrastructure as so-called critical assets, and they spend a lot of CapEx in that. Why? Because 1/3 of the area of Netherlands is below sea level, and sea levels will rather rise than go down. So the government and the population want to make sure that all those bridges, lock are working efficiently and safely and reliable. And they have trusted us with doing all the upgrades, all the electrical and automation upgrades in the area of which covers a big chunk of the Netherlands. Why? Because we have demonstrated these capabilities in other industries and because we are there on site, and we are present. Another example on how we combine different bits and pieces together into one solution, you see in the middle with our client, E.ON. Especially within Europe, the storage of energy is becoming more and more important to manage the different fluctuations in production and in demand. And at Bilfinger, we have a solution, the so-called heat accumulators, which is a proprietary solution where we use water and the temperature of water to store energy. And you see such a tank that's in the middle picture, this is the silver tower. They can go up to 30, 40 meters. We have the technology to design them. We have fabrication workshops in several parts of Europe to build the material. We even have a patent and technologies to assemble them in efficient and safe way. And we have the teams in all of the regions and areas and locations to build them, which is why companies like E.ON and others, they're working with us more and more to get this one package delivered by one source and to make it happen. Third example, working with clients more and more is global key accounts, key accounts. Shell is a company we used to come back to Shell in each of our Capital Market Day that finally are nearly our biggest customer. And we have been working with them a lot in the U.K., in Germany, in the Netherlands, and we still are. And since 2 years, we are now doing work with Shell also in North America. So we have won a contract, quite a big one in the Gulf of Mexico, where we are doing all the mechanical and electrical maintenance work and turnarounds of all of the offshore. Why is Shell working with us? Because they like to see and appreciate how we are standardizing our execution. So that no matter where they go, they work with Bilfinger and they see this is building up. That means standardization on our end, but that also means standardization at the client side, at the customer side. And also because we have established also a global key account management system where we are working with Shell on different levels. And they not only do work with us here on specific plants, but they also invite us for workshops with other contractors when it comes to safety, when it comes to mental health. And now this year, we will even start an overall program with them and other suppliers in how to increase the efficiency on their sites. So this is really a strategic partner for us. But we are not only working with big clients, we are also working with specialized clients because if we want to grow, we need to move into new segments. One example is the Sealand Refinery, which is a refinery in the Netherlands, where we are doing the full end-to-end maintenance for all of the mechanical piping and rotating equipment. So we make the equipment as efficient as possible, which means that equipment shall consume as little energy as possible. Now in the past, Bilfinger has been offering that contract for several years to the clients, but we were only able to do the mechanical and piping work. We did not have the know-how and the capabilities to do the rotating equipment. Now with the acquisition of Stork, the know-how on rotating equipment came in, and you saw the examples over there. And since then, the client is working with us and they have given us the contract. Why? Because to say when we bundle those things from one supplier, it just takes out complexity for them and it increases efficiency. And then we have two more examples to go where we combine local presence with global industry know-how. One is the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority with whom we are working in the South of Wales. The other one is Thor Medical with whom we are working in the south of Norway. One is obviously energy. The other one is medical. We do have teams on place who can do the engineering and who can do the electrical work for the work that we are doing. With the U.K. authority, this is the development of a virtual control room where their engineers can train and can be trained. And we combine the local automation and electrical know-how with our global experience in the nuclear industry. We bring it together. This is why the client is working with us. On Thor Medical, we are doing the engineering, procurement and project management, so EPCM that we've heard previously, for building a new facility at the Industrial Park for a first of its kind plant on a commercial scale for a cancer treatment. So that, again, that requires the local know-how and the people who are there, but also then experience and references from the nuclear industry and from the pharma industry, and we bring it all together. And this is exactly how this new segment structure, this updated segment structure is going to help us to accelerate growth and performance because there, it's just towards the client and internally much more aligned to deliver all of those things that we are doing. So three strong segments, kindly different environment, but all of them, if you do it well, which we are, can work to your favor and they will. So that's why we are confident to deliver the targets that have been shown, and we're all excited to make it happen. Thank you.

I think we have time for one or two of the most pressing questions if there are some. If that's not the case, let's just move on with our program and welcome Mirja on stage for her deep dive about people.

