Fugro N.V. (FUR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Welcome to everybody to our Capital Markets Day 2023. First off, a warm welcome to everybody that is here in the room to trouble to be here with us today, much appreciated. Of course, also to all of you watching on the webcast. I'm Catrien van Buttingha, Director of Investor Relations. Before we get started, I wanted to tell you a little bit about our program today. First, I'd like to ask you to make sure everybody's phone is on silent. And also to let you know that the presentations that we will be holding today will be posted on the website towards the end of the day. So that makes it maybe a little bit easier for everyone. Now I think we have a great program for you today, but it's a very packed program with presentations and also 2 rounds of Q&A. I'll start off with Mark Heine, our CEO; and Barbara Geelen, after which we have a Q&A session with the 2 of them. We have a break between 2:20 and 2:40 and then we will continue on with 3 presentations from 2 of our regional directors, Erik-Jan Bijvank, Céline Gerson and Wim Herijgers about building recurring revenue. And then a second Q&A session after which for the people that are present here, we have some technology demonstrations outside. Anyway, without further ado, I would like to start, and I hope everybody has a good and fruitful day. [Presentation]

Wow, how wonderful. Such a good impression of what Fugro does and can do. And you will see a lot more this afternoon. So I think there will be fantastic pictures shared and a good impression of what Fugro is all about. Very welcome, also from my side, the people here in the room, obviously, also people on the webcast because we have a lot of people dialing in. So we're very welcome this afternoon. Catrien already show the program, and there's a lot to show. So we just simply get going. And I'm very pleased that we have today the whole executive leadership team here in the room. On top of that, we also have our Chairman and our Vice Chairman of the Supervisory Board here in the room. So please make use of them also during the breaks and afterwards. And it's important to me because I think it's an important day. We're launching the strategy for the upcoming years, and we all believe in it. And that's why it's important to be altogether. And today, I will be joined by some of my colleagues to present the strategy for the upcoming years, here shown on the board and also shown earlier on in the presentation, Catrien showed. Our new midterm is 2027, and we have launched some ambitious targets. Financially, you have seen it in the press release this morning, but also on the nonfinancial side. So ambitious targets, we will talk about them in the presentations to follow, and we'll give you a lot more details. But before I go into the details of the strategy, let me first emphasize why Fugro is such a good investment case. We have 7 key investment highlights. First and foremost, we are a global Geo-data player that takes advantage of some really great market developments. Secondly, we have a unique value proposition, and we based that on our digital twin that we make with our map, model and monitor solutions. We have highly skilled people, market-agnostic assets, very important, we'll come back on that today. And we are a resilient company by now with multiple markets and a fantastic client base. We're innovative, scalable and have best-in-class operation, which is also very important and also something that is part of our future strategy. We have a very disciplined capital allocation plan and a clear strategy moving towards low carbon solutions, which will also spend some time on later on in the presentation. And last but not least, the strategy that focuses on growth and shareholder return. Let's look back at where we come from. So 5 years ago, we came out of a deep crisis, the energy crisis, the longest and deepest energy crisis the world has known. And 5 years ago, on the 14th of November, we were here in this building as well, a little bit higher up in the smaller room and many of you were there as well, investors, analysts, and I also want to thank you for your patience and commitment to stick with Fugro and to stay with us. We are a different company nowadays, much more client-centric. We strengthened our leadership team. They are all here today, the top leaders. We capitalized on the strong growth in offshore wind, and we cleaned up legacy issues. But we also continued to invest in innovation and in net-zero, which is, I think, very important because you need to think about the future. And the results are clear. It's not only the diversification that has changed. We used to be 80% more or more than 80% oil and gas. You see that you're on the board 2012, 76% and now we're less than 40% oil and gas, a well-diversified portfolio and the profitability also has really increased over the last couple of years. So we can clearly state that we have delivered on our strategy that we announced here in this building exactly 5 years ago, past the profitable growth. And I spoke already about the market diversification, but also financially, we have delivered on all our targets. We have grown. We have a fantastic backlog moving forward. But on the EBIT level, we're now 9.9% on the last 12 months -- rolling 12 months, LTM, but also on the ROCE side above 15% already today. And we have a very strong balance sheet right now. We have a leverage of 0.7x. And that's because of free cash flow generation but also because of the refinancing that we have done in 2020 and '22. And again, some of you were fundamentally strong in helping us moving through these refinancing periods, the more difficult periods of Fugro. But it's also part of our purpose to create a safe and livable world to actually reduce the CO2 emissions to reduce the environmental footprint of Fugro and to work on diversity in the company and many other things. But this is the future for many companies, and we want to stick to that and want to deliver on these also in the future. And before we go on, I think there's still a lot of people that often ask us, what is Fugro actually doing? We don't understand it. And I think that's why we have a great animation on the board here, and I will show you 2 examples, and I will talk you through it that you really make it tangible what we do. But before I do that, I want to emphasize that Fugro is not building anything. We're not constructing anything. We're a company that map, that models and that monitors Planet Earth, the surface and the subsurface. And what we do is critically important for every project -- any build project in the world. And here, you see an example of development of an offshore wind park. And it obviously starts, first and foremost, with measuring wind because why would you develop a wind park if there's no wind. Very important. Then we come in and we do collect geophysical information, build up that model of the ship service and then they can design, they can decide if they want to build the wind farm. And then when it's being built, we get involved in the construction of it, only by helping with the positioning, making sure that the jackets are a vertical that they're straight up and at the right water depth at the right level. And then later on, in the operational phase, we get involved with the inspection and monitoring of the structure. And we have also examples on the land side. We also get involved in the later stage, sometimes by building up the subsurface model and building up the layers in its sand, is it clay, are there any rocks, but it could also be in the operational phase where we start continuously monitoring how an asset behaves. Is it subsiding? Is there a problem? I'll come back on that. How important that is in the world of aging assets. So really great tangible examples of what Fugro can do. And we'll have more of these examples that you get a real good feel for how do we add value to our customers. And if you look at it in a different perspective, this is a model, what we call the geo risk management framework, a mouthful, but we actually explain here that we help our customers to reduce ground risk during the whole asset lifetime. So in the forefront in the site characterization area before they actually take a decision to build anything, they need to understand all the risks related to ground and the surrounding, the environment in where they want to build something. Later on, we get involved in the later phase in the operational phase. So I just showed you with the bridge there to do monitoring, to do mapping, modeling and monitoring of the asset and the surroundings. So this is very important to every client. It's project critical, as I just said. And we play sometimes a small role, but always a critical role. Nothing in the world can be built without Geo-data. And Fugro is the world leader in that. Let's have a look at what's happening in the world because that's obviously very important. When you start creating a strategy, you first need to take a step back and say, okay, what's actually happening around us? And obviously, we know that the population is growing. In 2015, close to 10 billion, 9.8 billion. That is, by the way, 5 billion in Asia, 4 billion in Africa and 1 billion in the rest of the world. And if you start thinking about that, that will have a major impact on how the world will be in 30 years from now. And then a lot of people are moving to cities. 5 years ago, I said 800,000 people, and now it's double actually the estimation. 1.6 million people move to cities every week, every week for the next 30 years. That's mind-boggling if you think about that. And that is all happening under the conditions of growing inequality in the world and climate change. So it makes it a very complex world because everybody on this planet needs energy, needs water, needs food. And they all want to move to cities so they need infrastructure. So there's a lot happening on that side. And these global developments also create key challenges, and they can't be a surprise to you. So the biodiversity is on the threat with overfishing with plastic pollution and many more things. Economic uncertainties. We've all seen it in the last period of time, in the last year, in the last 2 years, volatile stock markets, high inflation, supply chain pressure and then the geopolitical tension, very, very available or very present now in the world, obviously, with the Ukraine war, but also what we see right now happening in the Middle East. So these global developments are driving key challenges, and they need to be solved. And the beauty is that actually there by the United Nations, some very strong goals set, 17 sustainable development goals, very ambitious goals, 169 subgoals under these 17 goals, and they range from no poverty, 0 hunger, reduce inequality, climate action, life below water, affordable and clean energy. And energy in itself actually is now a bit more complex since what we have seen that we want to steer away from the Russian oil and gas. Certainly, availability also becomes important. And that is the energy trilemma that we have actually been talking about already over the last year. It's availability and affordability and then also the wish to go green. So we have seen what is happening in the world, and we thought in Fugro, okay, we need to take this in and when we want to develop a new strategy. Why don't we first and foremost look 10 years ahead of us and see what should Fugro actually be in 10 years from now or even 15 years from now. Let's create a vision. Let's create a picture how Fugro looks like in 10 years from now and then work our way back and see what we need to do in the upcoming 4 to 5 years. And that's what we have done. We created this picture. This is the vision of the future, how Fugro should look in the future. And this actually created the pull factor for our new strategy. So basically, we know where we want to be, and this is pulling at where we are today. So we have a push out of the factor of where we are today, the current business and the pull factor from that vision, that ambition that we have. It's quite exciting, and there's a whole story around this picture, but I will give you a brief executive summary today. So very brief. It's important because Fugro plays a critical role in unlocking insights from Geo-data. And as I just said, it's important for anything that is built on this planet. You need Geo-data and we do that by, yes, creating the digital twin of Planet Earth, surface and subsurface. Nobody in the world has the ability to do that actually for the surface and the subsurface together. This is our ambition. And in the future, Fugro will also look beyond the build environment. And we'll also care about the preservation of ecosystem, the natural environment. That's the future of Fugro. That's where we want to be. And we will have a unique combination, and we already have today will continue to have a unique combination of people and technology. And that actually makes us the world leading Geo-data expert. And in that whole discussion, we also concluded that the 3 markets that we currently serve, water, energy and infrastructure are still the markets of the future. So let's have a look at these markets in a bit more detail. First, the energy market. And I already spoke about the energy trilemma. And here, you see the renewables market. This is data from 4C Offshore. You're probably aware of them. They actually make these plans and these estimates of future growth, the investments of CapEx and so on. And this is the picture after they already corrected by 25% for the recent announcements of all these operators, not actually continuing with certain sites. The questions that we always get nowadays, 30% CAGR, 30% growth per year. And it's primarily CapEx-driven because there still needs to be a lot built. And I can tell you, the renewables market offshore wind for Fugro is very Geo-data heavy. And that's for fixed bottom installation and even more so for floating wind, another question we always get. And much more data heavy than the traditional energy markets. Traditional energy markets that are also growing in the upcoming years. And Rystad another organization that makes these plans. This is the data that is shown on the board here, estimates a 9% growth per year for the upcoming years. Oil and gas is now 1/3 of our revenue, a little bit more, but roughly around 1/3 of our revenue. And it's primarily related to what we call asset integrity work, inspection and monitoring work on existing pipelines and infrastructure. And as you see here on the Board, only 2% of our turnover is related to greenfield oil development. If we look at the infrastructure market, it's obviously driven by the population growth and the urbanization I spoke about, but also a lot of assets are aging. Most of the assets were built in the midst of the 20th century and they're getting quite old. They get at the end of their lifetime. And in principle, many countries have to actually replace them and invest in it. But it's impossible they do not have the money to replace all the infrastructure, the roads, the flyovers, the buildings, the bridges, et cetera. So extending lifetime is a really important topic. And you can only do that by making sure that these assets are still safe moving forward in the future. And what you start doing as we've shown in the animation, monitor it. Model it and monitor it and make sure that they're still safe in the future and extend the lifetime of these assets and then gradually start replacing it. And Geo-data is an essential part of all the decisions that need to be taken. And the importance of critical infrastructure is also reflected in a number of stimulus programs by governments, and we have seen programs being launched in the U.S., in India, but also a fantastic infrastructure investment program in Australia and many more countries. So this is going to be also an area of importance moving forward. Then the water market, the third market for Fugro. And the water market is an existing market for Fugro, but it's today very small. You have seen that in the numbers. But it's identified as a future market, a future growth market that we need to be in today to actually benefit from it also in the future, and it will grow over time. And we analyze this, we break it down in 3 elements: an offshore part, ocean health; a coastal part, coastal resilience and the land part, inland water management. That's the split that we have made. And investing in our oceans and fresh water systems is vital to keep the planet safe and livable. You need to think about the oceans, and that's something that's very close to my heart because the oceans are, you could say, the lungs of this planet or maybe the beating heart. It produces 50% of the oxygen that we breath in the world and absorbs more than 30% of the CO2. It's very important to keep the oceans clean and healthy. But also think about sea level rise, flood control, coastline protection, all very important in the future, knowing that more than 40% of the people live within 100 kilometers of a coastline. The water market will be very important. But why is Fugro actually a market leader? So we have 5 competitive differentiators that drive this market leadership. And #1 and #2 and #3, I will come back on in a subsequent slide, but #4 and 5 are equally important. And let me say a few words about that. Number #4, differentiating through innovation. Since 2022, we have brought 28 new innovations to the market. Maybe we don't make enough noise about it, but this is a staggering amount of new innovations. And it really helps us to be more efficient and to be a market leader. We also issued or actually filled for 29 patents, which is also a pretty high amount. And the people working on it, they are super excited because they see so many things that we can still file for Fugro, a lot of new technology and a lot of benefits for that. But #5, we're a global player with a local presence, also very important. And why? Because it generates skill. And skill is an important one because we are able to flexibly move assets around in the world. We can ramp up in certain areas if there's more busy and larger projects. And very often, our competitors cannot serve these large projects because they don't have the capacity and the scale of Fugro. There's a bit more detail here on the market leadership. You find that in your deck as well. Have a look at that in detail. I'm not going to dwell on that right now. I will move on, considering the time, but we are #1 and #2 player in all the key services that we provide. If we talk about the first item that was on the list of the 5 items why we differentiate and are competitive. We have a very highly diversed and long-standing relation with our clients. A big diversity with clients ranging from international to national oil or energy companies, governments, local, central, EPC contractors and more. There's none of the clients that actually generate more than the 5% revenue. Very nice mix. And for many of these clients, we work already for decades, 62 years, as you saw in the video, Fugro started 62 years ago. And many of these clients actually work with us already for a long time, and they work in multiple markets. So very often in energy and in infrastructure or in infrastructure and water, so we can serve them on multiple fronts. And people, we already talk about people, extremely important. We have a unique and diverse workforce, more than 100 nationalities. You saw that also in the video, and we're back above 10,000 people, and we have hired already year-to-date 1,900 people. We often get the question, can you find the people? It's not easy, but we do hire them, and we have a machine going now on the recruitment. And that's globally, the expansion is available everywhere. And we have driven our eNPS, Employee Net Promoter Score. You need to be familiar with that to 19, and we have an ambition to go above 30. That's a really good score. And thirdly, we have market-agnostic assets resources. You see 4 categories here on our assets, a geophysical vessel at the top, then a geotechnical vessel, a CPT truck and our laboratory. And this is what we have done with it this year, and it's applicable to all the assets. We move them from oil and gas to renewables, from infrastructure to energy to water. And it could be with -- yes, within weeks or within a quarter, it can change overnight, and we do it with the same people and the same equipment involved. And that is different than many of our peers in the industry because they have very specific equipment to maybe build something. So we're flexible. We move things around, makes us much more resilient and different than what we were in the past. And we also have a track record now in reducing our asset intensity. Again, a question that we often get, we have the ambition to go and become asset lighter. And this is what happened over the last 10 years. We have come down on the asset intensity, and we continue to come down on it in the future. And Barbara, in her presentation, will spend more time on it and explain how it works. But it's important to take note of this. Okay. I have now shown you where we come from. I have shown you what we have achieved over the last 5 years. What the world is doing. How it's developing and how our markets react to it, and what our core competitive strengths are. I've showed you our thought about the future, the picture of the future division that we have. So now it's time to show you our updated strategy. And we have 3 strategic priorities defined. The strategy is called towards the full potential for Fugro. And first and foremost, we'll focus on growing and transforming our current business; secondly, expanding into developing segments in existing markets; and last but not least, build a recurring revenue model with Geo-data as a Service. So let's briefly look into those in a little bit more detail, albeit there will be a lot more shown later on. First and foremost, grow and transform our current business. Grow with the market. We need to invest in equipment and people, but we also need to expand on the services that we deliver in this business. We want to transform the way we operate. We want to transform our capabilities, different ways of working, roll out more on crude and autonomous vessels, remote solutions, but also speed up data delivery. And last but not need, at least, we want to optimize our business performance, for instance, by more standardization globally. So this is the first strategic priority. And after Barbara, Erik-Jan Bijvank, our Regional Director for Europe, Africa, will talk more about growing and transforming our current business, our first strategic priority. The second strategic priority is expanding into development segments in existing markets because the resilience is a good example. Secondly, ocean health and already spoke a little bit about it, the importance of it, mapping the conditions and the biodiversity of the ocean, but also CCUS, Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage. And we want to do this by expanding on our existing capabilities, our map, model and monitor solutions that we have. And enhancing it by either developing something new ourselves, maybe partnerships or selective M&A, but we need to expand on it. And Céline Gerson, our Group Director for the Americas, will talk more about this second strategic priority after Erik-Jan. The third strategic priority is building a recurring revenue model with Geo-data as a Service. And also there, we will get more details from Wim Herijgers, our Director for Development and Digital Transformation after Céline has spoken. And we'll do that with data platforms, but also with hardware sales with data subscriptions. We will use our experience that we already have in this field from satellite positioning business, the successful satellite positioning business, but we'll also actually acquire and attract people that have experience in doing start-ups and scale-ups and we already have been successful in some areas. So 3 strategic priorities. They will all get more attention after Barbara has spoken about the finances. So I get closely to the end of my presentation, but not before I've summarized some of the things that I've said. But first and foremost, I want to do that on the ESG front because our updated strategy towards full potential is creating a positive impact throughout our value chain. Impact by what we do and by how we do it, from clients on operations or thinking about the suppliers we use. We have plans in place to really go to that net-zero in 2035 in Scope 1 and Scope 2. And we already have pretty good rating on many of these things from the rating agencies. But the most important one for us is getting science-based targets accredited. And we have submitted the documentation already, and we hope to get an answer very soon on that. So to summarize. Here a summary of our updated strategy. With our purpose together we create a safe and livable world with our values that we really adhere to and that we believe in and our vision to play that critical role by unlocking insights from Geo-data through mapping, modeling and monitoring the build and the natural environment. 