Koninklijke Ahold Delhaize N.V. (AD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning and good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to the Ahold Delhaize Investor Day. While I very much had hoped to have this event face-to-face, I'm very glad that you are with us virtually, and I'm very much looking forward to our time together. And I'm not alone today because together with my colleagues on the Management Board, I'm here with many of our talented dealers across the company. Together, we have a lot of exciting things to share today. So I would say, let's get started. We are Ahold Delhaize. We are a company with 19 great local brands that serve more than 54 million customers every week along the East Coast of U.S., in the Benelux region, in Central and Southeastern Europe and in Indonesia. We have built a strong portfolio of leading local brands, each with the #1 or 2 position in their local markets. Across the company, our brands and businesses employ more than 440,000 talented and committed people dedicated to fulfilling our purpose, helping millions of customers in thousands of communities to eat well, save time and live better. Our purpose guides our company. It's at the heart of all the promises we make and gives overarching direction to our leading together strategic priorities. Eat well. We help people choose a healthy and balanced diet, creating access to high-quality, fresh and delicious products. Save time. We make things quicker, smoother and easier to support people in their busy lives. And live better. Whether this means healthy eating, affordable, fresh or making sustainable choices, we are committed to making this happen for our customers, associates, and of course, communities. We've been in business of serving customers for more than 150 years and have a long track record of always delivering for our key stakeholders. This has been the case in both good times and in bad, and with the latter underlined by the hardship that our local communities have faced during the COVID pandemic. It has been a privilege to be at the center of our communities, ensuring access to food at the most crucial of times. The business of food retail is tough, it's competitive, and I can tell you it's hard work. It's a complex value chain to orchestrate but fundamental to everybody's lives, and we are passionate about it. I've been in this industry for nearly 25 years. And the one thing I know for sure is this: success in this business comes down to shared values. And our values are courage, integrity, teamwork, care and humor. And the shape to winning Ahold Delhaize culture we have become known and respected for, something we are very proud of. It's why we go the extra mile every day at all our local brands to serve local customers and communities by keeping their shelves full, keeping stores and home delivery safe, working with local food banks to make sure people have access to food and supplies. Words cannot express the level of gratitude and thanks I have for the employees, the teams and the leadership of our brands for their amazing daily efforts. It's from our purpose and our values that we drive our vision and growth drivers. Altogether, this comprises our Leading Together strategy. It has served us well over the past few years and it will, for sure, serve us well into the future. So let's look at our scorecards. Since 2018, we have achieved a lot, even overachieving in many areas, but we still have some homework left. On balance, though, it's clear that Leading Together is the right strategy for our company and the right strategy for our future. First of all, it starts with an important rule in retail: you win when you drive relative market share combined with brand strength. And each brand is a strong #1 or 2 in its local markets. Just look at the market shares gain in our top local brands over the past few years. Food Lion's performance is very impressive. And Meg Ham and her team are winning in the last 36 consecutive quarters of growth. While Stop & Shop improvement is vindication of its transformation, albeit at a slightly lower pace than we would like. And it goes without saying Albert Heijn's market-leading position in The Netherlands is the benchmark of the industry. And Martin will do a deep dive into these great local brands in detail later in the program. So why have we been able to achieve these great market share developments? It's all about being relevant for local customers, enabling them to shop when and how they want on their terms. Convenience is the name of the game and has replaced price as a priority #1 on the customer journey. So when the surge in local demand occurred in the pandemic, we were ready with the additional capacity to meet that demand. Every month, millions of customers use one of our brand websites and apps to do their shopping. Our brands have more than doubled their online capacity, and we've expanded click and collect and pickup points to more than 1,400 in the U.S. In fact, in the U.S., online sales growth has been 3x the target we set in 2018. bol.com and the recently acquired Fresh Direct in New York City have both grown their customer and partner base, with bol.com alone having 140 million monthly visits. We've more than doubled net consumer sales since 2018. And we did so a year ahead of target. Of course, this was also a result of exceptional circumstances in the last 18 months, but we firmly believe this shift in the customer journey is here to stay. The working-from-home trend or hybrid working will continue. Slightly more than half of customers surveyed in both the U.S. and Europe said they expect to work from home in the near future. Online purchasing will accelerate. 60% said they expect to shop more online. An emphasis on health and well-being will persist. 2/3 of those surveyed said they are trying to eat healthier. And furthermore, 35% of customers are more conscious about the sustainability of their food purchases. And finally, value remains paramount. 2 out of 3 customers said they will try new brands if they offer a better value. And this presents for us an opportunity to shift customers towards our own brands and allows us an opportunity to help redefine value beyond price and to include healthy and sustainability, experience, et cetera. All of these trends play right into our wheelhouse and provide an ideal backdrop for growth. As Kevin and Walter and their regional teams go through their presentations today, you will hear a lot more details about how we will create even more momentum across our portfolio on the road to 2025. You will hear how we are thinking about technology, automation and data to accelerate our omnichannel transformation. Vibrant modern stores, reimagining loyalty, automated fulfillment centers and last-mile delivery, they will show how we will make these ingredients work together to bring the most optimal, tailored, inspiring and relevant customer journey to life locally for all our customers. I truly believe we have cracked the code and have a repeatable formula for growth in the U.S. and in Europe. We have a strong operating model with our leading local brands, supported by service brands who operate at scale and that leverage their best capabilities globally. Between now and 2025, we have 4 big priorities we are doubling down on for the next 4 years: serve our customers through deeper digital relationships, accelerate our omnichannel transformation and continue to be the best local operator, lead the transformation into a healthy and sustainable food system, and create the one-stop shop for smarter customer journeys. These priorities tie straight to our vision: to create the leading local food shopping experience. Leading. Leading at the very least means being the #1 grocery brand in all the markets we serve. Customers want to shop with brands they trust. Leadership helps convey the trust by leading through safety, leading through community support and leading on health and sustainability. Local. Local also conveys trust because customers want to buy from somebody who understands them and who knows their taste and preferences. And that's why our brands stay rooted in their local communities. Connected to and giving customers what they want. Food, food and fresh food, in particular, is at the center of what our brands offer. It's the #1 reason our shoppers visit our brands. It's also an area where we have high expertise and the ability to differentiate. And last, shopping experience. Customers expect a completely easy, seamless and omnichannel experience from ordering on their phone to moving through the store while they get value at every step and every click. We can uniquely do this by combining the best of our brands and the local expertise with the scale benefits from our global footprint. So let's unpack these 4 priorities for the next 4 years a little bit more. Creating the local food shopping experience is a differentiated and winning vision for us, and it starts with deepening the customer relationship. And this is all about understanding critical aspects of their lives, the moments that matter to them and their daily needs. This to help them eat well. save time and live better. The way we do that is with our omnichannel customer value proposition, CVP in short. And here, we have 7 areas. The first is fresh and healthy. This means healthier foods and lifestyles, providing easy navigation, clear nutrition information and clear standards on labeling for our increasingly more health and conscious customer. It also means strengthening fresh and healthy assortments and communications so that we are the first choice for the customer. And to show we are serious, we're increasing our targets of healthy own brand sales to exceed 55% by 2025. And we'll do this by enabling fresh and healthy choices, driving programs like implementing nutritional labeling and guiding platforms for all our brands. For example, our U.S. brands are using Guiding Stars to measure nutrition in their products, and we are aiming for a majority of owned brands to achieve at least 1 star in the Guiding Stars program by the middle of 2025. The second key component of our CVP is local and trusted. We want the customer to recognize our local brands as the trusted local leader. And we'll do this by delivering a truly local and sustainable food shopping experience. Each of our brands is an icon within its community with many of them servicing customers for many decades. Our brands epitomize local through their partnerships with local charities, food banks and sport teams. That is why we place great importance in giving our individual brands the independence to meet their customer needs. A growing centerpiece here is locally sourced assortments to support their local communities and offer their customers unique products from just nearby. For example, our new brand, Fresh Direct, works directly with local farmers and fishermen to get the freshest local produce and provide uniquely local assortments for customers, all with a shorter supply chain. Our brands are also embedding themselves in the community, continuing to end hunger in the towns and cities they serve. No one should have to wonder where their next meal will come from or have to make the choice between paying bills or buying food, which is why we are making this global issue our #1 charitable priority. And lastly, we will drive local sustainability, reducing food waste by 50% globally. The third component is personalization. Our brands will deliver a personalized shopping experience for the customer: highly tailored, highly customer and highly connected to the individual and unique daily lives. And this will manifest itself in many ways. For example, prefilled lists based on personal preferences and dietary requirements, reminders, personalized offers, subscriptions, rewards, the list goes on. Our brands will help customers build their baskets in real time, providing great value, recommendations, broad assortment and convenience of delivery. We also bring community, gamification, novelty and augmented experience into the mix. And while these are all great benefits in isolation, it's combining them that gives the most precious benefit for the customer: the gift of time. Every minute they save is a minute gained to focus on the things that really matter most to them, whether it be personal or professional. This is one of the greatest lessons we have learned as we have grown bol.com to the leading online marketplace in the Benelux. bol.com is a powerful asset in our portfolio. And when I look at the numbers and the KPIs of bol.com's business, this is all the evidence and inspiration I need to see where we can truly go over time. And in light of our announcement this morning, we are going to spend a lot more time on bol.com later in our program. And Margaret will take you through why we are so excited about the next phase of growth we are about to embark on. Now let's move on to the operational priority to accelerate each brand's omnichannel transformation and continue to be the best operator. There is no standing still in this industry in this time. And I mentioned earlier, we have a repeatable formula for growth. We can see that simply through the scaled service brand model. Here, we are efficiently organizing ourselves to drive scale and speed in transformation while also balancing this with the unique demands of customers across our local markets in Europe and in the U.S. Given the tight operating margins, innovation, transformation and change, these are the tools that keep our brands sharp and ahead of the pack in their daily work. This is where the brands and support functions really rise and make a difference. They are the competitive advantage and the glue behind bringing the omnichannel CVP to life. As many of you know us by now, our brands have always approached operating excellence with a healthy dose of curiosity and common sense. The result is that they have built a robust supply chain, installed great commercial practices, deployed sophisticated data capture and analytics and assemble great teams of experienced talent, amongst the best in the business, to take us into the future. And to realize that future we have defined 7 areas that we will continue, and in many cases, accelerate our investments. There are 3 of these areas that are critically important: digital and in-store experience; supply chain operations and merchandising; and of course, data and analytics. First, digital and in-store experience. We are creating scaled e-commerce platforms in Europe and the U.S. to take advantage of our scale while still delivering a truly local experience for customers. By harmonizing the technologies behind the digital platforms, our brands can rapidly deploy new capabilities, keeping them ahead of the game in the important battle for new features and functionalities. Our brands are also digitally enhanced their stores. For example, over 80% of stores in Europe have electronic shelf labeling. And in the U.S., over 70% of the stores have self-checkout. While seen as a customer benefit, these will add further value in improving efficiency in store operations. Additionally, our brands are leveraging their store experience of running urban store formats in Europe and offering that also to our U.S. brands, leveraging those learnings to win in the Philadelphia market with The GIANT Company. Nick has a really nice update later on how that vision is coming to life. Secondly, supply chain operations and merchandising. To help further lower product costs, increased product availability and increased freshness, we will complete our migration to full self-distribution at ADUSA. And Chris will show you all the great work and tell you about the benefits that the teams have delivered and what's next on the agenda up to 2023. In Europe, our brands have increased their joint sourcing initiatives in the Benelux and Central and Southeastern Europe across the national brands, own brands and goods not for resale. They actively use both buying cooperatives in Europe, AMS and Coopernic, to secure better costs. Our brands have also improved and will continue to improve shrink with smart merchandising and inventory management. And we are introducing additional technology to help further manage it, such as new capabilities in forecasting and replenishment as well as, for example, dynamic markdowns. This all to help them sell through more product before it expires. All of these capability enhancements across the omnichannel transformation are priority and underpinning by the third key area, unlocking the power of data. The race to be first to on-demand real-time intelligence is the race no one can afford to lose, and we are certainly in the running. And because of its importance, we have planned a separate session with J.J. and Selma to show you how we look at things in holistic way. Given our big transformation ambitions in technology and automation, in data and in new business models, we are committing to higher investments in tech and capabilities, and therefore, are raising our CapEx spend from 3% to 3.5% of our sales on an annual base. And be assured, we will continue to be the best operator in the industry, underlined by our world-class operating margins. As part of our planning towards 2025, we are committing to more ambitious, Save for Our Customer targets, EUR 4 billion by 2025. And we will also use our knowledge and experience to make e-commerce on a fully allocated basis profitable by 2025. And Natalie will walk you through both of these areas later in the program. The next priority is one that helps us fulfill our purpose of: Eat well. Save time. Live better. This is our priority around health and sustainability. Elevating health and sustainability holds a special place for me. I believe it transcends and touches all aspects of our business and our industry. I think of this priority as our commitment to be grounded in goodness. I want the decisions and choices of Ahold Delhaize and its brands to be grounded in goodness and does make healthy and sustainable choices easy for both people and the planet. So let me elaborate a little bit. For people, I believe, elevating health and sustainability benefits all the people we touch. It benefits customers, it benefits associates, and it benefits the local communities. For the planet, we see 3 big tracks to move on. First, in our own business, we are committing to drive the decarbonization of our own operations, both in order to help the world to achieve the 1.5-degree target, as specified by the IPCC as well as to become a net-zero climate-positive business. We'll work with our supply partners to help them achieve this goal as well. And second, we have committed to radically reduce waste and moving to a circular economy with respect to products and packaging. Finally, we will support farmers and suppliers as they decarbonize their operations and the overall supply chain and transition toward an inclusive and regenerative food system that supports biodiversity. We already are starting from a good position, and we have a great track record in many aspects of this space. And this is also recognized independently. We have now a AA MSCI ESG rating, upgraded from the single a few months before. And we have a top 10% Sustainalytics rating in the food industry. And just this weekend, we once again achieved the #1 position in Europe and in U.S. in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, maintaining a track record of leadership we are very proud of. To further align and deepen our commitment to being the industry-leading healthy and sustainable retailer, we will invest healthy and sustainable further into our short-term and long-term incentive plans and other business metrics as we will report on them, just as we do on our financial metrics. I'm also very excited that we announced on last Friday that we are committing to reach net-zero carbon emissions across our own operations by 2040 and to becoming a net-zero business across our entire supply chain products and services by 2050. And we definitely won't give up on looking for opportunities and path to getting that job done faster. And this is such an important topic. We will be dedicating more airtime to this going forward in our communication starting today, where I'm delighted to have Daniella Vega with us to walk you through our plans how we will achieve our ambitions here. Lastly, let's spend some time on the portfolio priority. Over the last years, we have spent a lot of time doing the dirty work and heavy lifting of elevating the operating infrastructure, reducing complexity, replacing legacy systems and allowing the organization to scale. And this hard work has brought us now to the tipping point, where we can start to imagine a lot of cool and interesting things we can do by collaborating more deliberately and to interface with the customer. And today's consumers are busier than they ever have been. And as I said earlier, time is a precious commodity. In this digital age, consumers are endlessly bombarded from all angles, social media, e-mails, apps and for example, spam. For brands and retailers cutting through this dense overload of information, options and complexity is probably the biggest challenge ahead when we emerge in a new post-pandemic normal. Retailers with the courage to really cut through the weeds and simplify the customer journey to the essentials that really matter will be winners, and we will be one of them. I'm excited to announce today 2 examples how we are thinking about this. As we look throughout our portfolio, we knew urban centers are critical points of influence for customers. They drive cultural influence for their surrounding area. They drive commerce, and they are the focal points for busy customers' life. With our proven model from Europe, we have the unique opportunity to win in these urban markets. The plan we have just executed to win in Philadelphia, I already mentioned before, is the first export of that to the U.S. Those learnings will now be taken to drive a clear win in New York strategy, creating an ecosystem encompassing Stop & Shop and Fresh Direct and their partners to offer a unique proposition. This will be about delivering fresh and healthy food wherever, however and whenever New York customers wish to shop. And Kevin and Gordon will tell you more about both of these omnichannel and marketing strategies. Secondly, we have a truly unique opportunity to win even more in the Benelux. We have the leading #1 and 2 food retail brands and the leading #1 online marketplace in the region. And this is one-of-a-kind opportunity. The timing is also right. Combined, we have 2,900 stores and 1,000 pickup points. We support all type of shopping journeys from single item to full shopping baskets. And combined, we have more than 35 million products we offer. Here, where we significantly enhance the customers' experience across the brands of bol.com, Delhaize and Albert Heijn. Here, we will significantly enhance the customers' experience across the brands of bol.com, Delhaize and Albert Heijn. Here, 3 things are really important: more convenience, more value and more relevance. This is a true opportunity, and Bart will spend some time on this big idea later. This portfolio priority also extends to how and where we will accelerate testing, learning, experimenting and scaling new customer propositions. We will carefully choose the right brand for the right opportunity to be a pioneer for our company and bring more speed and more innovation to the market at a faster pace. For example, we will scale Albert Heijn's premium subscription model and compact e-commerce models to select markets in Europe. This compact e-commerce model will start with Albert in the Czech Republic not only is this compact model environmentally sustainable, but we are able to share the efficiencies with customers by lowering our delivery fees. We're also leveraging our portfolio of brands to test various permutations of quick commerce grocery. We know consumers are increasingly moving to an on-demand model. Our brands are on top of this trend with several pilots already underway or under 2 hours, under 1 hour, under 30 minutes delivery times. And finally, our brands will continue to build out broader portfolio opportunities to accelerate growth in complementary revenue streams. Within this category, our ambition is to deliver EUR 1 billion in complementary revenue streams by 2025. And you will hear more about this from J.J. and Selma, our Chief Digital Officers within our company. So these are our 4 priorities for the next 4 years, and we are entering into an exciting and new growth cycle. As you have heard today, we have had a consistent track record of driving profitable growth with a clear vision and strategy. Across the portfolio, you can see how we are focused on creating uniquely local omnichannel customer experiences for every brand we have, continuing to strengthen and grow our brands and their market-leading positions and also enhancing the long-term durability of our strategy through scale and omnichannel transformation. We have a strong competitive advantage rooted in our 19 great local brands. We have an efficient formula for growth with our service brands. We have stable and predictable cash flows. And we believe our position matches our vision to be the consolidator of choice in the industry. And we have a track record of successful acquisitions over the last 3 years. Natalie will bring home our program later today with details about what this all means for our financial ambitions. But to give you a sneak peek: we believe our strategy and priorities will allow us to deliver sales growth of more than EUR 10 billion; double our net consumer online sales; deliver fully allocated e-commerce profitability by 2025; EUR 1 billion of complementary revenue streams; EUR 6 billion of cumulative free cash flow; and a high single-digit underlying EPS growth versus 2022. These are big ambitions, but we have the talent, experience and diversity to drive our purpose, our values, our vision and our priorities. I started off by speaking about our people, and it is critical that I finish with them as well. Our people are at the heart of our strategy. They live by the values of courage, integrity, teamwork, care and humor. And we are committed to them with our 100-100-100 diversity and inclusion ambitions, a topic which is indeed very close to my heart, too. So let me thank them once again for what they have done and what they will do together with us in the future. These are exciting times ahead of us. There is a lot of uncertainty across our markets. However, we believe our strategy in 4 priorities will help realize the vision of creating a leading local food shopping experience. We will continue to drive profitable growth, and we will realize this with our brands' relentless focus on the customer, creating local and trusted brands and driving the omnichannel transformation. So that was it from my side and see you later at the Q&A. We have a great program ahead of us. And to start us off, over to Kevin and the team to talk about Ahold Delhaize USA.