Thank you. Thanks for having me here today. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm responsible for HR and HSEQ, and that's excellent because it's both about people, right? You heard Thomas say earlier, we are an asset-light company. You heard Matti say we are an asset-light company. Our assets are our people. We are proud to say that we've got more than 32 (sic) [ 32,000 ] of them in more than 20 countries, with more than 120 nationalities. So that's as diverse as we can be and have to be because you heard Jug talk about our customer requests. And when you walked around here, you must have been impressed by what our colleagues are doing and by the variety of jobs they are covering and by the variety of requests they can look after for our customers. So they can go high, and I did this myself, not yet the roping, the colleagues promised that I can do that later on. But putting myself into safety gear and going up to 60 meters in a chemical plant and understand what our colleagues doing where they are operating. We have experienced colleagues. So you see here that the average length of service, and I think Thomas mentioned this earlier, is around 10 years in our organization, our own workforce, and that's excellent for us. And it gives us the opportunity to grow together with our employees. We provide great career opportunities. I talked to one of you in the lunch break, who said that the son is currently becoming an engineer and doesn't want to work in a bank. So looking for Bilfinger as an employer because that's really, really skilled jobs and skilled people we are always looking for. So we have made a commitment back at Capital Markets Day in 2022 to invest 0.5% at least of our revenue on an annual basis into learning and development. And we set expectations, we meet expectations. So we have fulfilled and partly overfulfilled our commitment of this investment, as you can see here. So we are spending a significant amount of our revenue into learning and development activities. So this is very important for us. Again, you saw the variety of jobs, the variety of requests that our customers have. And I would like to give you an overview of what we have done and what we are still doing. So when we looked into this back in 2022, Bilfinger has always invested into its people. So there has always been activities on learning and development. However, in kind of in a more scattered way, I want to say, right? So what we have done over the last 3 years is we have streamlined our portfolio. We have brought our colleagues between countries together so that they can talk about and learn from each other what they do in terms of educating our colleagues. And all of that is always based on what you see here at the bottom, the Bilfinger values. We are a value-oriented organization, and that is something that I think Thomas mentioned this earlier today. You see, for example, in the education GmbH, where we have around 300 apprentices a year in Germany alone in roughly 30 different apprenticeship schemes. And one part of the program is the democracy education where we make sure that we build a value-based team. Another example I want to give is the repeat program for engineers. That's really where we feel the power of a global organization. Jürgen mentioned that we depend on good collaboration of our colleagues also across borders. And here, we rotate engineers internationally to make sure that they can learn from each other and also teach each other. And when we talk about challenges of the future, the volatile environment, the preparation of our workforce to handle colleagues like Max and artificial intelligence coming in, digitization, et cetera, we also have to make sure that we invest in our leaders. The executive flagship program that's mentioned here for our leaders is a collaboration with London Business School, one of the most renowned business schools in the world actually. And we have started this program a couple of months ago, and we really, really, really feel an impact because it is not off the shelf, but it is customized for us. For Bilfinger, we also work with immediate use cases for our own organization. So we are investing and now you have to ask what's the return and when does it come? So there is a long-term return. At the same time, we also see a short-term return. We already see it. Colleagues like to stay with Bilfinger because they see a career. They see that we are investing into them and they see that they can develop themselves and progress and grow with us. We were able to bring down the voluntary turnover rate. So the number of colleagues we don't want to lose, right? So that's got to go down. And we were able to bring this down already to a level which sits slightly at the top of industry benchmark. If we are able -- and we believe we are able to with our investments and with the engagement that you feel in this organization to bring this down by 100 basis points, this will deliver savings of around EUR 5 million to EUR 10 million. It's a spend because it always, of course, depends in what jobs, what geographies, et cetera. So it really has an impact. And we know that in most of our countries, we are already an employer of choice, especially in those where we have scale because then we are known, right? So recruiting is a very, very important discipline for us. And here, we are also improving day in and day out. HR, HSEQ, all about people. Bilfinger has a strong HSEQ performance, a strong safety performance, and you see that here. We have been able and we are reporting on that on a quarterly basis. We have been able to improve our KPIs and safety performance over the last years to a level which is on a top industry level. And that's important because our safety performance is part of our license to operate. You heard Jürgen talk about Shell. And together with Shell, for instance, we have a program to jointly further improve on the safety of our colleagues. So also our customers have high expectations and standards, and we have them as well because we want every one of our more than 32,000 colleagues to return safely and healthy home. Every incident is still one too many. So our ambition remains 0 incidents. And we know that further working on health and safety of our colleagues and also looking at the health of our colleagues, we can see an impact of around EUR 10 million per annum if we continue to improve as we do at the moment. So to summarize, we are investing at least 0.5% of revenue on an annual basis into learning and development. I gave you a few examples. We are creating a future-ready workforce. I think that's very visible here today. We are an attractive employer already, and we are getting stronger every day. We have already improved our HSE performance, and we are doing this also on a daily basis so that we are generating value and growing together with all of our stakeholders. And this was what I wanted to share with you today, and I'm happy to take some of your questions. Thank you.

Thank you, Mirja. So again, if there are any questions relating to Mirja's presentation, please raise your hands. Stefan, please go ahead.

Yes. Thanks for your speech. One question. I know from some other companies, they have their own academy. How are your plans here? Or what do you do to establish an academy or something like this and your cooperations with the leading universities in Germany or also on an international basis?

Yes. That's a very good point. We are already cooperating. I mentioned London Business School, and that's just one flagship program. We have further cooperations with business schools and with universities in many of our countries. I know at least some examples also here for our German colleagues who work closely with universities in the areas where we operate. That is already happening, and we always have to make sure we target this to the jobs that we have and need into the skills that we have and need. So that's a very good point, and that's a very important part of our work, yes. With regards to the academy, personally, I think -- and I know many companies still have kind of a physical academy in places where it makes sense, right? So they have a large scale of their colleagues. Now remember, we are in more than 20 countries. So physically building something like that, not so sure whether that makes sense. But the idea of an academy in the sense of a learning environment that combines all of the different elements that we need for different target groups and especially making sure that we do not reinvent the wheel with -- in terms of training and education offering many times. That's a very, very important one.