3 markets to serve, energy, infra and water, and 3 strategic priorities: grow and transform the current business, expanding in development segments in existing markets and build a recurring revenue model. And then 3, strategy enablers: people, technology and execution excellence, very important. And last but not least, our targets. This is my last slide. We commit to these targets. On the people side to have an Employee Net Promoter Score above 30. Up to 30 is good, and we want to be better than good. That's our ambition. We want to reduce the voluntary turnover rate below 8%, have a nice diverse company. And one of the measures that we have here, women in senior management between 25% and 30%, which is a strong ambition for a technical company, where we're going to do that. On the planet side, revenue on the renewables more than EUR 1 billion in 2027, 25% reduction of CO2 emissions compared to 2020 on our owned vessels, also very ambitious. And then the profit targets I've already mentioned them from the EBIT to the cash and the ROCE, but also a Net Promoter Score from client satisfaction above 50. This is what we commit ourselves to. And I'm pleased that we have the whole team here. We all believe in it, and we're very determined to once again deliver on this. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mark. Welcome, and thanks for joining us today. I will be presenting on 4 topics. First of all, on the value creation, which includes the midterm targets and its drivers, then we'll be talking about the asset strategy, how we managed our asset base and how we fund our future. Then on our financial policy, which includes the capital allocation framework, and then I will close off with the key investment highlights. Fugro is very well positioned for the future, as I just described by Mark. There's a global increasing need for Geo-data. We're #1 and 2 in the markets that we play. And in the Q3, we announced our results. And in the last 12 months, we have shown a revenue growth of 20%, and we have increased our EBIT margins in that same period to 9.9%. And together with a very solid balance sheet, this gives us a great foundation to build further upon. And let's look back at the diversification journey that we've been on. In '18, the majority of our revenue came from oil and gas and infrastructure and a little bit from renewables and see where we are today. We are now generating, as announced in the Q3 trading update, more than 1/3 of the revenue comes from renewables and also the water market has been developing. And the renewable growth is not only coming from Europe anymore. It's coming from the Americas and also from Asia Pacific. And the same goes for infrastructure. The growth is ongoing there. The same for the water market. So a very well-diversified company already. That was the to profitable growth that Mark explained. Then we're going to move into the next era of Fugro. And let me say this is very high level directionally. This is not exact science, but we see these are the markets that we can grow in and that we see really revenue potential for Fugro. And let me walk you through the 3 priorities there. Most of the revenue and value creation in a new midterm target period will come from our existing markets. And Mark already explained the strong backdrop of all the end markets up to 2027. So I'm not going to repeat that. If we then look at the second priority, there will be revenues in the new midterm period, but not so much then after the new midterm period, where we really see in the development segments on water, which is existing that will grow much more. Same for CCUS and same for coastal resilience. And then lastly, we're already building -- we're already generating revenue that is recurring. We have our satellite positioning business, and we have a lighter voice business, but we see more growth in that priority in the future, and we will be investing in that. And this revenue, this recurring revenue has higher margin potential, and this will further strengthens Fugro resilience. So where does this take us in terms of value creation? Our value creation is focused on growth, stakeholder value and shareholder returns. And over time, we are focused on changing that portfolio mix from projects business to more recurring revenue. And as you can see in the run-up towards the full potential as described by Mark, we are already selling ourselves ambitious yet realistic targets. So let's look at the midterm targets. 11% to 15% EBIT margin, 6% to 9% of free cash flow and more than 15% return on capital employed. And we also give guidance and these are not targets. We give guidance on revenue, EUR 3 billion to EUR 3.5 billion in guidance on CapEx, EUR 200 million to EUR 250 million. I will be showing in the next few slides a number of bridges. And I would like to highlight upfront that these are directional and not exact. So the main drivers for revenue growth is, one, the strong demand growth that we see in our end markets. Secondly, there's a pricing component. We will continue to focus on value-based pricing that comes along with the superior solutions that we offer to our customers. We play, as Mark said, sometimes it's small and sometimes a big role, but we always play a critical role in all our projects on all our clients' projects. Let's not forget about that. And then lastly, we have the recurring revenue and the Development segment revenue, like for Geo, Lighter Voice, but also Costal Resilience, that Céline will be talking about more. And lastly, although we foresee growth in all markets, we aim to achieve more than EUR 1 billion of renewables in 2027. And this revenue guidance is underpinned by a strong backlog, which is very well diversified. We report a 12 months backlog to the market, and this backlog consists of tenders, repeat business and business from key accounts. And when we presented our Q3 trading update, we presented a backlog growth of 14.5%, which previously -- in previous quarters had even been much higher, still 14.5% is high growth. And this comes from all regions. So again, very diversified. And usually, we don't disclose the split per end market, we now do. And you can see the ongoing growth in the renewables segment in the backlog. And on the right-hand side of the slide, you can see the split by project size, another clear point of how well diversified we are in terms of concentration of product sizes. So let's look at the first midterm targets, EBIT margin. And what are the drivers there? The first driver of our EBIT margin expansion is operational leverage. And we will achieve this by increased utilization of all our assets, not only vessels, but all our assets. And we will also be scaling on remoting -- on remote operations and the technology business. Then on the pricing component, we will continue to improve our terms and conditions. We've done very well to date, but we will do better tomorrow and strict cost management. Fixed and variable cost. We remain very focused on it, and that keeps us agile. We've made improvements and we will make more improvements on that. And then this positive impact of operational leverage, in combination with the net pricing that you see, we're going to spend some money on the strategy enablers. And why do we do that? Because this can accelerate and underpin the realization of our strategy. We will be targeting spend in innovations to bring them quicker to the market and then the strategy enablers people, technology and execution excellence. On the people side, we will be investing more in people in our academy and in the onboarding process. In technology, as I mentioned, bringing innovations to market quick. And on the execution excellence, what I mean with that is commercial excellence, operational excellence and financial excellence. And lastly, of course, as we have been doing already for many years, we will continue to optimize our business portfolio as we are showing an increasing trend in EBIT margins. Working capital is an important component of free cash flow, and we're very focused on that. We need to keep it under control, which in a growing market and with ongoing bigger contracts is not always easy, but it clearly has our attention. And there is scope to improve. Having said that, our working capital will always be subject to seasonality. Q2, Q3 being the highest, Q1 and Q4 being the lowest. And then we will continue to focus on our cash conversion at the lowest level, at project level, where we'll be targeting matching cash flows. And for example, we will do that by appropriate milestone payments from our customers or even prepayments. Then the second midterm target, which is free cash flow generation. I already spoke about the EBIT, EBITDA, the working capital and on tax. At the end of last year, we announced in the annual report. We have EUR 59 million of deferred tax assets and EUR 289 million of unrecognized deferred tax assets. And in the next few years, given current trading, we expect to consume part of these. And then lastly, of course, there's CapEx as a component of the free cash flow. And we will balance -- have a balanced approach there, which I will be talking about later. Let's look at the third midterm target, which is ROCE, Return On Capital Employed. And where we can make a difference between land and marine. And on this slide, we show adjusted EBIT, which is a proxy rather than the group ROCE. And it shows the low asset intensity in land, which in combination with the land EBIT actually makes it quite attractive ROCE. And then looking at the left-hand side of the slide, it's important to realize the asset intensity of marine is higher, which we all know, but that also commands a higher EBIT margin, and that's what we're working on. And that's what we have been demonstrating already. Overall, we're going to have a target of more than 15% group ROCE. And both land and marine will contribute to this target. Then let's look at the components of the ROCE. Again, we have the EBIT in combination with the asset intensity. And then we have the mix, the business improvement mix, targeting more than 15% in '27. Then let's move to the asset strategy. Fugro generates around 40% of its revenue with low asset intensity business, asset-light business. And around 60% of the revenue comes from more asset-intensive business. We deploy equipment, both in the land and marine business, and this is required actually to acquire the Geo-data. And we have a gradual shift strategy towards asset lighter and low-carbon solutions. Now first, let's have a look at the land, at the low asset-intensive business. We will still be making changes to the portfolio and upstairs -- for the people who have been upstairs, I think most of you have, you can see actually a demonstration of how we do that. You see a CPT truck outside and then you see SWANS inside. So we go from the trucks, the CPT trucks to a very asset-light 3D subsurface scanning, SWANS, technology, which is scalable. That's what we're focused on becoming asset lighter even in a low asset intensity environment. And the same for the marine side of the Marine services. For example, we're focusing more on remote operating on our ROCs, remote operating centers. Then let's look at the other part of the business, which have more assets. First of all, I want to make the point that we have a focused strategy on net-zero '24 -- '35, but for not all assets, it's possible to travel at the same pace. And first of all, I want to talk briefly about the geotechnical fleet that we have. Geotechnical service line is part of the marine site characterization business line of Fugro. And this geotechnical service line has been growing a lot, and this is mostly driven by the offshore wind developments. And this is the most asset-intensive business that we have. And we expect this to be that and remain that in the near term. And why is that? That is because we need to have heavy equipment on board of a vessel, and we cannot do that in an uncrewed manner, having drill towers on a vessel. As soon as we can, we will, but we're not quite there yet. And that is also the reason why we recently acquired 2 assets, the resolve and the resilience. Then the second level is the geophysical fleet that we have. There, we will moving gradually towards an uncrewed fleet. This will also take time, but we're working on that. We already have 5 uncrewed vessels in the water. And over time, this will increase as you can see. And then lastly, on the Marine Asset Integrity side of the business, we will also gradually shift towards uncrewed. We have there 4 vessels, including EROVs, Electronic Remote Operating Vehicles on board of the USVs. And we're currently trialing the fifth vessel in Europe at the moment, again, further expanding in the next few years towards uncrewed. We have been working on our net-zero 2035 road map in the last 4 years already. And we have a mix of solutions that are helping us towards the execution of the program. 80% of our Scope 1 and 2 emissions come from our fleet. And the speed at which we will travel will be driven by a combination of the following factors: technological maturity of the solution, commercial viability of the solution and the regulatory framework. And these need to work and aligned together. And they will determine the speed at which we travel. So firstly, for all of our existing fleets, we are focused on fuel efficiency to be smarter. When we look at CapEx, we asked what is the CO2 impact of the spend? Very focused on that. For our own vessels and depending on the remaining lifespan of the fleet of the vessel, we will be investing in hybrid conversions, especially for the vessels that have a dynamic positioning system, mostly the Geo-tech vessels. Now for existing and future vessels, we see methanol as being the future fuel that we want to use. But the technological maturity is not yet there. We are converting now one vessel. I think it's in the back to methanol. And then we have our uncrewed service vessels. That has a large increase -- a decrease in emission, up to 95% lower carbon emissions compared to traditional vessel. Taking people out of harm's way and actually enable us also to attract people onshore, which before our offshore. And we're actively engaging with third-party vessel owners to understand what they're doing about decarbonization. And what actions they take towards lower carbon solutions. Then let's move to our financial policy. We have 3 levels here of the capital allocation framework. We have the company level, the portfolio level and the project level. And at company level, we'll be investing in our future. We will be creating value and investing in our existing business. We will have a strong balance sheet, and we will be working for attractive returns to shareholders. At the portfolio level of capital allocation, we're working with differentiated hurdle rates for returns on investments. And we are balancing our portfolio between existing business and future business, supporting our long-term strategy and at the same time, ensuring that the cash flow pattern remains the same and balanced. And lastly, at the individual project level, we prioritize the most attractive projects, generating attractive investment returns. And I will explain this in more detail in the next slides. So let's double-click on capital allocation at company level. We'll make balanced and considered investments, as I just mentioned in the current and future business to achieve our strategic objectives. And we also want to maintain a strong balance sheet. We now have a leverage of 0.7x and we want to stay below 1.5x. And we want to generate attractive return for shareholders. And recently, we announced the dividend that we will resume being dividends. And then we're going to invest in sustainable growth at the portfolio level. And at the portfolio level, we are giving guidance of EUR 200 million to EUR 250 million of CapEx, to sustain the business, to grow the business and to increase our transformation capabilities. And of this guidance, around EUR 100 million to EUR 125 million is sustaining CapEx, and that includes maintenance CapEx. And EUR 100 million to EUR 150 million is discretionary CapEx. That means that we can make flexible investment decisions where we see the market develop, and we keep the flexibility that we can choose. And this includes expansion CapEx, transformation CapEx, carbon reduction CapEx. And all CapEx is subject to strict capital return guidelines. And in this EUR 200 million to EUR 250 million CapEx on the higher band, that includes actually the purchase of 3 Geo-tech vessels. So we have a number of classifications in the CapEx, and that means how are we driving the CapEx and the categories. For maintenance CapEx, we sustain our current cash flows, very important and sustain our asset base. On expansion CapEx that will have higher investment hurdles. Investments that ensure that we can grow our business, we grow to EUR 3 billion to EUR 3.5 billion revenue, we need assets to do that. And then the transformation CapEx that the cash flows are a little bit further out in time, but they should definitely be accretive. But sometimes this, for example, includes new technologies, and it will take time to mature those. And then lastly, we have a carbon reduction CapEx in the form of, for example, vessel conversions, as I just explained. And although there are financial benefits to those investments, for example, through lower fuel expenses, the payback is longer. And other lower -- ROCE lower than others. And then regarding M&A and organic growth, we will always keep our eyes open, but there needs to be a very clear strategic fit. There needs to be a technology that actually strengthens our product offering or innovation. And we can think of partnerships, as just highlighted by Mark, on certain developing segments, for example, that makes us bring products and solutions quickly to the market. And then we look at the lowest level of investments, and that's the project level. And therefore, each of the investments we make, we will have solid business cases. And here, you can see on this slide an example of that. And this is, for example, a vessel that we would buy. We have an initial investment, we model the future cash flows. We sensitize those cash flows. We look at the payback versus the asset life. And we have certain hurdle rates for each of the categories that we have, as I just explained. And once we've decided to spend the CapEx, we will make sure that we focus on execution. We will have the proper governance in place to managing this project. And we will make sure that the project is executed within time, scope and budget. Then do the back testing and look at the lessons learned so we get better every day. And then we move on 2 levels up again to the company level looking at the balance sheet. On the balance sheet, we now, as I mentioned, have a net leverage of 0.7x. What is also important is that we maintain ample liquidity to manage the business through the cycle, but also that we can grow. We have a balanced approach to lease financing. Around 50% of our gross debt is leases, and this reduces our refinancing risk. And then, in 2022, I would like to highlight that we entered into a sustainability-linked financing, which is very much in line where we want to be and what we want to be, which already have reduction of vessels of CO2 emissions. Women in leadership positions and the revenue growth in renewables and then attractive returns to shareholders. At the publication of our Q3 results, we already mentioned that we would resume dividend, EUR 0.40 per share, subject to shareholder approval. And we announced the dividend policy of 25% to 45% of the net result. And shareholders will have the choice between cash and shares, whereby we would like to highlight that we will offset dilution by repurchasing the number of shares issued as a stock dividend. And to summarize, our capital allocation policy is focused on creating value for all stakeholders by attractive returns on new investments, keeping our risk profile low by maintaining a strong balance sheet and providing attractive returns to our shareholders. And then I would like to close off with the key investment highlights. We are a global leader in strong end markets. And we have a unique value proposition at Fugro, playing a project critical role in all our clients' projects. We have a highly skilled workforce and market-agnostic assets. We are a highly diversified company from a project perspective, client perspective, geography perspective and market segment perspective. We are an innovation and technology leader. We have a clear plan to become asset-lighter and to decarbonize. And we have a strategy towards growth and shareholder value. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Barbara. So what the plan is, is that we have a short-term session on Q&A. So there are 20 minutes max, well, a little bit less, 17 for some first questions on this part. And then later on, there is more time for questions. So there's 45 minutes later on in the program. So let's get going. I see a hand up, Quirijn.