Thank you, Frans, for the introduction. And it's great to be with you today, and I really look forward to sharing with you an update on the great work the U.S. brands are doing for our customers as the largest grocery retailer on the East Coast. But first, let's take a look at our U.S. presence. Our ADUSA brands operate more than 2,000 stores. We had sales of over EUR 51.8 billion last year. And our companies employ more than 230,000 associates. We've now reached 90% consumer coverage for e-commerce with click and collect and delivery. And our ADUSA brands have over 30 million active loyalty card members. Our U.S. segment reported 105% growth in online sales. And our companies are now rated #1 food retailer in the U.S. in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, which we're very proud of. Now back in 2018, we talked about the transformational journey we set out on following the merger. We shared with you our plans to grow market share and to have strong local brands in the markets we serve to grow our digital capabilities and create the value unlocks to fund our transformation while achieving our financial goals. Our ADUSA companies have achieved a great deal and are well positioned as we look forward to continue our transformation and support of the 4-part promise that Frans outlined earlier. As we get started, though, I wanted to acknowledge that we couldn't achieve the results that I've shared without strong teams and our associates at ADUSA. They've done a phenomenal job in delivering business results that have exceeded expectations despite a really tough year filled with challenges, not only in our industry but in the communities that we serve. People, culture and passion differentiate our U.S. businesses from our competitors, and they are strong contributors to our brand's longevity. In some cases, our brands have been serving customers for over 100 years. Our people bring our brands to life locally for us. Today and in the future, having these strong brands with deep roots in their local communities is more important than ever. The close relationship our brands hold is why our customers value our brands and trust the brands to nourish their families. Our brand identities are built on how we show up in the communities we serve, not only when things are going well, but also when times are tough. Our local brands are among the first to have stores open after hurricanes, among the largest donors at local food banks, significant funders of cancer research centers and much more. We show we care in big and small ways every day, and it really makes a difference. Now our customers' lives are truly in motion. And over the past several years, each of the brands of ADUSA have been on a journey to create a seamless omnichannel experience for our customers, positioning our brands to serve our customers' busy lives in motion. We provide many ways for customers to shop and interact with our local brands. Each interaction is part of a personalized experience the customer has entrusted to our brands. And today, I want to share with you where we are going next and how we will accelerate our omnichannel evolution through what we call our Connected Customer strategy, and I will highlight that today. Delivering on our strategy will meet our customers not only where they are but also where they're going. Before I go into the Connected Customer strategy, let me describe to you what we mean by a connected customer. Now in some ways, it's every one of us. Our customers' lives are constantly in motion. They're looking for convenient and personalized solutions to save time in their day so that they can enjoy the moments that matter. Now our strategy is built on providing relevant omnichannel solutions so our customers can enjoy the moments that matter in their lives. And our strategy is resonating. Over the last 2 years, we've seen significant digital growth across all segments of our customer base. In fact, we've seen our digitally engaged customers grow by 56% in the last 2 years. So let's take a quick look at what today's connected customers means. [Presentation]