So Nikolas, there's another question.

Yes. Maybe one question to the lost time number. I think it was last year at 0.3. So there, we saw a little increase. And now year-to-date, we are slightly below 0.2. What actually helped that it is this year so much lower than last year? What was the reason for that?

I'm with the organization for 6 months, okay, but I'll try. So what I see is that Bilfinger has a culture where we care for each other. So that was my -- also very first impression when I came in. And couple that with very professional programs. So Bilfinger really has -- and you saw this today, right, we open with safety first also in this environment. So this is very much a habit in the organization. It is a habit with our customers where we have clear structures, clear responsibilities, clear KPIs and then are able to further improve our safety performance. Where exactly the difference comes from from last year to this year, I don't know, but maybe one of the colleagues can answer that later. But that's a general attitude and a general potential that we have in our organization.

Is there another question with a direct link to Mirja's presentation? That's not the case. So then welcome Gerald on stage for our deep dive on sales.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Thank you, Mirja, for this deep dive into our -- one of our assets and that are our people. The second asset for us are our customer that are our market. If we look into the market expansion, we have 2 sublevers. One is performance partner. Your business is our performance. What does this mean? We want to drive the improvements in the performance for our customer. We don't want to sell only single services. We want to actively support our customer to achieve the efficiency, sustainability and at the end, operational excellence in sales, and that is the main topic also for the future to reach our growth. So with our strategy to expanding in revenue with sales, that gives our -- gives us the opportunity to reach the numbers for 2030. Let's have a look into the market. We saw at the beginning, big markets are right on our doorstep. But these big markets are very volatile. And you can see the growth of the market is rather low. It's 1% to 2%. Despite all these challenges in the market, we see also opportunities. And in the lunch break, I was asked, where do you see the biggest opportunity? And one of the biggest opportunity is the topic outsourcing. And here, Bilfinger has a big advantage. Bilfinger is benefiting from declining market as well as from growing market. That sounds a little bit strange, why declining market. So in declining market, customer has usually cost problems. Therefore, they have to look for other systems for our organization and then outsourcing came in place. And the outsourcing requests are different from the industries. So in oil and gas industry, outsourcing is very mature, roughly 55% of the services are outsourced in the oil and gas industry. In the pharma and biopharma industry, the driver for outsourcing is to enable the customer to concentrate on their core business. So totally different approach. In chemical and petrochemical, we have a mixed picture. It's a bit depending also from the area, from the country where they are producing. For example, in Europe, cost is the main driver for outsourcing costs and to secure the production in terms of people. We all know the demographic development, and that will be a challenge. The baby boomer will retire in the next 7 to 8 years. and we will lose and our customer will lose a lot of qualified people. And here, we can come in and support the customer and to cover this gap. In energy, outsourcing is driven by new and innovative production facilities like hydrogen, like hydropower. For these facilities, for these new facilities, the energy provider are looking for O&M operation and maintenance provider. So we take over also the operation. We don't take over the responsibility for the outcome, but we take over the operational responsibility and the maintenance responsibility. And in the adjacent industry, it's a mixture of that. If we look into our ambition, -- so more than 50% of the growth, 8% to 10% should come or will come from the market and from inside from Bilfinger, so-called self-propelled. So more than 50% of 8% to 10%, so roughly 5% to 6% should come from ourselves, should be driven by ourselves. How we want to reach it? We want to increase the share of wallet that was mentioned several times today and where we want to do it in our core business. So we have -- in a lot of our regions, our countries on our sites, we are delivering 1, 2, 3 services, but we can offer much more. And this is what we want to aim for to close the portfolio to deliver the full portfolio from Bilfinger in the core business. Adjacent markets and adjacent products were mentioned several times. Here, there are new opportunities, and I have an example with me where you can see how we want to tackle the market. Outsourcing. Outsourcing, most probably the main topic, outsourcing is not a trend. Outsourcing has always waves. But currently, we are on the top of the wave. And one disadvantage of outsourcing is the outsourcing will not come to us. So we have to go for outsourcing. We have to explain the customer what is the benefit for the customers in terms of outsourcing. So we have to take care about outsourcing. And that is one of the task of the Adapt future sales organization. Today, pricing was an issue. Pricing together with the remuneration model is very important for us to gain certain margin and also for the customer to get transparency. The pricing or we can influence the pricing with the bundling of our products with delivering of our solutions. And what we don't prefer -- that was a question also in the lunch break. We don't prefer to deliver single services. Here is the benefit rather low. We have to deliver value -- we have to deliver concepts for the customer. Then it's an advantage for the customer and as well advantage for us. And all these things can be happened only if we have the right people in the right place. Therefore, people learning, development, training the people is a very important thing to make all this way forward happen. If we look in the current situation, we are currently facing more than 6,000 customers, active customers. And the positive message is more than 40% out of the 6,000 customers are buying more than one services from Bilfinger, multi-trade or full concept, full solutions. If we look into the outsourcing share for our customer, so the whole circle is 100%, 100%. So roughly 1/3 will stay with the customer. So that is not addressable for us. Then roughly 20%, 23% is not addressable. Not addressable means we cannot delivering any advantage for the customer, any product for the customer. But the good message is 45% out of this 100% is the addressable market for us. And with our services, we can cover all this 44%, 45%, also the positive message. So this is our addressable market. And with the growth of 1%, you see quite a huge potential. Customers appreciate us for the right side, our global presence. A lot of our customers are international companies. Shell was mentioned before, BP is another one, Borealis, Future Borouge International. They have a lot of sites all over the globe, also Middle