Quirijn from ING. So thanks for all the work you have done on this presentation. So the IR department, I must say, good work. My questions are two because to this session. I would like to limit my questions to two My first question is about the story about value-based pricing. And I saw that sentence in the press release, but I didn't hear that from you on the presentation. And I think one of the biggest driver for higher profitability is in the value-based pricing in my view. As you know, engineers are always inclined to ask too low prices compared to the clients. And my second question is about the breakdown. The previous Capital Markets Day, you gave a breakdown target for land and for marine. And I'm missing that somewhat today, especially with regard to the EBIT margins because it looks to me that 11% -- or let me say, 11% to 15% EBITDA margin for land is quite ambitious. And that means, of course, that for marine, you must realize much higher margins. That were my questions.

Thank you, Quirijn. So I will talk about the first question and then Barbara can take the next one. So first question I would have is, are you an engineer yourself, but -- asking the question like this. But I think it's spot on, Quirijn. This is an important task. We put execution excellence on the Board as one of the strategy drivers, strategy enablers. And part of that execution excellence are three topics: First and foremost, commercial excellence; secondly, operational excellence; and then financial excellence. And all these items are extremely important to actually get to that value-based pricing. So we have programs in place where we actually help our commercial teams to really, yes, get to the level of, okay, I understand how I can get the value for the products that we deliver and also for, yes, the value, the insights that we create based on the Geo-data. So we are doing that already over the last couple of years, and you have seen the result of that because we are already doing that and the result is also showing that, and we will continue doing that because these three items, commercial excellence, operational excellence, financial excellence are top priority for our strategy moving forward. Barbara?

Yes, I can answer the margin question, Quirijn. When the previous Capital Markets Day, there were still 2 divisions as a standalone in marine. What we have seen in terms of trends over time is that actually -- and Céline will be very clearly making that point, is that we have a lot of land solutions that we are applying now to the sea. So the closer resilience component, for example, that is where land meets marine. And so the distinction between those two is becoming more vague. I also -- I did make the point of the ROCE on the land and the marine that both EBITDA margins -- EBIT margins need to travel up but more so in marine indeed because it's more asset-intensive business. So the mix will already increase the EBIT margins upwards. And then the third pillar I would like to mention is the increase in revenue where we have an increase in recurring revenue, where we have higher margin than in the next 4 years, we expect that to play a larger part of the portfolio. So it's not so much that clear distinction in land and marine, but it's a mix of effects. And indeed, land will have to increase also EBIT margins.

Luuk from Banque Degroof Petercam. I have a question about your leverage, which is already below your target. You also have a sort of minimum leverage where you think that the balance sheet is becoming underleveraged and in combination with at the same time, you lowered the payout of the -- for the dividend, which -- can you explain -- versus this previous Capital Markets Day. Can you explain why you do that at a point where your balance sheet is healthier in a very long time? And my final question is on the fleet. You mentioned that you want to buy a number of new vessels, but there are also some older vessels in the fleet. Do you think that you can make this future proved by investing in them? Or on top of the new vessels, do you intend to replace some of the current vessels with newer ones?