As you can see, our customers lead very busy lives. And we're doubling down on the Connected Customer strategy to build deep, trusted omnichannel relationships with them. While all of our ADUSA brands have incredible work underway, today, we're going to highlight examples from 3 of our local brands on how they are leveraging the strategy to win in the marketplace. But first, I'll give you more detail on the key aspects of our strategy. The key attributes of the Connected Customer strategy has 5 parts. The first is vibrant modern stores with a seamless omnichannel experience for all. Next is right pricing with personalized value, compelling assortments and services, including our private brands and a uniquely local experience. Let me walk you through these with a little more detail. Now providing vibrant modern stores means that we have the right format for the right channel, whether it's an online store, an urban market or a full-service store. It's about having a store that's convenient and easy to shop and one that's enabled by technology to make shopping more engaging, personalized and faster. Some examples of this would include Deli Order Ahead, In-Store Mode on our mobile applications, and Scan & Go Checkout to name a few. A seamless omnichannel experience for all means we're here for our customers, whether they need dinner tonight in 30 minutes, groceries or a prescription the next day or really through any channel that they want to shop. And with the knowledge that their preferred channel could change based on the circumstances of their busy day, we have to have an omnichannel solution. Right pricing with personalized value means we have a total store pricing that is competitive and compelling assortments with loyalty programs and health solutions that offer customers personalized content that delivers holistic value for each customer. In addition, our private brands offer compelling prices, robust assortment, including those that meet dietary needs. Now these products are sustainably sourced. They include clean labels, less plastics and a great story that surprises and delights customers. And finally, a uniquely local experience that connects our brands to our customers in each local market and community that they serve by activating all of their brand attributes across all of our customer touch points. Through the Connected Customer strategy, we are positioned for growth. Now for our brands to really win locally, we've also carefully designed the rest of ADUSA and the entire ecosystem to support them. Our support brands include Peapod Digital Labs, Retail Business Services and ADUSA Supply Chain. And they enable the capabilities to deliver the Connected Customer strategy while taking advantage of the combined scale and leverage of the total organization. This combination of local brands and support brands enables us to move with speed and advanced capabilities, scale and leverage within our ADUSA ecosystem much more effectively. The brands really develop and execute local strategies and commercial plans that connect with customers. While the support brands provide the scale, the platforms, capabilities and services that enable the local brands to drive the omnichannel customer experience to win in their marketplace. The idea of our platforms is important to us as they really are designed to achieve scale, leverage and capability builds to enable the value unlock necessary for the investments our local brands need in order to compete. Some areas we're covering with these scaled platforms are in e-commerce, digital and supply chain. We invest in building single platforms that can be tailored for the brands based on the needs of their customers. And at scale, we're introducing key practice areas like commercial services, retail media, indirect sourcing and a retail innovation center of excellence. Our disciplined around a cost savings culture along with these changes are key enablers for investing in our future. Let me tell you a little bit more about our support brands. So let's start with Peapod Digital Labs, which focuses on digital, e-commerce and commercial solutions and capabilities to support the omnichannel experience. Established at the start of 2019, and it's hard to believe it's only been that long, Peapod Digital Labs was created to house the core capabilities to accelerate omnichannel in the U.S. When we created Peapod Digital Labs, we had big ambitions to drive a seamless omnichannel experience for customers that would enable them to shop in any way they chose. Now to do that, we knew we needed to build new capabilities in a way that could be easily scaled and leveraged across our brands. To start advancing our ambition, we quickly expanded or, in some cases, we had to create new capabilities in key areas, such as product management, data science, DevOps, engineering, retail media and digital shelf. Now advancing these capabilities accelerates our omnichannel and digital customer experience really across all touch points, both online and in-store, including delivery, pickup, loyalty programs and so much more. And the results are really paying off. Over the last 2 years, we've seen over 200% growth in omnichannel customers. And we now have integrated omnichannel loyalty programs at all of our brands. Peapod Digital Labs has also been focused on building new capabilities, and they've created several scalable platforms, including our omnichannel loyalty; and [ Spectrum ], which is a proprietary picking and packing system to fulfill e-commerce orders, and this platform allows us to improve the associate experience while also driving higher utilization and productivity and decreasing training time by almost half. And this is part of really driving to find fully allocated profitability by 2025 in our e-commerce. Now PRISM is also important to us, and it's our proprietary digital and e-commerce platform that creates a competitive advantage for all of our U.S. brands. PRISM is a critical component for omnichannel shopping, personalized experience, integrated loyalty, health and sustainability features. And it really brings that all together. In addition, we're now adding Ship2Me, which is a part of Prism platform that will serve as our endless aisle marketplace and will enable our brands to offer hundreds of thousands more relevant SKUs. Over time, we'll be able to add new services and continue to grow baskets through this platform. Peapod Digital Labs will now apply the same focus to drive new omnichannel and commercial outcomes in important areas, such as private brands, data and analytics, assortment optimization, digital marketing and sourcing. And we're looking forward to what we can create and deliver in those areas. Now over the past several years, we've proven the power of scaled platforms and have built capabilities that have allowed us to improve the connected customers' experience and continue to grow our business. Looking forward, we have an aggressive digital and commercial agenda to continue accelerating our Connected Customer strategy and to really position us for success. What I'd like to do now is lightly touch on our Retail Business Services support brand. I've talked about it before in terms of some of the functions that are in Retail Business Services. And while there are many, what I really want to highlight today is the focus that we have on IT. In IT, we're modernizing our technology and our infrastructure to enable us to win with customer-facing omnichannel capabilities. And we do this by promoting common systems, which allow us to be nimbler and to increase our speed to market. We've made great progress on our IT road map to develop scaled and integrated platforms with development underway on systems, such as a new finance and accounting system, our supply chain that we'll talk about later, e-commerce that I've already mentioned, frictionless checkout, moving to a perpetual inventory and our network capabilities for carrying all of our totally integrated commerce load. Now all of these will enable our organization to modernize and truly enable real-time operating environment, and this is so important for us as we think about the marketplace that we're in today and the omnichannel world that we compete in. Another significant transformation underway is within our newest of our support brands, which is ADUSA Supply Chain companies. In 2019, we launched our supply chain transformation, and we really were focused on bringing back our supply chain as we build out our omnichannel network. With these changes, we will not only have full control of our supply chain but an optimized network at scale, which will enable the local brands to better serve their omnichannel customers and create one of the largest supply chain networks on the East Coast. The transformation will continue to create value unlocks that will allow us to continue to invest in automation and digital capabilities and to lower our cost to serve and enable our direct-to-consumer relationships as we build this omnichannel network out. So what I'd like to do now is have Chris Lewis, our President of ADUSA Supply Chain, give us a little bit of an overview about what's going on in our supply chain.

Thanks, Kevin. The future is omnichannel. To compete, we must be able to serve customers in store, online and everywhere in between. Having the right infrastructure in place is critical to achieving our aspirations. We're now at the midpoint of our 3-year supply chain transformation journey to an integrated self-distributed network for the future. In late 2019, we embarked on this work, and we continue to deliver all the planned facility transitions on schedule despite the pandemic and unprecedented conditions in the supply chain. Through the hard work and dedication of teams across supply chain in all Ahold Delhaize U.S. companies, the network is now 65% self-managed, up from about 40% at the outset of the transformation. And we're on schedule to have 85% of the network in-house by the end of 2022. As we take back the supply chain, we're also building for the future. We're adding new facilities in key geographies to support our brands efficiently and effectively. By the end of 2022, the network will include 25 traditional distribution centers and food processing facilities, 28 e-commerce fulfillment centers and more than 1,500 click-and-collect locations. As we expand, we're deploying key technology capabilities to optimize the supply chain at scale. We have a fully deployed transportation management system, which is driving efficiency across the network, reducing overall miles on the road and getting product to stores to e-commerce centers faster. And we're well on our way to a full deployment of an innovative AI-enabled end-to-end forecasting and replenishment system, which will enable us to more precisely predict demand, enhance freshness and reduce waste. This fall, we also began piloting new warehouse management technology, which we believe can be scaled across the total network to further enhance effectiveness and drive out costs. We are confident these solutions are the right technology suite for the future of omnichannel food distribution. As supply chains around the world continue to grapple with labor shortages, we're one step ahead when it comes to addressing workforce challenges by augmenting with automation across the supply chain. First announced in 2020, we're on track to open 2 new fully automated frozen facilities next year to serve the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic markets. Sitting at roughly 275,000 square feet each, these facilities will each receive and ship 45 million cases of product annually. We're also leveraging robotics to equip our people. We continue to scale wearable robotic technology that reduces fatigue for distribution center workers and help them avoid with injuries. And we're piloting virtual reality technology for training to help reduce injuries, too. In support of Ahold Delhaize USA's omnichannel customer value proposition, supply chain is also enabling new capabilities through investments in automated e-commerce fulfillment. As you will hear from Nick Bertram, we're testing automated solutions like the one at The GIANT Company's Island Avenue site to unlock productivity and drive profitability in the supply chain. We've also evolved processes and ways of working for optimization. We've doubled down on collaboration across our companies and with suppliers. The ADvantage supplier collaboration program now includes more than 200 suppliers, exceeding partnership and financial expectations and driving solution-oriented thinking to ensure the best in-stock position for the U.S. brands and their omnichannel customers and launch new efficiency forward by an investment by programs. As we continue to grow and evolve, we do it with care for the local communities we serve and our environment. Across the supply chain, more than 1,500 FTEs have been added since January of this year. And these are good jobs with competitive pay, enhanced benefits and a culture of care and appreciation. We're also investing in associates to help them to continue to develop and help us launch new capabilities. Through our LEAD program, learning, education, academia and development, we deploy a comprehensive approach, including partnerships with some of the most notable colleges and universities to grow talent. We have taken a purposeful approach to sustainability through energy efficiency, recycling and even leveraging technology for waste reduction to ensure our facilities are sustainable for the future. The strategic locations of the 2 new fully automated frozen facilities will alone eliminate 3 million miles traveled annually. As Kevin mentioned earlier, it's been a challenging 18 months, but our people have exceeded expectations and achieved our goals time and time again. We are trusted to always deliver today and for our omnichannel future.

Well, thank you, Chris. And for these examples, you can see how the support brands are providing significant capabilities and value unlock to enable us in the marketplace. It's so important to us that our support brands really enable these capabilities. And now I'd like to discuss a few examples of what our local brands are doing to strengthen our omnichannel customer value proposition as they focus on our U.S. growth and leverage the platforms and capabilities that I just talked about. We're going to hear from 3 of our brand presidents, and they'll share examples of the work underway to build trust and to resonate with consumers. First, we'll hear from Food Lion. Starting more than a decade ago, Food Lion started to reposition their brand. And Food Lion continues to grow today in a very competitive market by connecting locally to the towns and cities they serve. And Meg Ham, the President of Food Lion, is going to give us an update on their omnichannel progress. And Food Lion is a remarkable turnaround story with 36 consecutive quarters of same-store sales growth. Food Lion will share how their brand strategy and culture fuels their omnichannel growth and continues to help them with winning locally across their more than 1,100-store network. So let's hear from Meg.

Thanks, Kevin. Food Lion opened its doors in 1957 with a very simple focus: providing the lowest food prices in North Carolina. With no-frill stores focused on helping people save money and put food on the table, it's still at the core what we do here every day. Since 2010, Food Lion has been on a journey of transformation to strengthen our position in the marketplace, which started with in-depth consumer marketplace and associate research identified the most important areas to strengthen Food Lion's position in our markets. Acting upon what we heard required meaningful business trade-offs and methodical, strategic discipline that still exists today. Let's explore some the key steps of our transformation that are fueling the momentum we have today. We developed our strategy, "Easy, Fresh and Affordable, you can count on Food Lion every day." It brings the omnichannel experience to life no matter how our customers choose to shop. We strengthened our core equity of low prices with significant price investments across the store. We continue to make price investments today in service of maintaining our low-price position and perception. By pioneering one of the first retail loyalty programs in the early 1990s, our industry-leading MVP program continues to create strong loyalty and equity for our brands. And we continue to strengthen its value to customers by allowing them engage in multiple ways to get personalized value, whether that's online, in-store kiosk or mailed straight to your door. We have a deep understanding of our customers' behaviors and preferences, enabled by our ability to data and analytics. And in 2018, we introduced our innovative digital Shop & Earn program, which has saved customers millions with personalized offers, which means the more you shop, the more you earn. We began our program to modernize and freshen our stores. By making responsible store-by-store financial investment decisions, we provide updated equipment that not only meets the needs of our growing assortment, but also helps us to achieve our sustainability goals. We're expanding our e-commerce capabilities that allow customers to shop when, where and how they want. And we're creating the modern, consistent shopping experience across our stores that our customers told us is so important to them. Our remodels have created the platform to evolve the store experience and continue to generate strong return on investment. A key focus over the past decade has been to enhance our overall assortment to remain relevant for our customers' evolving needs. We leverage internal and marketplace data to provide what our customers are looking for, including more natural, organic, plant-based and private brand items while keeping pace with the evolving trends. We're leveraging partnerships with our local suppliers to provide the unique local items that customers expect from their neighborhood Food Lion. And we're focused on improving our produce and home meal solutions offering because that's what customers tell us is most important to them. We work hard to keep our shopping experience up to date even outside of the remodel program. That's why we've created a continuous process that enables us to keep assortment up-to-date and implement innovative programs throughout the network. Customers are responding to these enhancements in their increased share of wallet with Food Lion gives us permission to go even further. Investing in our associates has been a critical component of our transformation journey. Food Lion's 82,000 associates understand their role in delivering our brand, our strategy and our culture across our 1,103 stores every day. Each associate is empowered to make decisions to put the customer at the center of all we do. At Food Lion, we are the towns and cities we serve. We are your local neighborhood grocery store. Our actions over the past decade have resulted in deeper trust, equity and loyalty, which generates strong financial momentum whether demonstrated by our achievement of 36 consecutive quarters or 9 years of positive same-store sales growth, substantial growth in our average weekly sales per store, continued year-over-year market share gains or the significant increase in sales per square foot. Our brand is strong and well positioned for future success. By continuing to listen to our customers and associates, we will confidently adapt and evolve our brand based on their changing needs. Executing our time-tested and proven blueprint will continue to strengthen our brand in a fiercely competitive marketplace. We are confident that by delivering our brand, our strategy and our culture, we are well positioned for continued success into the future.