East, Europe and U.S. and the customer wants to have the same system, the same quality, the same delivery model on all the sites where we are acting for. So they appreciate a lot our global presence. The most important thing, most probably for the customer, mainly for the technical department of the customer is our domain knowledge. Domain knowledge means we are the expert. We know quite well what we are doing, how we are doing that and what is the benefit for the customer. And -- you are part of the journey of Bilfinger the last couple of years, and you saw how we changed our delivery models. We are going more and more into products, into transparent delivery. Before we had a lot of different services in different shape. And now with this clear product sales and solutions, what means solutions? Solutions are, for example, in maintenance, a comprehensive concept, a comprehensive product about how we run maintenance, how we create benefit for the customer and how we secure also the availability for the plant for the customer. That are the solutions. And these solutions we have in turnarounds in German unlocking Allen shutdowns of plants. We have this solution in inspection service. You can see it here in the exhibition, one of the part of the inspection service. And we have the solutions also in engineering. So this makes us very unique. And here, the pricing comes into here, we are not so comparable with the competitors because the competitors cannot deliver in this kind of shape. The main driver in the future, mainly in maintenance is digitalization. So the operation cost in digitalization will be flat. We saw in the industry 1% growth, so almost nothing. But -- if we look now, the part of digitalization in maintenance overall is roughly 10% to 15%. 2030, this part will be more than 60%. So more than 60% of the whole spend in the future will come from digitalization in maintenance. So that is a huge step change, and that will create also different business models. And you saw today also with MAX and with our AI-based maintenance approach, we are well prepared to tackle these challenges in the future. And overall, value-based selling, several time mentions. The customer don't want to buy Technik, costs only money. They want to have value. We have to explain the customer what is the benefit if you get these services from Bilfinger? What are the efficiency gain? What are the cost savings, how we can support the availability in the customer plant. That is value-based selling. And the left-hand side and right-hand side flows together into our so-called sales powerhouse. And this sales powerhouse is adapt sales organization, which should support the future growth story of Bilfinger. What is now the task? The task of this powerhouse is sales strategy, sales plan. Also our general sales approach. In our industry, sales is very local or in the best case, it's focused on a country, but we need sales cross-border. So we drive here out of the sales powerhouse cross-border sales. We want to have new customers. We want to increase the share of wallet. We want to have standardized processes. And to get all of it, we need qualified people. So one task of the powerhouse is also to train the people in terms of our products and in terms of the sales process. And also a discussion during the lunchtime about the attitude of engineers, so to say, they have not really the sales DNA, and this is what we have to implement for our people. We will not hire new people. We have existing people. We have the capability to drive the sales. And so the new setup will be built internally in Bilfinger. And of course, in the center of the sales powerhouse are our four products, consulting engineering, preriefab and installation, insulation and asset performance. And the focus is always the customer. Only discounts, the wishes of the customer are counting nothing else. Now I can show you on 4 examples how this should work. And these are brand new examples, so that is not old stuff. On the left-hand side, we have an adjacent industry. That is a data center. And for all 3 examples, different KPIs are important. For example, for data center, they have only one KPI that is availability, 100% nothing else, not 99.9%, it is 100%. You can imagine if in the hyperscaler, the data center fail, what's happened in the world. The world is close to a collapse. So therefore, 100% availability and you can read it also after the bullet point or in the bullet point one Bilfinger solution, 365 days 24 hours a day. That is where we are on site for this customer. And that's a little bit different to the chemical industry, to the energy industry. They don't have shift system. They have shift system in production, but not in maintenance. That was 30 years ago. But for data center, that is the most important thing. And what you can see, we have maintenance for all the trades. We offer builfinger bundling services, and we do also small modification on site. What we don't do, we don't act on IT stuff, on IT equipment and this kind of stuff. Here, we are talking about the utilities, about the heat treatment, about cooling and about infrastructure. Another example -- that is an example for our global presence. UPM is a Swedish company, is originally, I think, a paper production company, and we have long relationship for them or with them. And 3 years ago, they decided we go to Germany and we build a biorefinery. And they look for a partner. And 3.5 years ago, we started to talk to them to support them in the engineering phase over the brief application phase, construction phase. And at the end, we end up with a maintenance contract based on our Bilfinger maintenance solution. So this is a, I would say, unique maintenance setup unique for the market, not for us. So that is our standard delivery model, this building a maintenance solution. And you can see we deliver mechanical, electrical, so all trades, what is necessary to run a biorefinery in Germany. And the third example is an example from the energy. Availability, also very important. Here, Fortum, Finnish company, Finnish power producer, and they run a district heating system, German system. And you can imagine these days, if the district heating fails, it is not nice because in a lot of living room, it's very cold. So therefore, 100% availability. And here, we do operation and maintenance. This was an existing site took over by Fortum, and we took it over from another supplier. The performance of the supplier was not good. They delivered only what the customer said to him, and we have the active approach. We make proposal how we can improve the performance, how we can reduce the cost. So we took this over in November this year. And this is also a comprehensive operation and maintenance model. And you can see all these three examples are from one of our new segments. I hope you got a little bit the feeling how the new sales organization can contribute for the future growth. So 50% of the growth should come from internally. And I hope you you take with you that Bilfinger is well positioned in the challenging but promising market. All what I present here and what present to my colleagues, you can see here in our exhibition and you see these four areas are exactly our four products and which products we're offering in these four areas. So now I'm happy to get your question.