Thank you, very clear, Luuk. Maybe first, leverage with Barbara?

Yes. It's true that we continue to delever at the moment. And having said that, it's a place where Fugro has not been for a long time. You could say when are you going to use your balance sheet again, we believe that under -- as we say, we want to stay below 1.5x leverage. We think that is prudent and sound for project business. Once we're moving more towards the recurring business model, so to speak, that which -- would be a change. The lower payout that you referred to would be from the current policy of 35% -- 55% moving now to 25%, 45%. I presume your question is on that. Yes, so we have a lot of plans. And we have a lot of where we believe attractive investment opportunities in our own business where we can realize better returns than giving the funds back to shareholders. So we try to strike here an equilibrium of making returns for shareholders by way of dividend, but also reinvesting the cash flows that we generate in the business to generate those higher returns. So it's really a combination of both. In terms of releveraging the balance sheet, I think, for now, we are okay where we are, and we have no further plans to relever, and we will first see how the business develops further working on our future.

And I think just to pick up on your last question, maybe to add a little bit to complement what Barbara said, I think it's also important to realize that you should have a lower leverage in the season where we're doing well in the business where it's going well and have also the time to obviously have that room in situations that maybe you get some fluctuation in the market and have some downturn. On the payout ratio, I think it's also good to mention that there is a difference with the past where our [indiscernible] are also influenced by our tax benefit. That's not necessarily related to the income of our business, so it has an effect on the payout ratio or the absolute amount if you calculate that on the relatively high [ not faster ] that we generate. Then on your last question, we have at the moment included in the top range of the CapEx, 1 to 3 vessels. That doesn't mean that we actually need to buy them per se. We are still evaluating. There are different options to finance them potentially also in a different way or have a longer-term lease. So -- but we have created that optionality. And also, by the way, the CapEx includes a number of used fleets, 5 used fleets that we want to build in the years to come. So it's important to take note of that. Yes, we have some older assets. Luckily, our asset base is relatively young on average compared to maybe some of the other players in the world. And we have to replace 1 or 2 indeed, and this is also taken obviously on board in our planning. Probably, yes, one of the vessels will have to be a replacement for a current vessel that we have in our fleet. So to answer your question, yes. So, yes, Andre and then I see another hand here.

Andre Mulder, Kepler. First question on renewables. The EUR 1 billion itself looks me quite low looking at the growth that we have seen over the last few years. Growth in the first half, 60%, and also taking into account the relatively low growth in the other parts, infrastructure, oil and gas and water. Wouldn't you be able to set that higher than just EUR 1 billion?

Yes. I think it's a great question, Andre. And I would say we have committed to more than EUR 1 billion. So it can be more indeed. At the moment, we're roughly around EUR 600 million today. If we look at the EUR 1 billion and if the growth rates that are also showed on the market, we normally follow the markets, then you could expect that renewables is higher. If you look at the EUR 3 billion to EUR 3.5 billion guidance that we gave on the revenue, if you go to the lower band and then consider EUR 1 billion being renewables, that means that 1/3 of your business is on the renewable side. And that is actually the nice mix that we want to have. We want to have an ideal mix in our portfolio of markets that we serve because that makes us resilient to move our assets around and be flexible when there are some ups and downs in particular markets. So in that sense, I can confirm, yes, if the market continues to develop, as we have seen here, then it could be above the EUR 1 billion indeed.

Then a question on CapEx. Looking at your sales development, your CapEx seems to follow sort of downward slope there. So can you explain there? Can you add a bit more detail apart from the statement that you were buying 3 geotech vessels? What are the plans do you have in mind? What are the plans do you have for investing in young crude vessels, for example?

Barbara?

The downward slope I -- you referred to the step down towards '27? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Yes, so we have this -- we intentionally work within the bandwidth of EUR 200 million to EUR 250 million. And that is indeed the geo-tech vessels. As Mark said, it's not set. We buy them, but there is to achieve certain revenue growth, you need an asset base. And especially, for example, in 2 regions, Americas and APAC, you need also a critical mass to realize your operating leverage also in those regions. So there is definitely that element that plays a role in realizing the top line that we've set on the board that we need to spend money to get there. At the same time, we also want to invest in the future in the uncrewed service vessels in the USVs. And we will continue to do that. But we have to also be cautious about that because the cash flows of the USVs, we believe it's the future, but it's not the cash flows today. So we will need to strike a balance in how fast we go, but also the technological maturity of those solutions, as I tried to explain. So that is in time. There may be some shifts. We're also looking on new adjusted deep-sea solutions, which will be very important for floating wind going forward. You then can think about AUVs, and we will really need to follow also where the market is. And then there's a time lag in terms of when you're building assets, when you're constructing assets and when you really have them in the water generating cash flow. So it's a mix of spend that we will carefully decide on based on the market developments that we see and the speed of certain markets but that's there. The opportunity is clear for us.

Thank you, Andre. Thijs?

Thijs Berkelder, ABN AMRO A couple of questions on your midterm return targets or EBIT margin target. Your slide which the bridge showing return on capital seems to suggest you're targeting 20% ROCE by 2027. That indeed is more than 15% right now. And can you maybe explain what kind of capital employed you are targeting by 2027? Maybe kind of similar question on the EBIT margin bridge being now already at 10% in the target range for 2027. Why should you get stuck at 11% by 2027? What is needed to only make a move from 10% to 11%, also given that you explained biggest growth is expected in offshore segments and not so much on land?

Yes. Thanks, Thijs. I will take the last question first, and then Barbara will talk about the ROCE slide there. I think what we have to realize, Thijs, first and foremost, okay, 9.9% LTM. Clever question. But obviously, we have our fourth quarter coming up, and we always know that we're down on the fourth quarter. So overall, that will have an effect on the overall margin for the total year. Having said that, you're obviously right that 11% could be seen as the low side in 4 years from now. We're changing the type of services that we offer. We're changing the company over time. So that is an investment required there, and it takes time and effort to get there. Having said that, we're also investing in maturing our organization. So the backbone of the organization requires some investment there as well. And then last but not least, we need to also create the room for normal fluctuations that you might see in the upcoming years. I have, seen over the last couple of years, obviously, big changes. We have big groups anticipating what's happening in the world, but nobody predicted COVID, nobody predicted the war, nobody predicted the long and lasting energy crisis. So we need to create that, that wiggle room, so to say, and say, okay, well, 11% will be a very healthy margin. It's not something that we will be satisfied with if we end up in 2027. We obviously aim for the upper boundary as we always do. But this is, yes, our way to create a little bit of flexibility in a very volatile world, so to say.

Yes. On your question on ROCE, I think you are referring to the slide with the land and marine, which is ROCE proxy, which is the adjusted EBIT, right? And it's not the group ROCE definition of NOPAT, which includes the tax and joint venture results in their -- so in terms of the ROCE bridge, you could say we're now at 15% ROCE, which we've reported. That's right. But what we're really going to strive towards is the sustainable more than 50% ROCE across the board in '27. And as I explained, the asset intensity level of the business will gradually go down over time, and that will take time. And we will need to be investing in our existing business as well, which will not be necessarily accretive. So it's a mix. It's really a mix. If you think about the differentiated hurdle rates that we make investments on, some of them will need to be north of 20%, indeed, as you say, to really lift that ROCE. And we will be very disciplined in making sure that we allocate the right capital to the right investments to keep that balance cash flow mix.

And the target is also not 15%, but more than 15%. Okay. So one more hand there, and maybe we can quickly do that, and then we need to park the other questions to -- after the break because we have a short break. So we'll keep this relatively short.

You mentioned your back [ hanning ] testing. Mentioned you're converting 1 vessel to methanol already, although the maturity is not very -- of the technology is not there yet. Can you elaborate because is that matured enough for an entire fleet to convert? Or is it a trial? Is it worth the investment?

Yes, absolutely true. So thank you for the question. So what we're doing right now, we're going through with a consortium of companies and subsidy program from the government as well to actually try to test what is working and how it actually responds. So we had engines that run on the traditional fuel compare them with methanol fuel next to each other. And we need to run for probably 2 years to actually see how these engines behave and what is required to actually run properly on that. That's pushing the boundary. I have spoken to many players in the market that have a lot more vessels, and they say, well, it's too far away from having solutions yet. For our size vessel methanol is a good idea. We have investigated that. A company like is also investing in methanol solutions, but they have engines that are probably 10x as big as the engines that we run on our vessels. So we need to actually testings try it out, and that's a subsidy program that's in a research program. And once it is proven, then probably the investments will come 5 or 7 years from now, we will start to invest more in turning around in more vessels into methanol. Okay. With that, I suggest that we go for the break. The break is now 17:50 minutes, roughly 20 minutes, and then we'll come back in the room here for the presentation from Erik-Jan Bijvank, Céline Gerson and Wim Herijgers. Thank you very much.

Thank you. [Break]