Thank you, Meg. Food Lion's transformation story continues to be one of the most successful and really inspirational stories in our industry. As you can see from Food Lion, not only have we been successful in repositioning their local brand, we're also truly connecting to customers in the community in a unique way, providing the relevant local solutions for their busy lives in motion so that they can focus on the moments that matter. Now the Stop & Shop team is also embarking on its own brand repositioning journey. And this is led by Gordon Reid, our President of Stop & Shop. And the team continues to do a remarkable job of driving their omnichannel transformation. And Gordon is going to share details on Stop & Shop's ambition and expectations across their more than 400-store network, tapping into their more than a 100-year heritage as a local brand. Gordon?

Thank you, Kevin, and hello, everyone. My name is Gordon Reid, and I am the President of Stop & Shop, a position I've held for just over 2 years. And I'd like to take a few minutes today to walk you through the Stop & Shop strategy and our progress over the last few years. Let's start with a high-level overview of the business. Stop & Shop is the market leader with the highest share in our trade area. We operate more than 400 stores and 20 central online fulfillment centers throughout New England, New York, and New Jersey with the help of more than 60,000 dedicated associates. Over the last few years, we've focused on building our omnichannel vision and bringing our customers the food they love [ for ] how they live. And I would like to share with you the significant progress we have made. Stop & Shop's ongoing multiyear remodel program is a key component of our omnichannel strategy. Since we've begun a repositioning in 2018, we have completed over 120 remodels. One key component of a remodel is to deliver excellence in track. This includes expanding our product space and assortment, and making it easier for our customers to decide what's for dinner through the addition of quality meal solutions such as ready-to-heat [ entrees ], flatbread pizza, wing bars and sushi to name but a few. We know that our customers are more strapped for time than ever. So we continue to roll out digital solutions that make their omnichannel journeys as seamless as possible like our deli order ahead and digital menu boards. We are making our assortments even more relevant by using data-driven analytics to assess and adjust their assortments at the macro and micro space level. This includes adding more local and multicultural products to address shifting demographics and the emerging needs of the communities we serve. Our enhanced price and promotion strategies have improved their value messaging and made our stores easier to shop. We have added signage to enable shoppers to identify the value in our private-label choices, our strong promotional offers as well as our local organic and gluten-free products. Convenience is key. So we let you shop [indiscernible] in-store or online for pickup or delivery. Stop & Shop has leading e-commerce penetration with more than 360 click and collects covering over 90% of the fleet. Our delivery service covers 80% of recruitment, including same-day delivery to 40% of our customers through our own delivery service. Our migration to the Ahold Delhaize USA Prism platform, which you heard Kevin talk about earlier, enabled the launch of a new go rewards loyalty program in quarter 3 of 2020. The program has approximately 1.3 million members and has driven more than $300 million in incremental sales by offering customers a more personalized experience. The progress Stop & Shop has made has led to substantial gains in financial and customer experience metrics. Our remodeled stores are seeing an incremental sales growth of more than 6%. E-commerce penetration has grown by more than 350 basis points versus the start of 2020. NPS increased by over 4 points versus 2018 with strong performance in key drivers such as store [indiscernible] and appealing [indiscernible] overall service and fresh quality. This progress and positive momentum provide a solid foundation to pursue a significant growth opportunity in New York City. Our holistic New York City strategy focused on being uniquely local and includes remodeling stores to ensure customers have a great in-store experience, accelerating e-commerce to same-day delivery and pickup, optimizing assortment on a store-by-store basis and further target marketing to help drive neighborhood-specific messaging. Given our strong base of 25 Stop & Shop stores, a central fulfillment facility for delivery, and a network of [indiscernible] facilities, we have a unique opportunity to deploy a truly differentiated value proposition to the customers of New York City and surrounding areas. Stop & Shop has made significant progress, but we have further to go. So we are not slowing down, and we'll continue to build our omnichannel vision. We will bring our customers the food they love for how they live through an easy, fast and personalized experience. Thank you.

Well, thanks, Gordon. And as you can see, we have a significant focus at Stop & Shop as they transform to a truly omnichannel retailer. And we're working on a cohesive strategy for winning in the Greater New York City area through a dual brand effort at Stop & Shop and Fresh Direct. Bringing together the best of both brands and linking our digital and physical presence together, we're going to aggressively pursue our omnichannel capabilities for the Greater New York City area. And the teams really believe that the combined efforts will generate significant opportunity for synergies and customer experiences that will allow us to grow our combined market share in the area. Next, you'll hear from Nick Bertram, who is our President of The GIANT Company, and he's going to talk about how we're winning in the urban market of Philadelphia. And we believe that we can draw on these types of experiences of how we win in the Philadelphia urban market and apply it to other urban markets, such as I was just talking about in the Greater New York area. So let's hear from Nick and his team on how they're doing.

I'm Nicholas Bertram, President of The GIANT Company, and I'm joined today by Glennis Harris, our Senior Vice President of Customer Experience. At The GIANT Company, we promise to be designed for the way families live now. This promise ensures we design our brand experience in whatever way is needed to be there for today's families. With the world around us constantly changing, being mindful of the world now is how we ensure we stay relevant, ahead of the curve, to be there for the families that depend on us for the future.

And a big part of that future is omnichannel, offering a strong customer value proposition through a personalized experience that extends beyond the physical store and seamlessly integrates into the digital world; allowing customers to shop how, when, and where they want. At The GIANT Company, we began expanding and investing in convenient multichannel and multi-format solutions before the world and customer behavior shifted in 2020. We are proud of our choice rewards program with tools and offerings that create a consistent and personalized experience, both in-store and online, resulting in increased loyalty and share growth.

Personalization really comes to life in Philadelphia, our first true omnichannel market with immense diversity and customer expectations and opportunity. Today, we'll share some of our strategic initiatives that have driven growth, customer loyalty and career opportunities in Philadelphia with investments in customer-centric solutions, jobs, community partnerships, philanthropic giving and volunteerism. A great example is the launch of our small urban format, GIANT Heirloom Market, which is focused on fresh products, local partnerships, and digital tools, creating a curated range within unique architecture. This is the first time that our brand was in Center City, Philadelphia, bringing forward a new format for GIANT that aligns with our strategy, and is based on what customers said they want. We want our brand to become part of the fabric of the city. And you'll see it through local growers and purveyors. It's not just innovation in our stores but also on how we serve others beyond our walls and reach. We see local vendors as local families, too, not only unlocking our potential to grow, but also their own. GIANT Heirloom Market's hyper-local approach has received positive brand publicity and favorably impacted the city. We have more locations in development, and you'll see our latest innovations when we open Fashion District this winter.

While the offering that to GIANT Heirloom Market is uniquely curated for its neighborhood, the learnings are universal and helped us grow in a big way with the opening of our first full-size GIANT in Center City, Philadelphia with our Riverwalk location. This urban 2-level flagship is a shining example of our company's innovative and courageous spirit, our passion for the city, and its families, and our love for food. And our growth will continue with more GIANT stores in Philadelphia, this year at Cottman Avenue and another on Columbus Boulevard.

Of course, our opportunity to compete fully in Philadelphia would not be possible without the introduction of GIANT Direct, which enables convenient online ordering for pickup and delivery, key in enabling the personalization our customers seek and what differentiates us as an omnichannel brand. Prior to the pandemic, we had already been proactively investing in click and collects. At Riverwalk, we have the offering front and center with a GIANT Direct pickup station, and now Island Avenue, first automated e-commerce fulfillment center opened in November will round out our citywide presence. This facility enables same-day and rapid delivery, not just to Philadelphia, but it extends our ability to expand into new markets. Through technology, the facility will be 57% more productive than our manual selection facilities, allowing us to be more competitive and get ahead of demand. Over the last few years, our team has launched 2 new brands and gained share in the Philadelphia DMA by offering a local assortment in the same grade value customers expect from GIANT. Our team has fallen in love with Philadelphia. And the challenge is staying relevant to families through an omnichannel experience. Because at The GIANT Company, we are fully dedicated to connecting families for a better future. We have rallied around this sentiment, not only growing our brand, but expanding how we make a difference every day.

Well, thanks, Nick and Glennis. That was a great update on how we're actually applying many of the attributes of the connected customer strategy to win in Philadelphia. And today, what we've tried to show you is how we're differentiating in key areas. And winning in local markets in the U.S. is part of our omnichannel transformation, and how we're positioned to really serve customers' lives in motion as we deliver this connected customer strategy. We hope that we've demonstrated to you how we are building size and scale to enable a connected customer future, providing the capabilities and the services from our support brands to enable our local brands to win. We've shown you how our local brands serve their customers and unlock value to win in their markets. And we've given examples of how The GIANT Company, Food Lion and Stop & Shop are creating uniquely local individualized shopping experience for their customers every day. And we've shown you how local brands serve their customers and unlock value to win in their markets. We gave examples of how The GIANT Company, Food Lion and Stop & Shop are creating uniquely local individualized shopping experience for their customers every day. Through these examples, we've also shown you how we are driving growth in new target markets like Philadelphia with new formats. Given that we're in many of the top urban markets on the East Coast, we believe that we can take these learnings and bring them to other brands. And while these are just a few of the examples, I could give many more, including at our GIANT Food or our Hannaford brands. You see, each of our brands are actively working to deliver the connected customer strategy. Through local brand experiences, we'll continue to differentiate and grow market share in the East Coast markets because we connect with our customers in the most meaningful way. We've shown you how we are uniquely structured to activate the connected customer strategy by delivering a local experience with strong community connections through our local brands and the significant scale and benefits through our platforms built by our support brands. Each of these brands understand their local markets and the community needs such as relevant assortment, pricing and services that are tailored to the neighborhoods in which they operate. And all of this is grounded in goodness with our leadership position in sustainability, as I mentioned earlier, being recognized in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. The connected customer strategy is also deeply rooted in our global 4-part promise that Frans covered earlier today. It's our promise that unites us all around the same goals and ambitions for our organization. We really believe we have a very exciting future ahead as the brands continue to earn the loyalty and trust of our customers year after year. So I want to thank you for listening to our omnichannel story. I'm very pleased I've had the opportunity to meet with you today to share a little bit about our journey. And now I'll turn the program over to Wouter, and he'll talk about our Ahold Delhaize European brands. And I want to thank you very much for the time you've given me to hear our story about AD USA.