Yes. You mentioned that your global customers are increasingly appreciating that Bilfinger is now increasingly global. And you now already have a much higher share of wallet. Of course, the target is to gain more. against which competitors, which peers are you now increasingly competing against with these global customers?

On global base, fortunately, there are not so many competitors. There are some in Belgium, Netherlands. There is not really a global competitor, but more regional competitor in Germany. So if we are -- if we have 5 -- between 5 and 10 customers over the whole globe, then it's all. So not so much who can deliver a comprehensive solution. If we look into single services, we have a lot of local competitors. And there is also a trend what we see with huge customers or with global customers. They try to bundle their services, they try to reduce their suppliers and then came automatically into our field. And we have currently roughly 5 tenders, European tenders where we should deliver, for example, insulations, scaffolding, access service or also maintenance.

If there is another question, I ask one from Olivier, please.

Just you talked about 44%, 45% of outsourced services at your customers. Is that sort of your estimate of what the customer could outsource because you mentioned it's addressable? Or is that something that's already addressed by competitors?

No, both. Some -- I mentioned it in the oil gas, 55% is outsourced of the 100%. And this is the addressable market for us. So we say to the customer, look, 45% of your spend can be taken over by us. So we define this for some customer by ourselves. And if we talk to customers, customers are not really aware. If we are talking about outsourcing, we are not talking about technicians, we are talking with management. And management, in fact, has no clue what brings outsourcing and what is the effect of outsourcing. So therefore, we have to explain them the efficiency gain, the benefit for them.

All right. And with that, let's move to our wrap-up together with Thomas and Matti.

So thanks a lot. So you got a lot of information. We make now a wrap-up actually of the whole package, what we presented, not of that, what you can see there. This well-known slide where the rumors is out, I have it as a wallpaper in my living room, maybe. It actually -- again, it shows what we are doing, what we did, what we are doing and what we will do. We work on two main elements, our own efficiency and on the market expansion. And of course, we have an ambition for 2030, and that is purely based on that, what we already delivered and what we will go on to deliver. But when we look a little bit back and seeing what we delivered, I don't want to talk more about the strategic levers and so on. But when you look into the financials, what we deliver, and I got the question regarding the EBITDA ambition, what we have up to 2030, how we see that, of course, with peers in the market, customers, the business environment, actually, the most difficult for a top management to improve profitability of a company is internal. It's not external. It's internal. It's the mindset of the people. It's the mindset of the people. You build up a strategy, you show that you can deliver step by step, you give a target and you look back and say, see, this is what we got. When we both took over, I remember that very well in one of the lot evening events what we had, we were sitting and saying for Christ sake, why are they -- why don't they believe in themselves to get over 3% EBITDA. That was the biggest hurdle, maybe the biggest hurdle I had in my career with such a big group of people. We have to trust back. We have a clear plan. We will achieve that. Other things like, of course, the confidence in the market, the confidence in the media, return to and so on, that all supports that because the business in itself is there. The profitability is there. You have to capture it with a strategy, with training, education, experience, digitalization. The market is there. I don't want to go further into the details as we already did. The market actually versus last year, we had EUR 190 million plus -- billion plus as an addressable market. This year, EUR 210 billion plus as an addressable market. We have a lot of opportunities more than we show here on the -- and these opportunities are actually built for us for the competence what we have. When you look into that and seeing what you see here, it is -- it fits 100%. It's up to us to capture that. But for that, we have to change a little bit that how we operate, how we are organized. Sales is important. We will bring sales culture into industrial service companies and customers will appreciate it, especially the ones under pressure. This adjustment is known in other industries already. Why not in industrial service? I said it in one sentence this morning. Industrial service is actually coming from doing business on customer side and being local. We have now with a special force to go out and making that happen. With all the changes what we do structurally wise too, there is no talk from us about a cutting program or anything. No we reshuffle and bring more money to the front line to offer and to discuss with our customers all the goods what we can do for them. And when we do it and when I go myself out, there's always something what we sell. There's always something what we can do more than before. Out of that, that structure, what we go in, we make us more transparent to track us with that what we promise, what we perform and you can compare us more to the performance of geographies, the performance of peers, to performance of customers. And on top of it, Matti with the remuneration model, which gives another transparency on us. This is the way we will go forward. And it creates, of course, internally a lot of pressure to perform because it's easier to compare. I grew up in a lot of different structures. That was the structure what I saw throughout all the B2B business for local decentralized as the most successful. And believe me, we looked into it a lot what we will do with it. Out of that...