Good afternoon, and welcome back to Part 2 of the Capital Markets Day presentations. In the second part, we'll bring some of our stories to life with real life examples. We like projects and we'll illustrate the benefits of what we're doing already to and what we're planning to do to our strategic plan in 3 parts, and I'm happy to present to you the first part, which is all about growing and transforming our existing business. My name is Erik-Jan Bijvank. I'm responsible for the region Europe and Africa. And as part of Fugro, I'm proud to present this lever. What are -- what we're talking about when we're speaking about growing and transforming our current business. Well, first of all, it confirms our confidence in the road that we've already undertaken. We have proven over the last quarters and years that we are experts in delivering quality services to our clients. And we're ready to grow these services further. First of all, with the market. As Mark and Barbara have already illustrated, we can do that by investing in assets and assets in differentiation sides. Of course, we're talking about equipment, we're talking about fleet, and we're talking about people. The people that we employ gain experience by working with Fugro. The experience that they need will really make them worth a lot more for us and for our clients, but we need to invest in our people and invest in attracting more people. Geoexperts but also project management. The second part of expanding is expanding our service portfolio. From a traditional focus on creating assets, we're also looking at expanding into monitoring, into longer-term asset improvements and we're seeing different questions coming from the market. Biodiversity is not just a nice to have. It's an imperative for a number of our clients to actually have a license to operate. They need to have biodiversity plants. And for that, they need data. And for that data, they call us. And the good thing is we were already there, we know these clients, we know these assets and we know the world around their assets better than most. A third part of the expansion has to do with focusing on specific geographical areas for specific services. And with this, we're talking, for example, about our power business and our remote sensing business. For those businesses to be successful, you need to have access to large areas of territory, large networks under control of limited numbers of clients. So we have a number of territories in the world that is the case, and that's where we're focusing. And as we grow, we also transform our capabilities. We spoke about uncrewed vessels, and the example is here. But it's not just about uncrewed vessels. It's also about decrewing our existing vessels, our traditional vessels. We have already successfully brought quite a few people onshore who used to work on a vessel. And that is a specific target in our strategy, and that's also part of becoming asset lighter. What also helps us speeding up our data delivery. In some of our areas we're near real time in our analysis because the data comes onshore almost as quickly as we acquire it. Also part of the transformation is using new technical technologies to transform the land business. From previously focusing on CPT and drilling, the CPT triggers outside, we're now also developing noninvasive techniques, geophysical techniques, which combine with AI and machine learning, really transform the way we do this, and I have a project example of that later. Last but not least, growing our existing business has everything to do with optimizing our performance. And when we speak about optimizing our performance, you've heard a number of examples already. But this has to do with early client engagement getting better terms and conditions. Value-based pricing, as mentioned before, getting better rates by using the availability that we have in the market where others, they not. By creating different questions from our clients, I was speaking to one of you before the event. When I joined Fugro 4 years ago, the question used to be, I would like to have that for so many weeks to do exactly that [ transform ] over there, and I want that report for you. That's a nice question. But the question that we now increasingly get is, look, we're developing a new territory over a number of years, can you help us do this? That's an elevated position in the market, and that gives you much better access to better conditions and better relationships with your clients. And we see that in the contracts that we signed. What we're also seeing is that the technical uptime of our equipment has improved. Good maintenance, good inspection and good use. And that helps us too. We use this leakage as we call it, it improves our returns. To increase the top line, protect the bottom line and deliver well within it. Helped enormously by creating more standardization of our -- of the way we do our work. Now to illustrate some of the things that I've just been telling you, I have 2 project examples that I would like to talk about. The first one is Energinet. Energinet is an example where we build a long-term client relationship. This relationship started 3, 4 years ago and is lasting for a few more years to come. This is a long-term engagement. It sits squarely in our strategic sweet spot to create a net zero sustainable energy infrastructure. It's critical. It covers a large scope, from early inception and in the future into operations. And what we like is we can trial and deploy innovation. So this project sits well for us, and we sit well for this project because we continue to believe in a strong offshore wind market. Mark has spoken about this. Barbara has spoken about this. Yes, we see rebalancing in the market. Yes, we read the same newspapers, but we also see a strong backlog. We also see continued commitment by government and by developers in this market around the world, with Europe leading, but with the Americas and APAC following. And that's fixed bottom offshore wind mostly. Industry is developing technology and strategy for floating wind. Floating wind is coming. It's inevitable as water depths increase and the requirement for energy continues to increase as well. It's a longer burn, and that's actually good for us because that means that the waves that we are currently on is going to run longer. That's helpful. And we differentiate in this with, I would call, an unrivaled service portfolio. We have competition, everybody does. But the breadth and the depths of expertise that we can offer right from consulting through the implementation and then operations is something that nobody else can really repeat. So why Energinet such a good example for us? Well, it is an evidence of what happens when there's sustained commitment to developing an infrastructure such as this. Denmark has been on the forefront of that development. And Energinet, as a Danish transmission system operator, is responsible to developing 16 gigawatts on the North Sea side and the Baltic side. There's renewable energy there already, and there's more to come. And a hallmark of this is the Energy Islands. Now this is an artist impression because the development is still ongoing. But an Energy island basically takes processing, storage and interconnection from onshore to offshore. And that's a game changer because it takes some of the restrictions from the transmission systems offshore -- sorry, onshore away, and it connects countries. Because this Energy islands can be going to be connected to Belgium, the U.K., Denmark and other countries. That is truly a game changer. And it's a connection of an island, offshore wind farms and cables. And that's where we play in all those areas. From metocean buoys you see on the model here, and there's a technology showcase outside. 11 of which environmental analysis, both wildlife and the wider weather impact, site investigation and cable survey, a very significant scope and a scope that you can really only execute with a large asset base. 12 vessels in Total so far have been deployed on this one program, including a USB, delivering 677 CPTs at almost 180 boreholes. Those are significant numbers. And like Barbara was saying before, offshore wind requires a lot more of these investigations that oil and gas ever will because it's a lot more locations than what you're building. You're building a lot more turbines than you ever would do offshore platforms in oil and gas. And in floating wind, that's going to increase again. So the market is still there to come. And with 35,000 kilometers of survey lines and 2,500 kilometers of work done now by the USV, also geophysical work. So that's a new functionality on the USV. We're really proving the technology in practice. The USVs have been on the water since 2020 in this guide. But they're now really sowing in multiple territories, their commercial value and the technical value to clients. We're getting a lot more practice and a lot more experience and we're learning all the time, and we're now also developing and deploying this successfully. And last but not least, on this program, Fugro is a trusted and successful partner. We're helping Energinet where it matters in increasing the speed of their development, in delivering their sustainability targets, delivering high satisfaction. And for Fugro, well, there's more work to come because we'll be working on -- again, to at least 2026. That's a sustainable business for us in multiple meanings of that word. Second example I would like to give you is Tes. Developing a green energy hub in lower in Germany, on the Northern Coast of Germany, where we have a different proposition in a number of ways. It's an onshore project with nearshore components is development of an LNG hub as part of the Green hub development for Tes. We sped up delivery with a lower footprint, and we trialed and proved our new protect investigation. Multiple part of Fugal coming together, combining nearshore and onshore in a market that we also believe in infrastructure. It's growing. It's more conservative. It's more fragmented, but it is growing, and the underlying megatrends are here and they're here to stay. And even here, we see fluctuations in various territories, some really close to home, some a little bit further away. But we believe in the underlying trends that will power this demand going forward. As I mentioned before, we focus on countries for some of our services with significant network to serve. And again, we bring a wide portfolio of services. Here, the market is, like I said, more dominated by small local players, but Fugro brings experience and size to the table. We can deliver larger projects with experienced people, person and equipment. And coming back to the energy hub, this is an interesting case because it is an interesting place. It's an interesting location because it's in an ecologically sensitive area with migratory birds. And we had to deliver our services in a short period of time. Now traditionally, you would bring CPT trucks and drilling operations into this area to do geo technical work. What we discussed with the client as part of this delivery wanted to prove our new capability in site investigation through site screening. You have seen outside of -- you able to see outside the site screening nodes that we're using as part of our SWANS technology. SWANS is a geophysical noninvasive technology, which basically consists of placing a grid of these nodes on the service area, collecting data, geophysical data and by inserting that into our AI tool. It combines that data with geotechnical data to create a 3D model very, very rapidly. That is lower invasive. It is quicker, and it has very comparable data to the traditional method, which in some cases is a decades old practice, which was ready to be innovated on. That's helping our clients here because in that narrow season of availability, like I mentioned, ecologically insensitive, we were able to deliver that data for the client, informing their next steps. And we do that currently quite so manually by placing these nodes on the ground, and we collect them, put them in what we call but it's a data acquisition box for data gathering. We deliver high-quality data with our transformed capabilities. And this is a game changer because this really speeds up a process that used to take a long time -- longer time, it is a lot less invasive and asset lighter as well. And by using artificial intelligence and machine learning, we interpolate and create a 3D draw model that is state-of-the-art to the client. We meet deadlines. We promote high-quality data with non-invasion technology, and this is leading to more requests also in the market. So this is the way forward for us -- one of the ways forward for us in land. So to conclude and to confirm, we are growing and transforming our current business. We have room to grow. We have strong markets we are serving. We have a strong position in those markets. And we're constantly updating the way we work, and we're constantly working to develop client relationships that pay off for both. With that, I will hand over to my colleague, Céline Gerson, who will speak to us about the next stage, which is expanding into developing segments. Thank you.

Thank you, Erik-Jan. Good afternoon, good morning for those joining us from the Americas. So let me take you on the journey into our developing market segments. Climate change is deeply impacting us. We see extreme weather patterns, we see fires, we see extreme heat, we see flooding. As a matter of fact, here in Amsterdam, we're sitting 2 meters below sea level. And what I learned this weekend, which was actually eye-opening, is the fact that the Dutch government has announced that despite the incredible engineering to protect against flooding in the water, close to 30% of Amsterdam is going to be at some point severely impacted by flooding between now and 2030. So those are significant threats to each and every single one of us. Those threats, however, are providing unique opportunities to Fugro. And those opportunities are in 3 market segments. Costal resilience, ocean science and carbon capture and utilization storage. Coastal resilience, the coast needs to be restored, the coast needs to be protected. Ocean science, do we deeply understand the impact of climate change? How do we sustainably develop the blue economy carbon capture? We have in excess of CO2 in the atmosphere. How do we today approach the severe issue that we have? All of those market segments require geo-data. This is where it all starts. And what's significantly exciting to me personally is the fact that those markets are providing us an opportunity to move from projects to programs, and I'll show you a couple of examples in a minute. It's requires similar to what Mark had highlighted, it requires a deep understanding of the baseline, the mapping because there are so many risks, we will need to be able to model to see where and how we're going to restore, for example, those coast lines. And we're going to continuously monitor because it is a fast changing environment. I will show you that we have the majority of the services over 85% of the tools in our tool belt to address the geo-data needs. As those markets are fast changing, we will also need some additional tools. We will either partner, we will innovate or we will selectively acquire. So let's deep dive into the first market segment, coastal resilience. It's been announced and recognized that between now and the year of 2100, if we don't specifically address sea level rise, that is going to have a $14.2 trillion impact as a result of losses. The cost is significant. And this is really what is triggering significant funding from various governments around the world. So I give you here a few examples, of course, one, which is in my region, the Biden administration Inflation Reduction Act that has earmarked $30 billion. This is a very large addressable market to Fugro. The Dutch government announced last week that it was earmarking $32.9 billion to protect the coast line, significant amount of money, which again provides significant opportunities for Fugro. We won't play everywhere. Those are very large market segments. We are going to focus on the build and natural environment. Why? Because this is where we play. This is what we know. We're looking at flood risk management, flood protection, as I just highlighted, the environmental impact assessment and preservation of coastal ecosystems. We're uniquely positioned. There is no other company in the geo-data space that has insight and capabilities on both the marine side and the land sites. The coastline, of course, is at the middle. How do you properly protect and address the risk if you don't understand the current or the geology on the land side. We already have 80% or more of the services to address the geo-data needs. Those markets require continuous data throughout the life cycle. We will further enhance our modeling and monitoring competencies, one of which is important is the satellite imagery and bathymetry because it provides you time-based continuous data that is needed as well. So let me give you an example one which is in my backyard. The state of Florida recognized that it's coast, where 75% of the population live, is significant at risk. It earmarked $100 million to actually map the coastline. We are the partner, the company that has the depth of expertise and the scale in order to undertake this type of program. What is unique about this program is our unique technology, our RAMMS system. This allows us to differentiate for two reasons: our competitors or other companies in this space would utilize very large aircraft with sensors operated by a lot of people. What our RAMMS system is allowing us to do is to scale down to go into smaller aircraft, which allows us to reduce our carbon footprint. It is also AI-enabled and why do I care about this? It's because it allows us to process the data faster. We have high-resolution data which, as a result, is allowing us to provide the key insight that the state of Florida needs 2 years before their estimated delivery time when they had to launch some vessels. This is our competitive advantage. This is how we play. We're looking at negotiating further scope looking at the modeling, supporting them with modeling, looking at monitoring. I talked to you about partnership. We launched our RAMMS 2.0 last week at the hydrography conference. And again, this is an area where we're going to partner. You can see that we're even going to scale further than those small aircraft. We're going to use drones. Reduction of our carbon footprint, and this is very exciting. So now let's dive into Ocean Health. As Mark stated, the oceans are lungs, but they are at significant risk. This market segment is underpinned by international agreements, the Paris agreement or the Montreal agreement focusing on biodiversity. And those are triggering and really elevating the risk associated with the ocean. You have significant funding that is earmarked by governments around the world. Italy, Norway, here in Europe, over $800 million to restore, protect the ocean and the marine habitat. The reality is, is that we know more about the moon than the ocean. Only 25% of the oceans have been mapped. Again, we're not going to play everywhere. We're going to be very focused targeting what we're good at, and that's marine spatial planning. And that's environmental impact assessment. We're already playing today in this space supporting companies like Atlantic Shores, which is a JV with Shell in the offshore wind environment. We're doing the bandwidth mapping on the East Coast of the United States. We're helping them make the right assessment, the right decisions in order to ensure that the infrastructure they're building is going to create the least amount of environmental impact. We know this space. We've been playing in it for decades. We've worked with the Hydrography Organization. In the U.K., in the U.S., in Norway, we have mapped ocean seafloors for decades. We've also, as I'm sure you're all aware, been a key partner in the United Nations Seabed 2030. We were the first private company to actually undertake the donation of seabed data. We're known in this space. We're respected in this space. There is a very high barrier to entry. It requires depth of technical expertise, depth of the knowledge when it comes to the environmental assessment, for example, but it also requires assets. Not everybody has the depth and breadth of assets that we have in our portfolio. And this is the reason why we have a right to play. We will, of course, enhance some of our capabilities and expertise, one of which is environmental DNA. This is an area that is required to have a very precise understanding of the environment, fish and algae and so on. This is important. So another example that I wanted to highlight for you, this is the Mariano project. This project showcases that this is an area we've been playing in for a long time. We have partnered with the Norwegian government since 2006. We have mapped more data than the size of the U.K.. As you can see, 7 Fugro vessels depth, scale and we are the partner of choice. The data we have collected is going to be absolutely critical for them to make the right decisions, not only for safe navigation, but also and equally important, understanding how they develop some of their industries like aquaculture, understanding, how they further expand their footprint from a renewable standpoint. This is the role we play. And that's, I think, a very neat map that shows you that the data we've acquired allows them with great granularity to identify how and where they need to expand their infrastructure and other programs. And the last one, carbon capture. The reality is that while we have focused a lot on renewables to date. And I think we're all excited about it. The renewable capacity can only meet 35% of the global power generation by 2035. We cannot scale fast enough. There are also industries that are high metres such as cementing or steel, for which we haven't found an alternative solution yet. Carbon capture has been recognized as by the intergovernmental panel on climate change as one solution that can quickly offset the carbon emission at the emission point. It's estimated around 90% to 95%. It is a market that is fast growing, as you have seen on some of the slides that is incentivized by tax regime and also highly funded. It's both government, but also companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, all are focusing in this space. And this is a really significant opportunity for Fugro. We play a critical role in derisking the project sites. This is what we know. We look at site conditions assessments. We look at geo-risk monitoring. And as you can see on this slide here, on the right side, it requires a deep knowledge of water It requires a deep understanding of the seafloor to put the infrastructure on the seafloor. It requires a high resolution and deep understanding of the subsurface. This is what we know, and it requires an understanding of the environmental impact, the monitoring. It's highly regulated as well. We have the scale, we have the tools and the tool belt, we know the clients. We are working with them today. The area we're going to focus on because it is a large market as well. What we know is the transportation, the storage and management. Some of you may ask, well Céline, are we reentering the 3D seismic space? No, this is an area we're going to partner with, and this is going to be very targeted. So I'm going to explain very briefly what you're looking at here. This is a project in the Southern part of the United States, a project that started with a client that thought that in order to explore their reservoir and store the CO2, that is simply needed in jack-up rig and started drilling the injection well. Well, they found out pretty quickly that it was not as easy as they thought. And they were actually having significant issues obtaining their permitting. We came in, we were called upon, and we quickly identified and provided tailored services that included pretty much what we are known for, the proper navigation routes, the seafloor mapping, the data set you can see on this picture are all hazard trees and boulders on the seafloor that basically prevented them from identifying where and how they would be locating, they would be positioning the jack-up rig. We use our Starfix system in order to properly position the jack-up rig. We provided them with an environmental impact assessment. We derisk their project and allow them to get their permits. There are 15 more sites at this specific site. So in short, climate change is deeply impacting us. Those global threats are providing unique opportunities for Fugro in 3 market segments: carbon capture, ocean health and coastal resilience. Those markets require significant geo-data. This is where it all starts. Those markets are well funded. We know those markets. We already play in it. We have the majority of the services, the majority of the technologies. Those markets are fast changing, and we will need to identify the additional technologies and services that we will be required. We will either partner. We will further innovate. And we will, of course, look into select potential acquisition. Thank you.