Thank you, Kevin, and good morning and good afternoon. I am looking forward to sharing all the initiatives and plans we have for our European and Indonesia business. We have seen a tremendous change in our external environment. However, I am very pleased that our omnichannel transformation has delivered outstanding results since the Investor Day, which we hosted in 2018 in New York. We have a fascinating business with a lot of potential for growth. But before I go into that, I would love to reflect a bit on the last 1.5 years. I'm also very proud of what we've been able to achieve together. Our local brands have done an amazing job to adapt to the sudden changes in the world around us. The pandemic put our people and our strategic choices really to the test. And we were able to deal with it. And in the meantime, always -- and always deliver a safe shopping environment for our customers, our communities and, of course, also for all our colleagues. I cannot thank all our teams in Europe and Indonesia enough for this outstanding job. It's, unfortunately, not over. We still need to deal with COVID-19, and we just don't know how it ends but also the volatility, the structural political changes and the economic uncertainty, which will impact all our behaviors. And as a company, but also as a person, I am very mindful about the impact that this will have on our increasing business responsibility. As Frans and Kevin both mentioned earlier, here in Europe, we also see a shift in consumer behavior: increased home consumption, more digital connectivities, price and value focus, and an increased interest on healthy living and eating. All these things matters and are really in the heart of our strategy. So before I get into it, let me start with an update on our footprint in Europe, and we'll dive right into the specifics of our strategy for the next few years. Across our region, we have 11 great local brands with more than 5,000 stores. We are, of course, also super proud of all our 170,000 associates, which we count on every day to work relentlessly to serve our customers. Omnichannel, our key strategic driver, has already yielded an industry-leading 12% e-commerce penetration, including bol.com. Besides growth, we are also focusing on gaining market share in all our key markets. This year has been another great year for our business. Some key KPIs we are proud of include our continuous e-commerce growth, EUR 7 billion net consumer sales, a 30% growth by the end of this year. Besides e-commerce, we also stay focused on strengthening our footprint across the board with more than 250 store openings in the EU and 130 store remodels. We also now have more than 10 million addressable cardholders. They represent about 50% of our sales. But for '25, we also have some -- quite some ambitious goals. First of all, a growth of online to EUR 50 billion, and a CAGR of 20%. We will also to continue to strengthen our footprint by opening more than 800 stores throughout Europe. And by '25, we will have more than 20 million addressable cardholders, doubling from where we are in '21. And they will represent about 70% of our sales. But how are we going to do that? What is our magic here? First of all is we are going to raise our game and improve the customer value proposition or CVP, as we call it, in all our brands. And this all starts with our unwavering commitment to improving our fresh and healthy proposition. And some very good examples are all our bakery and deli upgrades, which are critical drivers of frequency for our customers. For example, at Albert, we have improved all more than 330 deli and bakery departments across all our supermarkets and our hypermarkets. Another nice and good example is the introduction of Nature's Promise, a range, a new range that contains no artificial flavors, colors or any preservatives. Also important for our customers is our strong local link and our connection in the offering. To meet this desire, we have significantly increased local delicacies in the assortment. And a nice example that is in Mega-Image in Romania, where we've introduced Gusturi Romanesti, products that are made with ingredients according to the tradition of original Roman recipes. A further cool example is that we have turned Delhaize into Belhaize earlier this year throughout the country to promote more than 1,600 of our Belgium producers and suppliers. Broadening the range of assortment is also critically important at bol.com, where we have ambitious goals to increase the network, our partner network by growing to more than 75,000 plaza partners by '25. And Margaret will tell you all about it in the bol section. Another important pillar of our CVP is our own brand proposition. Customers keep telling us every day that they love the attention of detail, and how we apply and build our own brands. And therefore, we keep on expanding it, and we keep on improving it. Similarly, we are also focused in our CVP on price investments. We will introduce around 1,500 SKUs of price [indiscernible] in all our brands in order to improve our price reality and our price investments. On the personalization front, we've also made some great steps, and we have now implemented loyalty programs everywhere. Last year, we've done [ Muj Albert ] in Czech Republic, My Super Indo, of course, in Indonesia and My Maxi at [ Delhaize ] Serbia. And of course, I cannot leave the CVP topic about -- talking about our stores. Improve the convenience of all our stores, we are investing in electronic shelf labeling and self-scan. By the end of '25, 80% of our stores will be almost digital. To support our CVP, we are also building new scalable capabilities for the next 4 to 5 years to come. Starting with our overall operational excellence. One important program to fund everything is to continue our successful Save For Our Customers program, which basically has 4 pillars. The first one is sourcing, our joint sourcing. And we are aiming to especially focus on our own brands, to also subsidize the price rate program. And we are aiming for EUR 1 billion of value and joint sourcing by '25. Next to sourcing, also managing our cost is very important. And we are continuously seeking for new automated solutions like chatbots or virtual assistance to really manage and decrease our cost where we can. The third pillar is to optimize our merchandising capabilities by improving the pricing, the promo and assortment management with one shared tool that we have implemented in all our brands. All these initiatives, and there are many more to mention will drive more than EUR 0.5 billion year by year by '25. Besides our important Save For Our Customers program, we're also building a omnichannel solutions. We basically look at 3 models: the full service model, the compact model and now also testing the fast delivery model. And we are testing it currently in Mega-Image in Romania and Alfa Beta in Greece. These 3 models, the back office will be serviced by one management warehouse solution. And in the middle of '23, we're also experimenting on a first mechanized solution for that. As I mentioned earlier, we have also introduced loyalty programs everywhere. And we are improving and further enhancing the loyalty features and sharing also the best practices to all our brands so that we collectively can move towards those 20 million addressable cardholders with generating the 70% of sales penetration in '25. All these innovative, digital, scalable capabilities are not only there to improve our business and serve our customers. But they're also there to help to drive our health and sustainability agenda. And I have some nice examples because we are very proud of the results of the Super Plus program at Delhaize that combines the features of NutriScore and of course, the loyalty program to drive healthy sales by giving more discounts to customers when they choose healthier products. Also the digital signage, the ESLs, will help us to implement dynamic pricing. And dynamic pricing can be very specific and can help us to reduce our food waste. Implementing smart cooling will help us not only to reduce our CO2 footprint but also lower our energy bill. And new innovative packaging systems at bol.com will not only help bol.com to increase the delivery speed, but can also reduce the amount of cardboard that we use. So to conclude, I have shared with you how we are improving our CVP and we'll do in the future, but also how we are building scalable and exportable capabilities. But we have also a unique situation in the Benelux, and that gives us an opportunity to even stronger collaborate to service our customers better. And I will tell you more about that later in the program. Besides all these beautiful plans and initiatives at the end of the day is, of course, our customers, who decide whether they want to shop with us or not. But I do believe that we are in a real good position to win in each of our markets, not only because we have great, good and exciting plans, but we also have great teams in place everywhere with talented leaders and with high-performance teams who really know how to put customer focus into action. And therefore, it's really nice to listen to Marit and her story from Albert Heijn. And later on, we'll also listen to Margaret and the story from bol.com. Albert Heijn has always been a front-runner in many ways in the omnichannel transformation, in the digital journey, but also in presenting new ways to offer customer value. But also I think important thing to understand that Albert Heijn is a long history and a great ambition on health and sustainability. So let's hear from Marit how we are making an impact on the lives of millions of customers every day in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Thank you, Wouter. It's exciting times at Albert Heijn in the Netherlands and in Belgium. We play a vital role in the market of food and drinks. And over the next few minutes, I will share with you the journey we have been on over the last couple of years and highlight some of the key differentiators as to why we are well positioned for future growth. Albert Heijn has evolved into Europe's clear omnichannel food retail leader. Be it our store network or online touch points, we have developed a suite of capabilities that are second to none. We interact and transact with our customers single day every week of the year, over 15 million times each week. And it is our ambition to be everywhere and anywhere at the touch of a button for our customers. We have doubled our e-comm sales over the last 2 years and made great strides in doing so in a more profitable manner and how successful Albert Heijn, the #1 shopping in the Netherlands and with over 3 million multi-app users. We are also where our customers are, having grown our store network to well over 1,000 stores, covering over 90% of Dutch households. We still see room to grow. For example, in the next 12 months, we will rapidly expand a number of our high traffic to-go format locations from 100 to 200. Our innovation and growth has resulted in omnichannel food, retail, power [indiscernible] in the Netherlands with over EUR 15 billion in sales. And to put that into context, this is well over 35% market share. We are growing rapidly online with an impressive 10% e-comm sales penetration. And most important, every night, we fill over 6 million plates with our broad and innovative food offering and that considers the responsibility. Performance and purpose go hand-in-hand. We strive every day to achieve our important sustainability commitments, and that starts with the customers we serve. With our long history of food and drinks over 135 years, we have an important role to play in society. And our goal is to provide healthy and affordable options for all. By combining our healthy offering with personal insights, we are leading the plant-based, organic and local food transition. And for example, we doubled our offering in vegan options and launched the Albert Heijn Food First app. Food First is our Albert Heijn-branded lifestyle platform with personal challenges and inspiration to help everyone creating a balanced and healthy lifestyle, not only with the focus on eating, but also with support on sleeping habits, physical training and reducing stress. For years, we have been working hard through our own brand offering to help people become healthier, reducing tons of sugar, fat, and salt, small step for customers but with a great impact as a market leader. And last year, we also actively started to add fibers in over 100 of our products. In the Netherlands, farmers and growers are under increasing pressure. They have to deal with rising demands when it comes to the environment, and they often have no fixed earning capacity. And this means that their income fluctuates every year, each season. And fortunately, we at Albert Heijn have a unique and long-term partnership with more than 1,000 farmers who work exclusively with us and for us. We've built strong relationships with these family-owned businesses, many of them for up to 40 years. And in our [ better food ] programs, we pay them a premium on top of the price to invest in various sustainability programs. Last but not least, we are working every day to lower our carbon footprint and reduce packaging. For each converted store, carbon is reduced by over 50%. We operate solely on green energy from Dutch wind mills, and we are expanding our solar panels on rooftops. And to our light electrical vehicles, we are working towards emission-free transport in larger cities for 2025. Our strong and relevant customer value proposition drives the continued growth at Albert Heijn. And at the heart of this is our stores. And our new store format puts the spotlight firmly on the ease of shopping, the digitalization of the in-store experience and above all else, a full focus on our fresh assortment and product innovations. We have already rolled this out in over 350 stores, and the response from customers has been great. The new format stores are growing significantly faster in both sales and customer accounts. We have a strong track record of effectively driving price and value perception to our storewide price [indiscernible] as well as our widely recognized bonus weekly promotions. And on top of that, Albert Heijn is the own brand in favor, especially with our best-in-class fresh offering, closely linked with the long-term fresh partnership we have maintained for many years. But most importantly, I would like to highlight my 100,000 colleagues. At Albert Heijn, we operate our stores with industry-leading efficiency as you have struck the balance of using data and technology, while at the same time, creating a very positive and great place to work. In recent years, we have won multiple awards for best part-time in the Netherlands, something we are very proud of, especially now in 1 out of 5 people in the Netherlands has, at some point, works for Albert Heijn. And this is how we create true ambassadors. While Albert Heijn is the clear leading omnichannel retailer of the Netherlands, we are always looking to densify our network and adding new touch points. And I'm particularly proud of the acquisition of the [ 38 ] game stores earlier this year. This provided us with an excellent opportunity to call on many white spots in our map, Albert Heijn blue. And we are currently converting those same stores with a rate of 4 to 5 a week and expect to finalize conversion before the important December period. And it has been great to see the enthusiastic customer reaction to the revitalized stores. And I can already say we have a sales performance that matches that enthusiasm. But there's more. At Albert Heijn, we are also growing our foodservice and high-traffic propositions, including 100 [indiscernible] and offices. Our innovative fresh offering provides offices with a modern alternative to traditional catering. And when it comes to e-comm, I'm really excited on how our e-comm proposition is playing a key role in the overall integrated consumer journey. We see lots of upside potential as more customers become truly omnichannel. And let me give you an example. Albert Heijn customers that start shopping online will spend 40% more with us than they did before. And importantly, our insight shows that they do not fully switch channel. Even our most frequent e-commerce customers still do 1/4 of their spending in our physical stores. They become more loyal to Albert Heijn overall. And that is why it is important to foster our e-comm growth for the next year. It creates a strong customer connection and has allowed us to drive our absolute market leadership in both sales and customer recognition. Looking ahead, we have the ambition to double our e-comm sales in the coming years again. We will boost e-comm operational capacity for further growth, and we will enhance operational efficiency to state-of-the-art mechanization. And we will extend our reach with current and new propositions, covering over 90% of Dutch households as well as fueling strong growth in Belgium. Our high ambitions, coupled with the right capacity, the best rated app and the outstanding 360-degree service experience will allow us to leverage our market leadership going forward. But our innovation and growth doesn't just come from e-commerce. We take pride in the digitalization of the full customer journey throughout our stores. Over the last few years, we have built a strong track record in digitalization and invested heavily in this area. We have fully rolled out self-scan to all our stores. And currently, the percentage of transactions using self-scan leads the industry at a solid 63%. We've digitalized the self-checkout, the shelf labels, customer receipts and put in digital screens for inspiration and to enhance the customer journey. We are moving towards fully paperless stores. We are also deploying digitalization in ways that help us achieve our sustainability goals. A very nice example of this is our dynamic markdown initiative. Here, in-house developed algorithms work with our electronic shelf labels provide dynamic markdowns of key fresh assortments in over 100 stores, supporting our efforts to minimize food waste and optimize overall chain-related costs. And in other key digital development, we are proud of Albert Heijn is our app. Back in 2019, we developed a modern and new perspective on loyalty, pivoting our Albert Heijn app to become a true loyalty builder. And our app is positioned to be the key interaction point with our customers, wherever they are. We digitalize all our safety campaigns ranging from nonfood campaigns to e-tickets to our money saving programs. And we've developed a highly tailored personal offer for them, combining in-house data science, gamification, and strong offers to drive increased customer spending. We built recipe and inspiration functionality in the app, which enables our customers to get tailor-made recipes directly shoppable as everything is fully embedded in the app. And just last week, we launched our new Albert Heijn premium paid subscription. And this is a new exciting step in our loyalty. This paid subscription and not extra discounts, doubles the speed of digital safety and unlock the power of our Albert Heijn ecosystem. And for example, with discounts on [ Albert Heijn ] loyalty card and bol.com select. And we're even partnering up with partners outside the Albert Heijn ecosystem. I truly believe our app is a key differentiator in the market and already is the leading app in the Netherlands at 3 million active users and very high [ FPV ] scores. Our leading position in digitalization, our active app users, the in-house capabilities and the first-party data is also unlocking new business opportunities. And we have built an in-house retail media agency, allowing endemic and nonendemic parties to access our reach and enhance the customer journey. And most recently, we launched sponsored products being the first in Europe to do so. With new business opportunities, potentially growing beyond EUR 100 million per year, we see further opportunities to grow in this space as we work even closer in the future with other [indiscernible] brands. And that's something that Wouter will come back to later on today once you've heard from Margaret on bol.com. Finishing up, we are on an exciting journey at Albert Heijn. And what I would like you to take away from today is that Albert Heijn is the omnichannel food tech player in the Netherlands, with a strong proven track record in sales and profitability. We've established ourselves as the leading grocery platform for daily needs, combining successful relevant store network with fresh and digitalized stores. We are the leading from the front of food e-comm with a strong loyalty program. And our commitment is to do all of this while staying the absolute #1 in health and sustainability. Thank you very much for your time today.