Yes, we will accelerate our financial performance. We delivered 8% CAGR over the last 3 years. We will deliver 8% to 10% into 2030. We improved our profitability by 230 basis points already, and we will improve by 250 to 350 additional basis points to get ourselves to an 8% to 9% profit margin. We will improve our free cash flow as well as the cash conversion rate. We targeted 80%. Now we're targeting 90% and better. We've talked about the updated segment structure quite a lot today. It's very important. It's, I would say, close to our heart. It took a while to get the organization to this point. Now we feel the point in time is right to do this, it will provide much better transparency from the outside for the investors, for the analysts, but also and very important for our clients and for our customers. The growth rates that we see in Europe is 6% to 8%, in international, 12% to 15% and the profitability will achieve the 8% to 9% across all segments. Even more transparency on our risk profile, moving away from projects versus services to remuneration gives you a much better indication and much better comparability with peers and other players in the market. Even better working capital efficiency—. We had a target of 8% NTA net trade assets over revenue. We have lowered that to 6%, helping us to achieve a cash conversion rate of 90%, continuously working on working capital efficiency, accelerating collection and billing processes in the first place. Last but not least, our disciplined and transparent capital allocation in its totality will not change, but the compositions and the components will fluctuate over the course of the next 5 years to fund our growth, both organically and through M&A. But first and foremost, our dividend policy, 40% to 60% of adjusted net earnings is not going to change. Our balance sheet is very strong. We have enough headroom to our very low leverage right now. So there is plenty of room to maneuver for growth, be it organically or be it through M&A. And here's the sales pitch, a very attractive investment case with the 5 components, asset-light industrial services provider, very high customer retention rate, exceptional growth, interesting and ambitious 8% to 9% profitability, a very strong and continuous cash flow generation and disciplined and transparent capital allocation. In a nutshell.

In a nutshell.

In a nutshell. And we have seen very, very competent people showing you what type of services we deliver to our clients, our customers. So I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. We have an advantage. We can enjoy it every day. So I hope you remember what you have seen here this time. We have not set a date for the next Capital Markets Day. But when we come out, I think I'm not going to promise too much, but we will have something very similar to this one here. So thank you very much for being with us today. We -- take it easy. Thank you very much for being with us today. Obviously, we're always happy to take more of your questions. And for that, I turn it to our colleagues.

Thank you, Matti. Thank you, Thomas. So this is also true for our virtual guests who are very shy today. So if you have any more questions, please type them in the chat function. And for those here, it's more easy. I already see the hand. So please, Michael.

Thank you very much for the great presentation. I have one question on pricing. I mean, globally, we all know inflation is around 2%, maybe 3%. And I understand that a lot of your contracts are probably tailor-made, but as you move more towards standardized products or services and maybe multiyear contracts, what about pricing? I mean, if you would increase 1% or 2%, maybe you could increase your targets to 10% to 12%.

Yes. Thank you for that ambition. You should join us. At first, if it comes to pricing, it's a significant element in our working towards the client. But to go to the client and say we have to raise prices, that's not working. It is a value-based selling, the value-based selling. They know if we offer more, if we do here and there more, we can prove it that efficiency on their side improves. And to give you a little bit of ratio, if we offer a service and it costs, let's say, EUR 1 million and we impact that they earn EUR 2 million, EUR 3 million over the year on the bottom line, what's the talk about the pricing? But they have to be informed about that. You have to calculate that in front of them. You have to have the relation with them. That's actually the sales powerhouse approach. It doesn't work if you come every 3 years to renew the contract and then say a little bit like that. That doesn't work. We have to be permanently on it. Second, pricing has an element, what we call product offering, the mix of the products you offer. You have markets where some products are higher in price than in other markets. In the geographical organization, you have it on a golden plate to play that game regarding change of product offering, product mix. We had in the third quarter last year, we said we are 6% EBITDA. One part of it was that we had a favorable product mix. There, we were able to play it. This is what we drive more to play the product mix. Then regarding your ambition, to make that clear, if you go to the United States, the average EBITDA level for industrial service companies is double-digit. The average EBITDA level for United States companies, industrial service business are double-digit. Now we can go on and say, yes, they have one currency and they don't have Brussels, Berlin, Paris, and other capitals. So that maybe is 2%, 3% on the EBITDA. There you are with the 8% to 9%. We have peers in Europe saying up to 27%, 28%, 7% to 8%. I don't think that their ambition is flat on 29 and 30—. So from that point of view, the market has it, but it's not that we go out and say we make it more expensive. You have to deliver return, you have to deliver value for the client, and we are able to do that more and more.

Now who's next? Michael?

One more on the new segment structure, where I think it definitely makes sense to have a pure regional reporting still. You also said that size matters. And obviously, the size distribution is quite uneven. And I think also within the segments, there's probably some heterogeneity. So how do you make sure you, let's say, benchmark properly internally so that the segments can deliver on the ambitions and, let's say, also adjust for the element of M&A and make sure the M&A support is appropriate. so that the segments can actually deliver?