Thank you, Céline. So my name is Wim Herijgers, and I will talk to you about our third strategic priority. And that's all around building the recurring revenue from Geo-data as a Service. You know Fugro as the leading Geo-data specialist, we employ many, many Geo-Data experts, but we always complemented with unique technology. And what's so nice about the unique technology that we've developed over the past years is that we can also wrap that in a new business model, a recurring revenue business model, a business model that we call Geo Data as a Service. We've done this before, and I will show you 2 examples today. Our satellite positioning business line and our SeaWatch Lidar business line, we are already adopting those recurring revenue business models, but I'll also give you 2 examples of new technologies and new businesses that we can build in that field. So let's start with satellite positioning. This is our ultra precise positioning service. And this is essential for safe operations and constructions in the -- in your environment. So all the builders, all the construction companies, they need to know exactly where they are. They need to know exactly where that plays their objects. But also companies like Fugro, of course, need to know when they're collecting their data exactly where they are. And that's where that also precise positioning information comes in. Reliability is of the utmost importance. Our reliability over the past 5 years of this service has been 99.998%. Because if the service is down, our clients cannot operate. If the service is down, Fugro cannot operate. So how does this service work? We transmit via the satellite, this ultraprecise positioning information, in this case, to a dredging barge. But it's not only those larger assets, it's also the uncrewed service vessels that Erik-Jan has been talking about needs this precise positioning. It's not only about reliability, but these services also need to be very secure because it's possible for a vessel in the vicinity of another vessel to mimic the information that's being transmitted by Fugro. And that's why we have an extra -- an additional security layer around it that gives the operator of the asset, the security that the information that they receive is correct. Because if that wouldn't be the case, it's possible to navigate the vessel into an offshore structure or in this case into the side -- over the riverbed. So this unique Fugro technology, reliable and secure has led that we are the market leader in this segment and we're already the market leader in this segment for years. And also attractive for Fugro, it is a subscription service. It is recurring revenue. We don't manufacture the hardware. The hardware is manufactured by trusted partners like Kongsberg and [indiscernible]. We provided recurring revenue service on top of it. And what's also nice about this business is that there are new growth opportunities. We also can provide positioning services to satellites. And all of you know that there are more and more satellites being launched every moment. The second example I want to share with you is our SeaWatch Lidar buoys. So this year on the back, you see an example of the Lidar buoy at the technology booth, you saw the smaller version of it. With these Lidar buoys, we can very accurately measure the wind profile up to 250 meters. And synchronized, we also measure the waves and the current and all weather that goes along with it. And what makes our buoys so unique and that's also what you see on the next movie is that it's relatively small. And it's extremely reliable again. So this is a movie where we showed the deployment for EnergyNet, our Danish customer, that Erik-Jan spoke about. And these buoys are actually data collection platforms because next to the wind, wave and weather information, we can add biodiversity sensors on it, we can measure the water quality. So that makes it also in the future, a very attractive business proposition for us. So also here, it always starts with the unique technology. It's a versatile platform that we offer as a Geo-data as a service business model. And we see opportunities, not only to have these platforms operational for the development of the business case, the offshore wind farm operators, but also later on. So we can provide continuous services from these platforms. We follow internally a very rigorous process to build up these businesses. I gave you the 2 examples that are already mature businesses. We have scaled them and still there are more opportunities for growth there. But we're also looking at new opportunities in this space and there are 2 examples that I will share with you. The first one is Totalite, so this is our precise deformation monitoring solution. And the second one is VirGeo our Geo-data platform. So let's start with Totalite. Totalite very accurately measure deformations and change in structures. And this is very relevant for bridges, tunnels and what you see here, key sites like the ones in Amsterdam. Looking at the market, all of you know the collapse of the Morandi bridge in 2018. But this is not the only bridge that collapsed because this is a picture of the Fern Hollow bridge that collapsed in January 2022. And the challenge with all this infrastructure and Mark already spoke about is that they are aging. So in United States, the average age of the bridge is 43 years old. And why is it relevant because the design life of these bridges on average is 50 years. That basically means that 7.5% of these bridges have known structural defect. And that's 46,000 bridges in the United States alone. And if you take that as the addressable market for Fugro, that would only in the United States, mean a EUR 1 billion to EUR 2 billion an addressable market for our monitoring solutions. If you look at these bridges, you already know upfront or no upfront, but you can measure most of the time upfront already displacement and this displacement take place days or weeks before the actual collapse happens. And that's why we developed the Totalite solution. The traditional way to measure these deformation is with a laser system. So they are quite bulky. They require experts to do the measurements. But the Totalite system is plug-and-play and can still very accurately measure the displacements. So it is an accuracy of 2 millimeters to 3 millimeters over a distance of 100 meter. This is close to rocket size because what you see in the middle is a ring of LEDs. So instead of lasers, we use LEDs. The LED transmits of light to the reflector, which you can see outside and what you receive back is almost at the noise level. So we need to do a very computational intensive calculations in the cloud to determine this precise positioning with the result is a plug and play, very easy-to-use solution for our clients. So again here, the basis is unique technology. It's patented technology and it's very well protected for us, and we believe that we can turn this into a very significant market opportunity for Fugro. It's the new business model, so it's hardware sales in combination with Geo-data as a service. The last example I want to share with you is our Virgeo Geo-data platform. So you know Fugro as the leading Geo-data company and our clients often struggle with the amount of Geo-data. They need a lot of Geo-data to do their calculations for the engineering design. They need a lot of Geo-data to build the business cases that underpin the assets that they're building. So if we zoom in on one of these applications and also wind farm. The average offshore wind farm that's being announced for the moment has an investment of EUR 5 billion, of which 20% to 25% is related to the foundation and the cables. And in order to do the proper engineering analysis, an engineer has to deal with 30 terabytes of data. And it's not only the vast amount of data, it is the vast amount of files. So on typical project, this will be in the hundreds of thousands of files with different data types. So a lot of companies and our clients are struggling with managing all that data. And that's why through Virgeo, we create this long source of truth. And on the picture or on the movie behind me, you see how that's -- how it works. So during the collection of the Geo-data, the client gets right away insight into the information that's collected. So here this is bottom profile data. So bottom profile data later on was then complemented with geotechnical data. So here are all the statistics and locations of the geotechnical data. That then transferred into a 3D model. All this data needs to be synchronized and aligned. And this is not only what they need because they also need to understand how the Seabed behaves. So what you see behind me is the Seabed mobility. Because in some places, there -- all the sand dunes are moving through the offshore wind farm. And it's combining all that data, the geotechnical, the geophysical and the Seabed mobility data that then needs to be translated into this business case. And we help our clients through the Virgeo platform to manage this one certain truth, but also to then use this data to connect it to analytics applications. For example, the foundation design application and also the cable route optimization application. What's nice for us is that we can sell this as part of a project, which will, of course, introduce the new recurring revenue business model. What for me important to emphasize that this platform is open. And what do we mean with open is that our clients will always own the data but it's also open for third-party analytics companies to add their applications to this platform. We truly believe in the power of this platform, and we can still make decent margins of it while protecting the interest of our clients. So I wanted to explain to you today is that there's a very nice future for Fugro in exploring these recurring revenue businesses outside or next to our project-based business. The fundamental of these business models are our unique technologies. And in the future, we might complement them with selective acquisitions or selective partnerships to make these opportunities even more significant. We've done this in the past, and we follow a very, very rigorous process as mature these businesses into the future. A lot of you have seen the innovation booths already out there. I would feel, if you have the time, urge to talk to the people that are manning these booths. We basically showcased 6 innovations, 2 on the mapping side, should surface scanning already explained few times, groundbreaking. It's a new way of doing site investigations. Our USVs or remote operation centers are also featured. Secondly, on the monitoring side, symmetry and Virgeo what I just spoke about so on the modeling side, on the monitoring side, the Lidar buoys and Totalite. The people on these booths are the developers and the business owners of these businesses. So they will give you a very good insight in what the possibilities are. Now I would like to invite my colleagues to the stage, so we can move to the Q&A.

A short summary of today, this afternoon. Super exciting also even for me. I know it all and then looking at it in a summary like presented by Erik-Jan, Céline and Wim, I think I promised you some more insights of what Fugro does. And I think we kept our promises once again because we deliver on our promises. A very short summary of what we have shown today. First and foremost, these key investment highlights, and I'm not going to read them out once again, but I do suggest that you have a careful look at them once again because they are important. They show very clearly that we have the right to play in the markets that we presented, in the services that we presented and I think we are well positioned to capture the growth in all these markets, and it gives us a good future ahead of us. So the key investment highlights indicates why Fugro is a good investment case and obviously that's quite important to make that point here today. Then the summary of our strategy campus. The purpose obviously resonates with everybody that works for us and hopefully, also for you to create that save and live world, very important. With our values that we try to live by and that we do, and we show the example also very important to everybody even today that joins Fugro every day of the year. The vision unlocking insights from Geo-data, playing a critical role there by mapping, modeling and monitoring the build and natural environment, very critical moving forward. 3 markets that we serve, energy, infra and water. And 3 strategic priorities and you have seen the details there from Erik-Jan, Céline and Wim. Growing, transforming our current business, expanding into new developing segments in existing markets and building the recurring revenue model, #3 and 3 strategy enablers. People, very important at the heart of Fugro and that will continue to be combined as Wim said with state-of-the-art technology. And then the execution excellence, very important consisting of 3 elements, as I said before, commercial, operational and financial excellence. That's what we will drive moving forward. And then last not least, very important, the targets that we committed to on the people side, the planet side and the profit side. I'm not going to repeat them, take them with you, it's part of the deck there and it's very important. And with that, I want to close this afternoon with a Q&A session. And in that sense, all of my colleagues are welcome to stage, so please come here and let's do that together.

Okay. So questions are possible. So you just raise your hand. If I know your name, I can give you the word. If not then, I'll point to you. So we start with Thijs. Thank you. Questions in principle, I will decide who can take the questions, but please go ahead.