Thank you, Wouter and Margaret, for sharing all the great initiatives you are driving. On that note, I'm very pleased to introduce you to Margaret Versteden [ van Duijn ], CEO of bol.com. bol.com is at a very exciting phase of its journey. So first, let's get into some more detail. We promised you that already earlier to do this at this Investor Day. And then I will come back and share more details about our intention to sub-IPO bol.com as announced in our press release of today. So take it away, Margaret.

Thanks, Frans. Now that's going to be exciting and busy times ahead for bol.com with the announcement of the sub-IPO this morning. But actually, what I'm even more excited about is where we've come from and where we're going as a business. So let's take a look at that. bol.com operates in the Netherlands and Belgium. And these are 2 very exciting e-commerce markets. Not only do we have very high Internet penetration and smartphone usage, but we also already have the majority of our consumers buying online, 87% in the Netherlands and about 70% in Belgium. And what's really unique in our countries is the fact that actually most of these purchases are being made locally. In fact, in the Netherlands, 90% of all online sales are with local websites. If you add to that some very attractive geographic density, then you've got a fantastic e-commerce market. If you look at the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium called Flanders, we have about 500 inhabitants per square kilometer. That's 4x out of France and twice that of Germany. So let's now take a step back in time to when it all started for bol.com. We actually started the business in 1999 as an online bookstore. And we've been around so long, we've actually helped to shape the online e-commerce market in the Netherlands. 5 years later, we started to expand into other categories. In 2011, we also expanded to the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. And then in 2012, we were purchased by Ahold Delhaize, and this is when things really took off. This enabled us to launch our third-party platform business that enabled the acceleration of further category expansion as well as expanding to new services for our partners. In 2020, we also completed our geographic expansion into Belgium by launching in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. We are the clear #1 market leader. Since our purchase by Ahold Delhaize in 2012, we have grown from a EUR 400 million business to this year being a EUR 5.5 billion net consumer sales. This growth has been based on our platform business, which has grown at more than 100% in this period. Today, our sales are 60% platform sales. And we're also profitable. Our EBITDA this year will land at EUR 150 million to EUR 170 million this year. Not only are we the #1 market leader, but that leadership is very, very strong. And why is that? It's because this is our home. We have no other job to do apart from win the hearts and minds of Dutch and Belgium customers and partners. And we do. Our customers love us. If you take a look at our relational NPS versus other platforms, we stand out. In the Netherlands compared to the next highest scoring platform, you see a ratio of 30:1. And in Belgium with platforms or potentially a little bit further, even there, we have a 2:1 ratio. In our case, we really focus on ensuring that our consumers can find absolutely everything they're looking for with our 34 million unique products. They never have to go anywhere else to shop for price. So why is this important? Why is it important that our customers can find the right products quickly at the right price and get it delivered at home with no hassle? It's important because many of our customers are struggling, particularly young families. They are trying to combine careers and home life. And every 5 minutes that we can give back to them, 5 minutes of not having to search for a product, 5 minutes of not having to compare prices or 50 minutes of not having to go out to the store, they add up to hours. And the hours help to make daily life easier. And this matters. It matters because it also helps with gender equality. It helps to ensure that families can run their daily lives even easier and that everybody can then use their energy and bring their full selves to the table. They can use those minutes and those hours to spend on the things that they love. And our partners love us, too. If you take a look at partner brand preference, then you'll see that bol.com again outshines the competition. In the Netherlands, we have a 5.5x higher brand preference than our nearest competitor platform. And in Belgium, that's 3x as well. All of this leads us to have a very strong market position. In fact, we estimate that our market share is as big as the #2, 3 and 4 players all combined. And we continue to grow our market share, growing at 1 to 2 points per year. This leadership is built on our platform flywheel, which is probably not that different to other platform businesses around the world. But what is really different is how we localize it for our local markets. Let's take a look at how we do that. Let's start with our brand. We have enormous brand awareness, and we are actually a household name in the Netherlands and Belgium. In the Netherlands, we have more than 90% brand awareness. And in the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, 85%. In the French-speaking part of Belgium, it's a little lower because we only launched there last year. And at around 35%, we have lots and lots of opportunity to grow. Our brand is so strong. It's actually been named the best retail brand in the Netherlands for the last 6 years running. And that comes because we are deeply rooted into our local markets, and we have an enormous likability factor. We really focus on those local elements that we don't think can be replicated anywhere else. A great example of this is our St. Nicholas campaign Anywhere else in the world, you might think that you buy toys for your kids on the 25th of December. But in the Netherlands and parts of Belgium, actually, we buy our toys for our kids for the 5th of December, completely different holiday at a completely different time. At bol.com, we've really tailored our approach to this holiday. And so we've created a dedicated toys book with 200 pages of toys pleasure for adults and for kids. We have games, we have quizzes. We even have a TV show on Nickelodeon connected to the book. And of course, with QR codes, you can easily buy anything you may wish. And it really works. Families who use the book actually by 2.5x more with us than families that don't. And we have enormous distribution helped by our sister brands in Albert Heijn and Delhaize. All of this leads us to be a very likable brand. And I think it's really important to really get a feeling for what that looks like. So let's take a look actually at our recent St. Nicholas campaign. [Presentation]

Just fabulous. But if you happen to come from another part of the world and you're thinking at this point in time, what are those guys talking about, that's actually okay because this campaign is really tuned into local consumer insights and local humor. Last year St. Nicholas campaign actually won 6 different advertising awards, and we believe that this one is even better. This fantastic brand is, of course, built on an outstanding customer proposition. With 43 million products, our Dutch and Belgian consumers can find pretty much everything that they are looking for, and they can always find it at a fair price. On top of that, what they really love about us is how reliable we are and the fact that they can always count on us for service. In fact, we deliver more than 95% of our packages in full and on time. The average for our market is only 85%, and we're part of that average. So you can imagine how much more reliable bol.com is. We really pride ourselves on our customer service and being really close to our customers. Things don't go wrong very often, but if they do, we want to be able to call, we have WhatsApp, email us at any moment in the day. Our customer service is open 24/7. And in fact, if you give us a call, 75% of the time, your call will be picked up within 30 seconds. Now compare that to other global platforms, where you'll be lucky to even find a phone number, let alone talk to somebody in your local language. On top of this, we're also the best in the market at fast delivery. We offer not only next day, but also same-day, Sunday and evening delivery. On top of all of this, we also offer a select loyalty program. With this subscription, you can get free delivery on all of those great last-mile services I just spoke about. There's a point system to help you save, and there's lots of exclusive deals. We continue to expand this program, and it's really working. Over the last 2 years, we've had a CAGR of 80%, and members buy more. Each select member buys on average EUR 200 per annum more with bol.com. And once a select member, always a select member. Our retention is in the 90s, and it continues to improve. If we then turn to our partners, we are passionate about being there for the local entrepreneur, 47,000 partners who work with us from the Netherlands and Belgium. And the people you're seeing here on the screen, they're actual partners of ours, people who have come in to our studio and taken their time to help us with our marketing materials. Our partners come in to help us also with innovation in the discovery process of how we can make better tooling for them. And they appreciate the fact that we can bring them [ 30 ] million customers in the Netherlands and Belgium. But on top of that, we are there for them. We help them to grow their businesses. In fact, we have more than 100 partner service team members who are there to answer their calls day in and day out. The top 2,000 also have an account manager who's really helping them to shape their business. And you can see that this is really working. Over the last 2 years, our platform business has grown by 60% per annum. Our size and scale gives us the opportunity to actually help our partners be more successful by offering them distinctive services. We offer a full logistics service, but perhaps even more interestingly, we offer also a last-mile only service. Why? Because we came to the insight that not all Dutch and Belgium partners actually want to outsource their warehousing, but really want to get rid of the hassle of the last mile. With our last-mile only service, our customers can actually order all the way up to midnight. We then pick up the packages from our partners in the morning, and we deliver them in our same-day network. This means for the customer, they're ordering at midnight and receiving it the next day. Next to our logistics services, we've also developed advertising services to help our partners and brands be highly visible to customers. Last year, we launched our sponsored products for partners, and this has been a great success. In fact, already more than 30% of our top partners are already using our advertising services. No description of the bol.com business model would be complete without talking about our culture and our team. Now although we may be 100% focused on the Netherlands and Belgium, don't be mistaken. Behind that is a world-class team. We have 58 nationalities working at bol.com, and almost half of our teammates are working in innovation and tech. For the last 3 years, we've been named the Best Tech Employer in the Netherlands. And this is important because we need to add another 1,000 tech teammates in the next 3 years. bol.com is a really special place to work and to belong. We really believe in an autonomous culture, in small purpose-driven teams. And we have enormously high engagement in our teams. In fact, we get an 8 out of 10 on all of our engagement surveys. And we would really say that this is our secret sauce. This is something that really enables us to innovate faster and better for our customers and for our partners. As proud as we are of everything that we've achieved until today, if you ask any of the team at bol.com, they would tell you, this is just the beginning. There is ample opportunity in our markets for our continued growth. If we first take a look at the online market, although we have high penetration, certainly higher than countries such as Germany and France, we still see that there is enormous room for growth if you compare us to more mature markets such as the U.K. or the U.S. And in fact, post COVID, we are still assuming we will grow the market considerably. Now within that market share, there is more than enough room for bol.com. Why? Because what you can see in the Netherlands and Belgium is actually there's still quite fragmented market, and there's a lot of room for consolidation. We believe that as the #1 platform, we are in the prime position to help the consolidation of the market and help more of those local players come on to our platform. As we work in small purpose-driven teams at any moment in time, there are hundreds of initiatives going on to improve our business model and our flywheel. But really, there are 3 key game changes that will help us accelerate our market leadership. The first game changer is that there is significant room for us to grow in category depth and breadth. If we take a look at our top customers, we can see that they actually buy 6x more frequently than the average customer. And they also buy in 3x as many categories. This creates an enormous opportunity for us. And we'd really like to capture that opportunity by continuing to expand our select program. And in fact, we're aiming to have 2.5x the number of select members in 2025. The second game changer is to expand our advertising services. And here, too, there is ample opportunity in the market. In fact, the European retail media market is expected to grow by more than 3.5x between 2020 and 2025. And if you then zoom into the Netherlands and Belgium, we are the best positioned to take a lion's share of that opportunity. Why? Because we have the best rich shopping data, and we have the trust of our consumers and our partners. Here too, if you consider the collaboration with the other Benelux brands, there's an even greater opportunity. The third game changer is to scale our logistics services. And this one is the gift that keeps on giving because not only do we help our partners, but we also help our customers. By doubling our warehouse footprint, we can enable 4x as many SKUs to be available next day for our consumers. This means that more than 90% of all of our deliveries will be facilitated by bol.com. And that means the fantastic quality and reliability that our customers love us for. On top of all of this, we are committed to having 100% CO2-neutral last-mile delivery. So bringing it all together, our 2025 ambition is to double our net consumer sales and to do this while preserving our profitability and ensuring that we also double our EBITDA. With all of our logistics investments, there will be 3x as many shipments being facilitated by bol.com. And in fact, in order to achieve this, we will 4x the amount of investment to ensure that we can have this continued growth. We are very excited about our future because for bol.com, this really is just the beginning. So now on to the rest of the program with Frans.