The -- actually, borders are not so important for us to make it very clear. It's more the area of responsibility for management teams. You have a map in the office. There you have all the customers on it. And if the walls are big enough and we don't have our famous strategy slide on it everywhere, then you have a map, for example, for oil and gas, a map for biopharma and so on. You can split it as much as you want and you put all the clients on it. And then you put all the dots on it where we are already present and selling something. And then you make your strategy to go in. That's the share of wallet calculation because we want to know our people tell us these are the amount of customers I have in the different industries. This is what they invest. Because that is what they tell us, and this is our share of wallet. And these are the activities what we do to improve that. That's actually the whole realization in it. And then we measure on what is the share of wallet today and what is the share of wallet tomorrow. The opportunity pipeline, what we invented a few years ago actually triggers that to look into all the territories where we are, all the geographies, region segments, no matter how we call it, where they give us an overview what is out in the market and where can we go on? What is the likelihood that it happens, what is the likelihood that we get it. So that information we have. We actually built up a fantastic good culture to be focused on the client. Now the next step is to go aggressive on them in a way to offer them improvement. So that transparency is important. Then the last thing on it, we always have differences in country versus other countries. This GDP, amount of people living there, size of the industry and so on. And for us, it's important, and that is what we said, it's a local decentralized business where the power sits because that is where we make the business happen. It's the local responsibility to develop that. In that structure, you get a fairly simple overview how things are developing share of wallet improvement, how the plan is realized. It's like a dashboard, like sitting in the car and having the tachometer in front of you and the tachometer are free where we look into. And it makes -- to make it fairly clear, it makes a lot of fun when you do that because a lot of our customers are in more than one segment or more than one region. And you can compare them. And you see how are we performing here versus there. This kind of internal competition, as we call it, is a very positive thing to learn from the best in the Bilfinger Group so that the ones who are not on the top can see how to do it better. And it actually helps customers because over with us, they compare their own performance too. That's the reason why we call ourselves a little bit the barometer of an industry, of the process industry.

Stefan, you...

Yes. Thanks again for the very good insightful presentations today. One question about the topic of artificial intelligence. This is a big topic, I think, for many industries. And how can you exploit this to bring up your cross-selling ratio and to sell more solutions to existing clients or to bring similar solutions which you have for existing clients to new clients?

Yes. The -- you can look into what we can do internally, operational excellence and, of course, in the market expansion. You talked about procurement.

Yes. We're using a lot of increasingly AI to improve our processes. I showed some or explained some examples within the procurement process, but we also have started to use AI throughout the entire finance organization. I've put a position in place, individual to look into AI in finance to improve the use of AI within our finance organization and to bring it to a level that compares to others. We're not sort of an early adopter, but we have started some initiatives. This will also play into the learning and development. You have to educate people in the application of AI and to overcome some resistance that is, I guess, human and natural. But that is what we do internally in adopting AI for ourselves as part of our operational excellence.

And it's the same towards the client. We actually use a kind of language software to translate and to give support to our people to communicate with customers faster and more efficient. But this is at the early stage because it's on the customer side at the early stage, too. And here, again, the same as with the EBITDA. The biggest roadblock in bringing a company from analog to digital are our own people. Why? Because they are -- they have concerns to utilize it. If we would have the same digital setup on customer side and our company as most of the people already have at home, we would be 5 years ahead. I come out of an industry was belong in the industry of mining. Mining per se had to go very early into digitalization because the mine sites are really far away from civilization. So digital was necessary because the costs were too high to bring in people, fly in, fly out each day didn't work out. So what was it? We worked in all the companies I worked before actually to was to convince our own people to utilize it. And when you look into, I give you all the same experience with your own companies where you work in. When you come home and if you have kids in the age of 14, 15, 16 gaming around with -- yes, all the games, I don't want to make any advertising, but I stop to play with my son because before I start to play, I'm already dead in that game. But you try to get that information, what you need to have to play the games. What we have in the industry, what we offer, what we work with is significantly lower in the requirements. So what is it then that we are not doing more? It has to do that we have to convince, we have to make learning and development and training to overcome that fear, you know what the comments were on a big management meeting when we got Max in the little colleague without weekend. There are some people were scared. We have to take that away. It's technology. It helps us. It's good. It's something great, and it makes a lot of fun. And a lot of people here, they really have fun in it. So AI internally, externally, definitely. Are we the main driver? No. The same as in high tech. We utilize that what is ongoing for the benefit for us and our customers. We are not a software company. We are not an AI company, but we are unbelievably open to utilize whatever is possible and available for us.

If you look at the colleague, Max, the beauty -- there's several beauties about that device, I have to say. But one of the key elements is data collection with sensors, be it temperature, be it pressure, be it physical condition and what have you and collecting all the data and putting those into AI models is going to shape and reshape our business. So it's not a matter of choice. It's just a matter of getting it right.

Take the opportunity. There's one more, Andreas.

Thank you for the insight. I have another question on digitalization. To what extent is a higher share of digitalization and predictive maintenance a reaction to the service delivery of competitors? And to what extent can digitalization contribute to even higher profitability than you have planned?