First question for Céline. Can you explain what the impact of the IRA Act is on Fugro U.S. right now? Like you said Inflation Reduction Act, they have the inflation prices are especially going up. Does it also have an effect on volumes yet? Second question is for you and your on selective M&A. What kind of companies are you looking for special technologies, service companies or special regions where you're looking for?

Okay. So if I understood your question properly, I'm going to repeat it to make sure we were both anchored on the question. You are focusing on the IRA and the impact on inflation and prices, yes? Correct. And also, did you mention CCF as well? No. Okay. So there has been obviously significant investments from the U.S. government around the manufacturing support, around the tax regime as well to offset some of the inflationary prices that you see in the supply chain. That being said, obviously, it's longer term type program. We're seeing a little bit of, I guess, more of a regulation around the prices that is being highlighted by the various industries, both oil and gas, but also in the offshore wind space. So you are seeing a little bit of -- it was a huge peak. The IRA is now decreasing the impact via the influx of significant amount of money and pumping funding in various industries to offset those prices. So we're seeing a little bit -- better scale and better environment right now.

And on the selective M&A side, is that we are primarily interested in technology or very specific expertise. So Fugro already has a very broad portfolio in mapping services, but we feel that in some areas, we can very much benefit with additional expertise on the modeling side. And there are some unique technologies out there that we continuously scan that can complement our own technologies. So it's -- we're not looking for large-scale M&A, but very selective M&A that complements the capability that we have for the moment. And it's all about accelerating some of the value propositions that we have in mind.

Thank you, guys. Let me see. I go around. Yes.

Just a couple of questions. So the first one is on your assets utilization and deployment. You've valued very well that the assets you own are market agnostics. I presume there are also geographic agnostic as well. And I wonder if you could just elaborate a bit on the evolution of how you, as a company, choose where and when to deploy the assets and how this fits in with the overall improvement in returns you've had since 2018, but also going forward, especially as you seem to run the company by geography but you have teams of people in different countries around the world? And I presume at the same time, they might demand the same. Who's choosing where an asset goes and when?

Wonderful question and quite easy to give some insights in that. First and foremost, we have 4 reporting segments, indeed, 4 regions, 2 of the group directors are here, 2 are also here, but sitting on the other side there. So we have all the regions representatives. Having said that, we also have a structure in place in the organization where we have some global teams looking after particular businesses to make sure that they are optimized and also brought to the next level of innovation because the businesses that are actually executing on a day-to-day basis, very often don't have the time to spend enough time on the innovation for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. So we have global teams also on the coordination between across regional requirements. So the global team support, looking at the global fleet, for instance, on the Marine site characterization and try to look ahead and discuss this with regions and say, okay, what is the need for the various regions and how can we meet those requirements. So that's one thing. Secondly, I think it's very important that we create ownership. So most of the assets are permanently allocated to particular regions. So it's not like, okay, somebody in the headquarters decides, okay, now the vessel goes to another region because if we would do that, and obviously, Céline and the others would say, hang on, what's happening now, you are taking my asset away, so that doesn't work. So ownership is really important that if you feel responsible to get the utilization of this asset. If they see their market turning, they can raise their hand and say, hey, what can we do with this? And then the global team comes in again and said, okay, well, let's have a look. Maybe we should move this asset to another region. And we have done that. So one of the vessels, the Voyager is a great example where Asia Pacific, Umap responsible for Asia Pacific said, okay, in the upcoming 2 years, are a little bit lighter if we look at our requirements. And then Europe Africa said, on said, well, we can use that asset very well for the upcoming period. So we moved the asset around. So in that sense it's market agnostic. It's geographic agnostic as well. However, there's a little bit of ownership required to actually really make it working. So that's how we organize it, but we have also global teams to support the regional directors to really make sure that they have what they need for the upcoming years as well.

Great. And just the second question, just around obviously, you had very nice growth in the last 12 months. And I think if I'm right, you had added a net 10% in terms of people as well because you added 1,900 people with a 10% churn. So just over the next 5 years, it appears that the new areas you're targeting in ocean integrity, coastal protection look to be more automated recurring revenue type areas. Should we associate the same growth in people, growth on sales in the next 5 years or do you think you could scale at least of the people base a bit as you expand into the new markets you're targeting?

Yes, very good question. So what we see is, first and foremost, these new segments make use of the same expertise that we have in the other markets and the other segments. So we redeploy them also in the course of resilience or in the Ocean health. But we need to grow because if there's demand in all these areas, then all the regions actually need to step up and get more capabilities and more people. So that's what we have been seeing with the 1,900 people that we added. Last year, mind you, we also added more than 2,000 people. So -- and then the attrition rate was a little bit higher. Now it comes down and you have seen the ambition to bring it below 8%. And I think that's also good to mention, we're already below 8%, far below 8% in our key geographies. So if we look at the Netherlands or other places or in the U.S., we are much lower than the 8% already. But we have areas where we also are higher with the attrition. So we are addressing that and that becomes -- or it's also logical because it's a different type of industry where we have may be more people in a laboratory, working on manual work for instance, and there we see a higher turnover, for instance, in Hong Kong. And that affects the overall attrition rate number. So we need more people everywhere in all the regions. So everybody has vacancies there. We will deploy them in multiple markets, so we can reuse them. And in that sense, yes, we continue to grow. We will continue to add more people, not at the same pace because you will also see the operational leverage kicking in. And at some point in time, yes, we don't need more overhead staff or larger water head, so to say, we don't want that. We want to have people that are really working on the projects and executing the work.

Another 2 questions. My first question is maybe Céline can tell us about the U.S. market -- U.S. wind offshore market because it looks like there are a couple of setbacks there. So maybe you can give a view on how you look at, let me say, in 2027, '28 in that range? And then on the Ocean, let me say, on the climate change and the market with regard to Carbon capture, Ocean health and Coastal resilience. How large, do you think that the market is in 5 years' time? And what market share do you think you are going to achieve in that market?

Well, the last one I will take. And I'm also not going to give an answer, because obviously, I know that you were trying that, but we report in 4 reporting segments, those are 4 regions. We're not reporting into markets. We're not reporting into our new plans how much revenue comes from recurring, how much revenue comes from the new businesses. So we are not releasing those details. That's also competitively sensitive in some ways. But we also don't know exactly how fast it will go. So we have estimates ourselves but we don't want to give more targets than what we have today already given to the market now. So in that sense, we see that this is building up and Barbara I think explained it extremely well. The majority of the growth and returns come from our current business that we want to grow, transform and optimize where Erik-Jan spoke about in details. And the other elements will kick in over time and it's also preparing ourselves for the future. So yes, it will play a role in 2026 and 2027, but it will play even a larger role moving forward and thereafter. So that's what I will say about these new business segments in existing markets. And maybe, Céline, you can say something about wind?

Yes. So thank you very much for the question. So there are 37 commercial sale project on the development, 2 of which are nearing completion. The states around the United States have a demand, highlighted as over 80 gigawatts. The next phase of leases are going to be -- are already on the West Coast, but further on the West Coast in deeper water on the East Coast. And so the demand is there and what is really highlighted, a very interesting what just happened a month ago, so is that the state of California has already committed to 25 gigawatts. And what the reason what is very important is because they have already passed this into law that allows them to release funding to enhance their power transmission capabilities. So the commitment is there. The funding is there. The long-term plan is there, the midterm and long-term plan and we're already seeing commercial developments. So this is really the landscape of the United States. And then when you get out of the United States, which is equally interesting is the fact that Brazil is also looking at developing offshore wind. They just went into partnership with Equinor. Colombia in November is going to issue the rules for -- to go into auctions as well. So we're seeing a lot of activity and traction in the offshore wind space in the Americas as a whole, Canada as well. So lots of opportunities.

And to complete the picture, I think it will be good if Erik-Jan if you can say something about wind in Europe.

As I mentioned before, we have the large confidence in offshore wind in Europe as well. We believe that what we're seeing today is actually a normal readjustment of the market and the new economic circumstances as parties get used to the business cases and reviewing business case on a regular basis is something that we know from any industry, we're seeing that now as we feel that this normal plus we are also seeing in planned installed capacity in Europe bottom up from both the EU as well as the U.K. exceeds 100 gigawatts until 2030. And those plans are there and they are in place. And we see that continuing and actually we're in a situation where the supply chain was always going to struggle to get anywhere near that kind of ambition. So we have plenty of work and there's plenty of work still even if the plans were to reduce a bit. But we're not seeing that. We're actually seeing something else. The EU, of course, as you know, has come out with the power package intended to unlock the bottlenecks in the industry from consenting right through to supply chain delivery and that gives confidence as well. And the U.K. government is also entering in a different approach to the CFD route, but there is now an opportunity for higher returns for the developers, which also give some more confidence, if there wasn't any but there is -- so the confidence is underpinned by that as well. So we believe that in the period until 2030 we'll see continued development and growth in fixed and then followed by [indiscernible] wind also in the European arena. There's plenty of opportunity out there for us.

To complete the picture on Asia Pacific. There obviously also see over the last couple of years really activity growing on the offshore wind side, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. And then also now Australia, we have been involved in almost all the first fields in those countries as well. It's expanding. There's a lot of potential there in Asia Pacific as well. And other countries will kick in Philippines, Vietnam and others probably to follow up. So the total picture for offshore wind is quite exciting. And as I said, despite all the news that we have seen over the last few months, we see this as a buoyant market moving forward as well. Yes, maybe first here on the center and then over to [indiscernible].

Thomas Martin, BNP. I think I heard correctly, correct me if I'm wrong. In the first session that you're expecting higher margin potential in the recurring revenue business that you're developing. And I just wanted to say, is that higher versus current group levels? Is that accretive within the target mix, i.e. above the mid-range of -- the mid-range targets that you presented today? And just to be clear about what's driving that. Do you look like the lower intensity services, lower asset intensity services compared to additional marine business? Is that what's driving that higher margin contribution? Also the same, there on a ROCE basis, much higher ROCE business. I do have a couple of other ones as well.

Yes. So to answer your first question, the answer is yes, yes. Both, yes. And also why is it the case? And why don't you do that already today a lot more? Because it takes time to develop these things and to get the right things on track. So -- and that's what we're trying to do and has very well explained by Wim Herijgers, how we want to do that on the and also take careful decisions on that, how fast you can grow and bring in experts that have experience in scaling up these technologies. So we also put in a venture capital type of setup where we say, okay, we give them more freedom to play and get the guidance from Fugro and the experience from Fugro, but also have the room -- the wiggle room to actually move fast, if possible. So this is the idea. Why is it higher margin? Well, you talk about software, data and hardware services with a subscription in all the industries, those are normally generating higher margins. But it takes time, it will take time.

And then on the new business segment side of things, does that imply an increasing exposure to government revenues -- government revenues to you from government budget? Thinking of Coastal protection, et cetera, they tend to be bigger issues than individual companies. And also how much of the growth there is really driven by what you can do? It looks like you've got the equipment and the services and the abilities to do what people might want in the future. It is more about those budgets actually flowing through from commitments to contracts to the bottom line? Or is there much that you can do to drive that?

Yes. So again, I think you're totally right that in those areas, governments play a larger role. And we have seen that also in the examples that Céline put it out, Mariano in Norway, but also the Korea, local government, state government, central government also institutes like Norway, U.K. HO, World Bank, those kind of parties are involved in those kind of initiatives. And we don't necessarily see this as a negative. That's actually quite important for us to further diversify also the spread of our clients. It is a different way of operating because some of these projects will take a 4 to 5 years to actually get to a signature on contract compared to where we have projects for our energy companies or EPC contractors, yes, you negotiate the contract maybe in half year or in a couple of months. So it's also asking for different sales and business development and also relationship building. So -- but it's correct. So it will be more government work. And you had an additional question on that or did I answer your question actually totally?

I think you've answered it. I mean I'm inferring that you do have to wait for company -- for governments to actually transfer the money?

What is also important to add maybe, and that's why I thought there's maybe a different angle to your question as well. It is indeed the case that this is a growing area. So the demand is increasing. Why? Because everybody in the world starts to realize that we have a serious issue at hand, climate change. And Céline spoke very well about that. So it becomes more of a burning platform. So people want to take action. We have 39 small islands and the big oceans, they will disappear in the next 100 to 200 years if we don't take action. So -- and I think the wealthy countries feel responsible for that as well. We need to take action. And this is what's happening, and that's why these big amounts are allocated to these projects as well.