Thank you, Margaret. You said it nicely. This is really just the beginning. The digital market in the Benelux is highly effective. bol.com has a strong heritage and culture, which is some of the most attractive elements of this company, for associates, customers, business partners and once the sub-IPO is the case also for shareholders. As a management board, we always consider the best way forward for strategic value creation. And based on an extensive and thorough review we have been working on for some time, we have decided to capitalize on the strong growth and strength of bol.com and intend to explore and sub-IPO. We will provide further information in due course once preparations have been finalized. But a few details of interest are the following: the sub-IPO will entail a listing of a limited interest on the Euronext Amsterdam, and it is expected to occur sometime in the second half of 2022, subject to multiple internal and external factors, including market conditions. Ahold Delhaize will retain a long-term significant controlling interest in bol.com. For bol.com, this creates direct access to capital to fund its accelerated growth strategy with a clear profile as a consumer tech company whilst continuing to expand its strategic partnership and collaboration with the other Ahold Delhaize brands in the Benelux. So let's talk more about that now. As we unleash the potential and power of bol.com, we will also step up and invest more in collaboration across the Ahold Delhaize Benelux brands. We have a one-of-a-kind opportunity to create a truly unique platform and with that new and cool customer journeys. So let me hand over to Wouter to share our ideas on how this bigger Benelux picture might look like.

Thank you, Frans. There is no doubt we have a unique position in the Dutch and Belgium market. Following years of careful development and investment, our 5 brands have similar strong positioning: all of them trusted local brands, all of them focused on convenience, and all of them offering an unrivaled broad assortment. Together, every day, we fulfill almost all food and nonfood needs with our strong omnichannel infrastructure, providing a powerful backbone. Combined, we have almost 3,000 stores and more than 1,000 pickup points. We support all kinds of shopping journeys from single-item shopping to full shopping baskets. And combined, we have more than 35 million products in our assortments. The last couple of years, the brands have already been working together on several initiatives. A couple of examples, single sign-on to make shopping easier, joint delivery subscriptions for extra value, using the 1,000-plus pickup points at all our stores at Albert Heijn and Delhaize. And we sell also gift cards like bol.com gift cards at Albert Heijn and Delhaize stores. When we look at the overlap of our current customers, there is clearly a lot of potential when you look at these numbers. In the Netherlands, we have more than 5 million who shop at Albert Heijn and bol.com, and 1 million at Delhaize and bol.com. Besides the obvious cross-shopping opportunities, there is also a potential to create more unique and interesting loyalty building occasions. As always, we see this through the customer lens, of course. But for us and for our customers, 3 things are clearly important when we are collaborating. It's about more convenience, more value, and more relevance. So let me take you through some of the examples and the opportunities that we see and also working on. A linked account, which will make it much easier to connect with all our brands, an easy interconnection between brands while shopping. A very important element of convenience is payments. whether it be shared payment options or a joint checkout, something we work on as well. And fourth, in the future, we would also like to look at delivery and returns. In a more joint and holistic way, this will be, of course, not only convenient for our customers, but also very good from a sustainability point of view. In addition, we can also further improve the customer relevancy across the shopping journeys that we have right now, introducing new cross-brand promotions and events by building joint subscription and loyalty programs with offers and discounts for our most loyal and frequent customers. And these initiatives will also open up all kinds of new digital services and partnership opportunities, which we can, of course, explore further within the brands and also without. To bring this to life, we have a nice example of a customer journey of Sam, Charlie and Alex, just as an illustration. Having a new baby is an important milestone in our lives, where customers have the natural and almost instantaneous tendency to change their shopping behavior. With true collaboration in this case with [indiscernible], Albert Heijn and bol, we can make the life of Sam, Charlie and even Alex much more convenient, increasing more value and towards and relevant part of them. Our focus for the collaboration is really looking at those moments that matter, those big customer impacts and life-changing event. So it's like moving house or retirement, where we can really make a difference. By focusing on customer journeys and combining all the relevant data surrounding them, this also gives us the opportunity to build a joint media proposition. Given our scale, this potentially means combined with all the brands that we are probably the #4 publishing player in the Netherlands, in terms of reach after the likes of Google, Facebook and [ DPG ]. This enables us to be a one-stop shop for agencies and big publishers alike, which is a huge opportunity. As a retail media player, we can also offer ad spaces right on the shopping journey of our customers, which is a truly unique feature. Ultimately, our knowledge of customer shopping patterns and our first-party data can help to make advertising much more relevant for the customer and, therefore, yields a higher return on advertising investments for our brands and, of course, all the strategic partners that we have. All in all, with our collaboration, we will bring the following benefits: bring together our great local brands. Our focus, of course, in the Netherlands is the collaboration between Albert Heijn, bol.com, Etos and Gall & Gall. And in Belgium, we focus on the collaboration between Delhaize and bol.com. We can drive convenience and value and relevance for all our customers, and that is the opportunity. And we can also, of course, create a sustainable and competitive advantage in our very, very important Benelux market. What will you see in '22? We will make the first steps visible in our collaboration. We will introduce our media proposition to advertisers and our partners. Customers will see the first tailored offerings. And in a later part of the year, we will introduce a joint subscription package. Lastly, we will also try and pilot a return option for our most loyal members. So this is, in short, the presentation about how do we improve the collaboration in the Benelux. So thank you very much, and now back to you, Frans.

Thank you, Kevin and Margaret. You have really shown how you placed the customer at the heart of our transformation ambitions. Now over to J.J. and Selma, our Chief Digital Officers for the U.S. and Europe, to share how we are unleashing the power of data to serve our customers through deeper digital relationships.

Hello. I'm J.J. Fleeman, and it's a pleasure to be here with you today.

And I am Selma Postma, and welcome to unlocking the power of data. As you heard earlier today, we have a strong portfolio of great local brands that are actively deploying the omnichannel customer value proposition and significantly enhancing digital capabilities. This omnichannel and digital transformation is driving new opportunities. As we continue to evolve, we are increasingly leveraging the strength of our unique data and our business portfolio by building state-of-the-art new capabilities and activating those to create positive business impact. Specifically, we are focused on 3 key activation areas, passionately driving the best omnichannel customer experience every day, while boosting the efficiency and effectiveness of our business and increasingly tapping into new exciting business opportunities. And in that way, ultimately driving our sales growth, lowering our costs and reinvesting into our business in a continuous cycle. Today, we will be sharing concrete examples on how we are unlocking the power of data to drive those transformative changes and results. Let's first have a look at what makes our data so unique. Given our broad global reach and the close trusted relationship with the customers, we are uniquely positioned to collect valuable first-party data. We have over 7,000 stores in our global network with 19 strong local brands in 10 countries. We have 54 million customers shopping at our brands every week across our stores and our digital channels. Our customers have a high shopping frequency. On average, customers shop with us 2 times a week, and our loyal customers shop even more frequent. This creates ample opportunities for customer interactions. They shop across the entire store with a large breadth of basket from produce and meal solutions, to pet food, to household and more, with the added bonus of having a close relationship with our more than 33 million active cardholders engaged in our loyalty programs. Finally, we gather this data across a multitude of customer touch points. As our business continues to become more digital and more omnichannel, it creates the opportunity to engage with more customers in more ways, from stores, to websites, apps, marketplaces and loyalty programs. We increased our understanding of our customers and their local needs, which allows us to continuously serve them better, adding value to their unique customer journeys. To do that, we first need to unlock and deploy the power of our data.

As Selma shared, we have very loyal customers and rich data that we are using across our total business. We have built a significant amount of capabilities that leverage data across all areas of the organization. Like the 3 key activation areas listed: best customer experience, business optimization and additional income streams. As the customer and business continue to evolve, we are looking for opportunities to leverage our data to build new capabilities that, in turn, drive positive customer and business outcomes. While we already have thousands of scalable capabilities across our business, we've listed a few here that are really driving meaningful change. These capabilities are underpinned by data security, compliance and governance. It's important to note that we always obtain and use personal data in a lawful and ethical manner with the highest standards of compliance and security. At the brands of Ahold Delhaize, the customer experience is built around not only the individual but also where, when and how they're interacting with our brands. Let's meet one of those customers today and see how capabilities and data enhance their experience. [Presentation]

This is one example of a customer's journey, and it's just the beginning. We're constantly using data science, algorithms and machine learning, among others, to evolve our customer offerings and experiences as we introduce new capabilities and leverage our data in new ways. These capabilities are driving value for our customers, and they've driven significant value for our brands.