There's a reason why we use internally share of wallet. It doesn't matter what the peers are doing to make it fairly clear. It is important what the customer needs. This permanently looking left and right what others are doing at best brings you in a position to be a good follower. We don't want to be a follower. We want to be the #1. These people want to be the #1. That's the reason why we have it. And when we look to our customers, they talk a lot about digitalization. Why are they doing that? Because they need to have suppliers doing the same or more for them because alone, they can't do it. We can't do it alone. We use Microsoft. We use Boston Dynamics. We use a lot of other companies for that because it's not Bilfinger, which developed that robot, but we use drone technology from I don't know what companies all to fly over oil fields and offshore platforms to offer customers quick data analyze, early warning systems. And that improves our competitiveness and keeps a lot of others just out of the market. Entry barrier is significant higher today for someone who would like to compete with us 10 years ago, and it will get higher. Then the profitability, it's easy to say, oh, if you use digitalization, you get more money. It is not like that. Digitalization is an environment we work in. It's like the air we breathe. It's not a project. It's not one product. It's an environment we work in. It's a society we work in. But if you are able with digitalization in that environment to add more value to the client, you can actually price more because the value-based selling drops in. If you -- I have a good example, which has nothing to do with digitalization, what I always bring to all my salespeople when it comes to that point. It is a flacaf, bottle of perfume, I think we would say. You know what the most expensive on it is. It's the bottle. It's the bottle, not the perfume. And when you know the price for the bottle, I know it. I will not tell you for some of the main brands. And then you see what they price. You actually question, why the heck I'm not doing my own perfume because it's a huge margin on it. So what is the margin on it? -- value the value is on it. So -- and we -- of course, we don't do. Thanks God, a little bit oil -- but what I tried to sell is value-based selling is to have the capability to improve for the customer something. For us, it's the efficiency and sustainability. It's not enough to have that capability. You have to sell it and you have to prove it. And digitalization, that's the real good thing. You actually can prove it. I come out of a time in the '90s where we offered the process equipment. And then others came in and say, we can do better. No one could prove it. The customer bought then this equipment and bad luck didn't perform. Do you think the customer went to the market and said, "Oh, I bought something what didn't perform? No way. No way. Nowadays, we can go out and say, this is what we offer you. This is the improvement what you get, and we can really prove it. We actually can bring them to hundreds of sites to show what we already did. That's value-based selling. But again, I know I repeat a lot. We have to get out of our fence where the customer sits today and going to new customers, too. And for that, you need an aggressive sales force. That makes a lot of fun again.

So any more open questions, issues, Olivier, please?

Just two nuts and bolts and then I have a third one. So M&A and capital allocation, so you want to stay investment grade. Is that fair to say the 2x leverage is the maximum you want to go to? And the second nuts and bolts is on the free cash flow. Overall, you've done an impressive job with working capital. Is it fair to say CapEx to sales should stay broadly level at the 1.5%?

Yes to the second question. First question, it's a threshold right now as we speak, based on our past performance and based on S&P giving us an investment-grade rating. Obviously, as we improve our performance, our profitability, we will have further discussions with the rating agency and then see if we need to make adjustments on the risk profile or the like. But for us, right now, we have a threshold of 2.0 as leverage.

Yes. And then just on the derisking trajectory. So you've said now you've got 20% lump sum revenue, 80% reimbursable. Can you just help us understand where it was in 2022 and where you want to go, if you want to quantify it?

I don't have the exact numbers, but from recollection and memory, I would say that the lump sum portion was more around 30%, if not more. The 20% certainly is a much better share in terms of composition. We have not looked too much into the future and saying as part of the modeling, this has to go down to 15%, 10%, or 5%. It is looking at the overall risk tolerance and risk appetite, it's a component. Doing lump sum work is part of our service offering, part of our offering. But as I said, and I hope I explained it well, lump sum is not equal to lump sum. You can do lump sum when you have been involved before, and you know very well what is going to happen during the execution of the works. So as— I would not say in absolute terms, it's bad, not at all. It's part of the offering. It's part of the product mix and obviously, of the margin mix, but it has to be executed properly.

Are there any more? So as this isn't the case, thank you for your active participation, for your attendance. You will now have the possibility to attend the exhibition again. Anette, please join us on stage and then thank you.

We should say goodbye. So, of course, as it is, but especially here in that, a fantastic exhibition, well done, guys. Really, I'm very proud of you. Great show. We will repeat that. For all the guests here, of course, on the webcast, but especially here in the room, thanks a lot for taking the time and going with us in quite detailed discussions. For us, it's very important because on your questions, we measure how we improve our communication and, of course, getting to know us better than before. Of course, you can always call—, we're always available, Investor Relations for that. We have it. No matter what you do now afterwards, stay safe. That would be a big, big thing. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes. No matter what you do, you, of course, join another exhibition tour. We meet again maybe in 50 minutes, grab a coffee, get yourself maybe some cake and then we meet again close to the industrial climbers or again behind the exhibition circle. We also have a LEGO box. Maybe you need more Christmas presents where you can build your own bioreactor with LEGO—, just some inspiration. But anyway, we look forward to seeing you again over there, and thanks for joining. Have a good afternoon. Thank you.

Thank you.