Can I just ask a couple of quick ones on the fleet side? You've talked a couple of vessels. You spoke about CapEx of the vessel today. It feels like larger vessels that acquisitions are offering better economics than leases in the current market, correct me if I'm wrong. But I also want to check on the USV side of things. Are you able to give us any insight into whether or not the USV investment is clearly a more profitable venture today for growing revenues if we just keep it as simple as that versus the larger crude vessels including amortization of service centers and all that stuff? Or is that something that's going to increase in profitability and returns as you scale up that overall USV provision?

You understand this very well. It is the deal to deliver because we will have to take time to develop those profitability because basically, right now, it's hugely better. We are [indiscernible] players. We are already in the forefront. So we're also learning the hard way but that is needed to actually stay ahead and to be a market leader. So in that sense, I think it's important to be there. But the initial projects were not more profitable than maybe doing the normal traditional businesses. So in that sense, I think you're right. And on your first question, buying more attractive to lease, yes, with the current lease prices could be the case, not always. And it also means that, yes, there are also new models where you say, well, let's drop news model maybe for 15 years or so or longer. So investigated everything in that sense. But at the moment, the market is on the vessel side, very hot. And why is that? A, because we look for particular vessels and those are not readily available. And secondly, there's nobody building new assets because it's so expensive with the current supply chain. There's no additional capacity coming to the market. So there is a higher demand and no additional capacity. So there's a lot of tension on it and you see the rates moving up very quickly.

One question about your digital platform. In the previous Capital Markets Day, you talked about your GAIA platform, which you launched then. Now you move to Virgeo. Can you talk about the accomplishments that you've had with the previous platform over the last year with regards to the number of customers that are using it, cross-selling of data and so on? My second question is about the recurring revenues. Can you give a revenue indication of how much that is now? And do you intend to report on this metric going forward?

So the last one, I think I already answered and you expect my answer, no. So I'm not going to give an indication right now, and we're not reporting on that in the future. On the other elements of your question, I think there are probably multiple people that can give you some insights in that and maybe start with Wim and then also Erik-Jan and Céline can chip in because they can give some examples where they are using the current platforms. It's not only GAIA, by the way, we have other platforms as well. And we can give those example as well Wim?

Yes. So the GAIA platform was actually the previous name and we rebranded into Virgeo. And Virgeo will become the umbrella product of all our platform businesses and will be then consolidated into this new recurring revenue model. What you see is that across Fugro, there are a lot of clients already using this platform successfully. And that's also why put it in the market validation phase. And that basically means that we can accelerate the growth of this platform.

I can give you an example of in the region, how is Virgeo being utilized. So one of the key anchor clients in the offshore wind space is authentic source. And what they're utilizing this platform for us as the data is being collected, either the geophysical data, Geo-tech, once the lab results are being provided, they're actually able to visualize and have access to the relevant data for them just in time pretty much. And what this allows them to do as well is to make the right decisions around their development program. And we have also been able to anchor this solution with [indiscernible] which is the regulatory agency in the United States that provides the permitting. So [indiscernible] now is used to seeing the data and how the reports are being provided and this really accelerates the permitting process as well. So very, very powerful platform utilized in this case, an offshore wind developer.

And to add, I think the use of data is changing and the user data is also giving us a longer-term opportunity. So the clients were coming to see us about a data platform are also looking ahead now because ask it it's not just there to be built, but it's also there to be operated and to be maintained, to be monitored. So having accurate data from the right location and you can now add the time to that, which now it becomes a monitoring opportunity as well. So as we go forward, we'll see the use of this kind of tooling, also go into the monitoring space, which will then create a sticking power for us in the long-term asset use by our clients.

And firstly, correct me if I'm wrong, but revenue guidance in based organic growth does not include acquisitions but talking about acquisitions within what kind of time frame you expect to live up to financial ratios of EBIT margin, free cash flow and return on the capital employed?

So Barbara, maybe you can?

Yes. Sorry, the time frame in which, the time frame is...

When making an acquisition within what kind of time frame do you think it will deliver a return of 16% and EBITDA the range you provide in the free cash flow.

Well, it would vary the type of M&A we're looking for is on the board today are -- would be not material or a smaller size. If that would be accretive day 1 that depends on the acquisition. If we have it as a technology, for example, we would buy a technology and we would ramp it up as, for example, [indiscernible] new business model, that it could take some time. Of course, we look for immediate accretion to the M&A, but we will be selective in how we do that. At the end of the day, it will go into the stream towards delivery of the midterm targets in '27.

Okay. Secondly, you mentioned that floating wind would provide more business for you and we're having more towards that type of offshore wind. Taking a 1 gigawatt offshore wind park, turbines of 15 gigawatts or more or less 60 foundations. What would be the difference in business for you floating versus fixed bottom?

Very good question. I don't have the answer at the moment and not in detail at least. It depends very much also on the type of floating solution that they choose. I think there at the moment, more than 50 solutions out there. None of them have been really proven being economically viable first day. So they still have to develop a lot more and see how they actually move forward with the foundation. One of the things that we have seen in some of these cases in the U.S. together with Céline in our office on the [indiscernible] experts in the wind business in the U.S. and they were explaining that there's a lot more required for floating wind. And that is because they need multiple anchors and they need also they will place some of these floating wind farms and attachment to the same anchors. So you will have a field where you have anchor points where multiple wind farms or wind mills are attached to the same anchor points. And that is such tension and requirement to do proper ground investigation that this is a complex problem to address for these clients. So -- and that requires a lot of field data. So that is required, how much more that is percentage-wise it's difficult for me to say. Is there anything you would like to add Erik-Jan?

I think a couple of things, one is with the size increase in the turbines and the space requirements for floating wind farm, you see bigger increases. So that's a contributing factor as well. Mark already mentioned the technology -- the anchor technology that is an issue here. And we do know that the current certification requires a particular approach to proving ground data. And of course, as the market develops, there's also a conversation ongoing to look specifically at the requirements for floating wind. Some of these requirements were actually developed for other industries. So that's another factor that we have to take into consideration that might change the future. The way we're looking at it now and the amount of work that's coming is actually a fear that might stretch the market further.

Maybe Céline, you want to say about California because there's a big development obviously on the West Coast.

Yes. So the regulations are still being molded as we speak. Obviously, the -- what we're looking at right now is even the environmental impact assessments and those being strengthened even further from a state level because of the sensitivities really pushed by the California government in deeper water. So deeper water means much more complex environment. And also, you are on the faults and you have earthquakes, which requires a very specific field set as well as potential impact of earthquakes. We have actually some of the expertise one in our Creek offices, which allows us to really bring in the strength and expertise that is needed in that space.

Okay. And then we go to Andre, you had some more questions. And I think then we slowly come to the end of the Q&A if there are no more questions, but otherwise, we see in event.

Four questions left. First on ventures. I'm pretty sure that the return hurdles wouldn't apply to that part, at least not for the short term, maybe not even for the midterm. In order to protect your earnings, you must have an idea of what's the maximum amount you would be able to put in that pool?

Yes. As I said before, we are going very carefully. We have a very rigorous process in analyzing okay, what do we allow to actually get through the gate of being even of interest to be tested for this new way of deploying new technology. We will be very rigorous in that assessment and we have developed a system to do that. So we have a few candidates there, but we don't want to go and play and shoot with hill and play on multiple fronts. So we take this very carefully. Wim show biggest and largest potential areas that we have developed already to the next level or 2 levels up, and we will have a look at our potential candidates. And we might add 1 or 2 in the near future, but we're not going to have a portfolio plenty of these things at the same time. We're not doing that. We're going to really carefully look at how are we going to do it, and we also want to feel fast. So if it doesn't work, it doesn't go through the gate, then it stops and we move on.

Okay. So second question on the ships. With the Cruise vessels gradually replacing the ships. What will you do with those ships? Will you help them -- hold them to scrapping time? Or will you dispose off them?

Well, there's an obligation if we expose them to do that properly and in also responsible manner. And that doesn't mean that you cannot bring them to certain countries and they will happily take them and say, well, we'll take care of everything. Now we need to have the certificates, how it's taking apart, what is being done with all the remainders of that vessel. So there are certificates required for that as well. So we will take that in a responsible manner. Sometimes we can sell it into a different market. That could be the case but we're very careful with that. And I see, unfortunately, in my period that some of the old vessels used by Fugro will always end up with the competition because they have a track record of 20 years or 25 years, and the competition can then squeeze out another 5 years of work on a lower level of quality, but they have the track record of Fugro and they can sell it very easily by that. So we normally don't do that. So we don't sell readily in the market all these assets that we get rid off. We rather take them down. And as I said in the past, we will make razor blades out of them.

And then a question on offshore wind, especially in the U.S., the problems are, of course, concentrated with private clients, but governments keep on developing plans so nothing has happened. So would you be able to give a split in your revenue base between governments and the private clients, especially in the U.S.?

Yes. We don't go to that granularity. But in general, we can say that what we see in the wind business that we actually do also the more work for governments and that could be state government, that could be countries as a whole. We see that in Europe. Erik-Jan can talk about received also in the U.S., and it's also applicable probably later on in the far east, not so much so there yet, but that will also come. And actually, that's the model that is being developed here in the Netherlands and they are actually promoting that model to other countries as well in the world where they say, okay, well, take charge as a government and then get the initial surveys done because that actually helps everyone to tender for these licenses in an equal manner. And it actually is quite good for us. It helps. And I think, Erik-Jan you can give some examples you have given, a great example with EnergyNet.

Yes. So around the North Sea and the basins in Europe, we're connecting with more and more governments BSH in Germany,[indiscernible] in Denmark, Crodastat in the U.K., of course, RVO in the Netherlands. So we are continuing our way in that, and that has a couple of real good benefits. One, of course, is the longevity of those connections. In some of these territories, we are involved in literally every development is happening in that country. But what also helps us that we're actually building the ground model in that particular space. So we have inside track advantage to the next development phase in the wind farm. Plus, we found that the plans of government certainly in the area that active in Europe, they have been quite stable in most areas. So we've been able to do our work fairly uninterrupted in that sense. And that gives us a wider base in offshore wind. I think that's a point that I think is being made. It's -- yes, it's a developer. Yes, it's the main contractors but the client base is actually becoming a lot much more diverse in and of itself. So it's also now government and government regulators, which actually add plus new entrants in the market because the renewables market is changing quickly in that respect as well. Players are being added on almost daily basis. So we have a wider catchment area in that respect as well.

And last question on margins and the vision. I think it's been, at least, it's my opinion, being instrumental that we split the business in the marine and the land, although they have things in common, like people, laboratories, the drivers are hugely different. And therefore, I feel it's a pity that you don't give targets for marine and lands anymore. I sincerely hope that you keep on reporting marine and land in time. So what's the reason behind that?

Okay. So we take note of your comment there, and I think we have no reason to change the reporting at the moment, so there are no plans for that. So in that sense, it will continue. I can also assure you that we have targets internally for Marine and Lands because you're absolutely right, there's different dynamics. It's actually a little bit -- it goes a little bit further. It is more than complementing each other because we really bring technologies that are developed on the land side into Marine environment and vice versa. So there's real benefit of having those together and Céline also gave a great example because mines where everything comes together. And some of these projects, and you saw the technologies listed on the board and we just did on a project in the Mediterranean, where there's 10 different services of Fugro come together and have to come together to actually deliver the final product for the customer. And this is institutes and governments in this case, a mapping Seagrass in the sea there in the Mediterranean sea. And it's very complex. And Fugro is actually the only party that brings that together. A very great example of how Land and Marine services come together. So we see that almost on a day-to-day basis what the benefits could be. So internally, we're definitely going to have these targets and also challenge our teams on delivering the right levels of returns. Externally, we have chosen a couple of years ago, to actually report on the 4 regions and those are the reporting segments and there is no plan to change that right now. I obviously fully understand that more insights also for the outside world is always of interest. Are there any additional questions? I look around, I don't see any hands up. That's great. Then I think there's always room for more questions when we go for a drink or for also going to the booths, the technologies, as Wim said, and our colleagues are there to give you a short overview. So with that, we close the Capital Markets Day. So I thank everyone also on the webcast for joining us. And there's only one last thing I need to do before we walk out of this room and that is something particularly of interest because 5 years ago, it was 14th of November and we had 1 person in the room that had its birthday on the 14th and that person has decided 5 years later, to be here on this birthday as well. Quirijn Mulder from ING, analyst for Fugro for many, many years. We have a small present for you. Thank you very much.