As J.J. mentioned, our data and our data capabilities help us create a personalized experience for our customers, but also help us optimize for efficiency and effectiveness within our business. We have many examples, but let me take you through a few. A clear example is the scalable and smart tooling we're implementing across the Europe brands to improve our decision-making and therefore, effectiveness and efficiency on assortment and pricing promo choices within merchandising. First implementations have been at Albert Heijn, Alfa Beta and Delhaize, with full rollout in Europe in the coming months. The assortment tool enables the best differentiation within categories related to available store space. The tool, for example, faulting customers' product switching behavior and prediction of new product performance. Our category resets based on the assortment tool, deliver on average 1.3% incremental sales versus resets done with that. The pricing tool enables customer-driven proactive analytic margin optimization with a much faster cycle and decision-making, leading to improved gross margins. For example, 0.4% incremental margin in Alfa Beta. These tools are scalable and shared across Europe, which decreases overall life and run cost significantly. The rent cost for Albert Heijn and Delhaize, for instance, have already decreased with about 26%. Another great example of commercial excellence is the U.S. Customer 360. Customer 360 is a centralized suite of reports and attributes that collect all the insights from every touch point we have with the customer. It creates a complete end-to-end view of the customer shopping habits, demographics, brand loyalty, product preferences, channel preferences and more. Across other layers, we place the customer at the center of all we do. Therefore, the insights we collect and make presentable through Customer 360 can be leveraged in an endless amount of use cases to make more data-driven and intelligent decisions. For example, when we personalized our homepage, we saw a lift of 69% in RPMs and 35% in product click-through rates. This is just one example. We are applying Customer 360 across other key areas like merchandising, assortment price and promo to make more intelligent decisions that drive customer loyalty and basket growth. In the U.S., we rolled out another proprietary tool called TNT. TNT, short for the network tool, is a best-in-class network optimization engine. It leverages predictive analytics and a wide range of data inputs to give network expansion recommendations that allow our brands to maximize reach and capacity of their e-commerce networks, while minimizing operating costs and capital required. TNT also allows us to optimize based on criteria such as sales, penetration and capital goals, providing the utmost flexibility. You heard earlier from Nick on the importance of the Philadelphia market and on the New Island Avenue automated e-commerce fulfillment center. The TNT tool was used to determine the ideal location capacity and coverage of that e-commerce fulfillment center and others in the area. It allowed us to optimize capital investments and reduce operating costs, while maximizing white space opportunity. And I also love the next 2 examples of data-driven capabilities for omnichannel productivity that have been recently launched. Not only increasing associate productivity, but also decreasing new associate training time and resulting in better customer satisfaction. The first tool we launched last year at Albert Heijn is called Store Genius. This machine learning-based tool has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that store managers leverage to drive success within stores. On a handheld device, it gives real-time visibility in key store metrics like sales, availability, customer satisfaction. And also proactively pushes alerts using in-house intelligence solutions and AI. It stimulates sales and customer awareness of the store team, empowering them to make the best decisions. Store Genius also learned from feedback by the store manager in a continuous improvement level. We have, for example, through smart alerts, being able to improve the freshness of our fruit and veg by over 5%. Also, we significantly improved on-shelf availability by driving the amount of stores that do perfect in-store counting to well over 80. We are continuously adding new features and solutions to Store Genius as it has become the key to unlocking in-store performance improvements. In the U.S., as you heard Kevin mentioned earlier, we have deployed a proprietary tool called Spectrum. Spectrum is designed to significantly enhance omnichannel profitability. It lives on a handheld device and helps our in-store and wareroom associates to pick in the most efficient and effective manner, while incorporating the needs and wants of our customers. Amongst others, offering our customers better more personalized substitutions. By the way, a wareroom is a dark store connected to a store. As a result of our Spectrum pilots, we have seen productivity increases of 1% to 3% through enhancements like pick-and-path optimization and improved visualization on the picker's handheld device. We have also seen trading time decrease by 50%. We will be further deploying this tool across our U.S. network, and this will continue to be a key driver in omnichannel productivity as we work towards fully allocated e-commerce profitability.

Starting with media, we can leverage our wide variety of channels to drive new business opportunities for Ahold Delhaize, while ensuring our customers' experience remains at the core. Not only are we able to do this through leveraging our physical assets, think digital screens and shelf tags in stores, but also our digital assets, which include our websites and apps. Media monetization potential like this also extends even further to loyalty and off property. The combination of our channels and our vast customer base enables us to offer tailored services to our advertisers, while providing our customers with the most relevant ads and information to make their shopping experience even better. In addition to media, we also derive value from our data insights. By transforming our unique data into smart and actionable insights at a macro level, presented in intuitive user-friendly dashboarding, we are creating an extremely desirable product for our strategic partners, helping them to understand and serve our customers better. For example, to make better decisions across their broader business, including product development, supply chain and logistics is a win-win for the entire value chain. And even beyond media and data insights, we are developing additional new and unique digital and in-store services, designed to improve the customer experience by making our stores and websites a destination beyond grocery. Within digital services, for example, we have third-party marketplace and e-commerce subscription programs adding a breadth of offering, a more holistic shopping experiences, while at the same time yielding commissionable sales and new income streams. Within retail services, we have numerous retail partnerships and offerings such as gift cards, which of course, generate incremental income. These services and partnerships expand the offering for customer. And we believe there are many store with in-store opportunities in the future. And all of this is just the start. Not only are we excited to be accelerating at each brand, but by joining forces across our local brands and across continents, we will do even more together. Given the continued omnichannel growth and the various opportunities we have just outlined, we see a clear runway to generate EUR 1 billion by unlocking the power of data by 2025. In closing, we are using data to power everything we do at Ahold Delhaize. We have built capabilities to drive a better omnichannel customer experience, drive business optimization and are unlocking new business opportunities creating a virtuous cycle that keeps improving our proposition to our customer. As we continue our omnichannel and digital transformation, our data will unlock significant new opportunities in areas like automation, loyalty, personalization and new services and increased relevancy for the customer. Data is at the heart of this, always and everywhere to the highest standard of data security, ethics and compliance and will play a key part in our market share growth, savings and productivity goals and our new income streams to drive profitability. Thank you for listening to our presentation today.

Thank you very much, J.J. and Selma. It's wonderful to see how a 150-year-old company is transforming to be ready for the next 150 years. Of course, this can only be done in a responsible way. And I'm happy to introduce to you Daniella Vega, Senior Vice President for Health and Sustainability, to explain how we will lead the transformation into a healthy and sustainable food system.

Thank you, Frans. I'm proud to be here today to underpin our health and sustainability focus. As Frans mentioned, a cornerstone of our customer value proposition is developing a healthy and sustainable food system. Our approach is built around the idea that the health crisis and the climate crisis are intrinsically linked. With this in mind, I'd like to share with you some of the key highlights of our approach to step up our efforts in this space over the next 10 years. And just coming from COP26, I'm also going to talk you through our net-zero ambition. The 2025 strategy, our associates have been diligently executing already, gives us an incredible foundation to build on. While indeed, there's still a lot to be done, there are many great examples of the strong progress that we're making. Just a flavor of our results to date. Our own brand, Healthy Food Sales, have increased almost 8 percentage points since 2016. We've reduced food waste by 17% compared with our 2016 baseline. We've improved plastic product packaging of our own brands, making sure it's made from recyclable, reusable or compostable materials. And we set science-based targets to reduce absolute carbon emissions for Scope 1, 2 and 3. And since 2018, we've reduced Scope 1 and 2 by 17%. We've taken an integrated systems approach to building our climate strategy, conducting in-depth research on the impact of climate change following recommendations from the task force on climate-related financial disclosure. And we've identified the impact from the most important physical, transactional and reputational risks that we face. Finally, we've conducted our first human rights due diligence process where we've also identified the most important salient issues and created a clear road map for action. As a result of our approach and our action, we continue to be among the world leaders in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, and we score in the top 10% of companies according to Sustainalytics. We're also pleased to say that we recently were upgraded by MSCI to a AA rating. Our performance on health and sustainability puts us in a leading position within our industry. And we're proud of this. But at the same time, we cannot rest on our laurels, much more needs to be done. The impact from climate change is clear, be it on our planet and the loss of biodiversity through the way in which we produce and consume food, to the health of people. Acting responsibly today is imperative to secure tomorrow for the generations to come. From the introduction of the sustainable finance disclosure regulations, to the expectations from the task force on climate-related financial disclosure and the implementation of the sustainable development goals, investors like you require more information about the sustainability efforts the companies you invest in. And with the newly introduced EU taxonomy, more transparency is suspected now on how companies use their investments to make sure they meet agreed sustainability goals. There's also an expectation from the next generation of associates. Gen Z expects Apple delays to have a clear purpose, which is strongly linked to sustainability. To attract and keep talented people, we cannot and do not ignore the fact that environmental, social and governance topics must be fully embedded into Ahold Delhaize's strategy and ambitions. Through robust engagement with all of our stakeholders, our health and sustainability strategy has been developed to accomplish all of these tasks. And it's actually very simple. We call it grounded in goodness. It's our plan to make healthy and sustainable choices easy for everyone. This next step on our health and sustainability journey is built around the idea that the health crisis and the climate crisis are intrinsically linked. What's more, there's an outcome of a food system, which is no longer fit for purpose. Think about it like this, 10% of the world population goes to bed hungry, and yet 1/3 of food is wasted. 2 billion people globally are now overweight or obese. And at the same time, 265 million people are on the brink of starvation. The system is broken, and the time to transform it is now. The health crisis and the climate crisis are 2 sides of the same coin. And our focus on healthier people, healthier planet, treats them that way. It's crucial that we see this connection between human health and planetary health. Because if we get it right for ourselves, we tend to get it right for the planet. So everything that we do going forward will have this simple grounded in goodness goal of making healthy and sustainable choices easy for everyone. Healthier people, healthier planet. While there are many targets we can set ourselves as a company, some within and some even beyond our control, the one area where we can make a 100% difference is on the customer journey, be it through our stores, our apps, our advertising or on our products, enabling the customer to make the healthy and sustainable choices that they want to make has the potential to pull our entire food system into a positive direction by prioritizing products that are good for people and planet. The good news is that the consumer intent is already there, providing tailwinds. 63% of American customers want to buy healthier food, and either don't know how or can't afford to. This number is even higher in Europe. With that in mind, our mission is clear. Healthier people begins with empowering our customer to make better choices. For example, via the SuperPlus program, where our Delhaize brand in Belgium integrated healthier choices into their loyalty program, as Bala mentioned earlier. They do this by giving additional discounts for products that receive a healthy score from the nutritional navigation system, NutriScore. Already more than 2 million customers have signed up for the program. Let's take a look. [Presentation]

We will drive transparency about nutritional value through NutriScore in Europe and Guiding Stars in the U.S. And we'll expand these programs to cover social and environmental impacts. We've already started this work with the HowGood program in the U.S. HowGood analyzes each product ingredient against environmental and social criteria, including farming practices, treatment of animals, labor conditions and chemical use to bring to customers in an easy-to-use environmental and social impact rating system. Let's look at the next key ingredient for healthier people, our products. By 2030, we will have revolutionized the products our brands offer. Our brands will have introduced exciting new ways to connect them to customers and will have done it all within planetary boundaries. Our brands will make healthy and sustainable choices easy by reformulating a healthier and more sustainable average shopping basket, lowering sugar, salt and fat and informing and rewarding customers to make better choices. And we'll also continue to focus on reformulating our own brand products to be kinder to both people and planet, as Margaret explained in her presentation. This isn't about restricting people's choice. Our brands are not talking about forcing customers to become vegetarians or vegans. It's about nudging people towards a planetary diet that will include many of the same elements that they will all be better. More vegetables, better meat and products that are produced in a healthy and sustainable way. To measure success, we will continue to track the percentage of owned brand healthy food sales as part of total owned brand food sales. By 2025, we aim to have well above 55% of our owned brand food sales coming from healthy products. So that's healthier people, but what about healthier planet? We'll achieve our goal of a healthier planet by focusing on our own operations and our farmers and suppliers. Let me first talk about our farmers and suppliers. We have unbelievable reach and power through our relationships with farmers and suppliers. Our brands work with thousands of farmers and suppliers who create hundreds of thousands of products. Our brands can drive supplier engagement and work with them to protect, restore and sustain forests and other ecosystems. And that's why we're committed to achieving 0 deforestation and conversion by 2025. As you heard from Margaret, an excellent example of the power of long-term relationships is the Albert Heijn Better For Program, where they partner with more than 1,000 suppliers and farmers to ensure production is better for animals, farmers and the environment. Albert Heijn works with these farmers exclusively, and these programs include a premium for the farmer and a guarantee of sales. For example, 5 centiliter more for carbon-neutral milk. As a result, carbon emissions in the value chain will decrease, biodiversity will improve, and there's more transparency on how products are produced. Another great example is The GIANT Company, a proud partner of Rodale Institute, the leading voice in developing solutions for the regenerative organic movement. GIANT supports 3 key Rodale initiatives that are centered on farm consulting, farmer training and research. Through this program, farmers will get support with the transition to organic farming and receive training and regenerative organic agriculture. Secondly, I'd like to explain to you how we'll make our operations better. Let's talk about food waste. In 2020, Ahold Delhaize produced 259 million kilograms of food waste. This is an environmental problem, and it's a business problem, and it's one we intend to solve. Alfa Beta, our brand in Greece, has created the first alliance for the reduction of food waste. Today, it counts over 45 members from other companies, organizations and the scientific community in Greece, and it's even endorsed by the Ministry of the Environment. Plastic is another enormous environmental problem, very visible to and extremely high on the agenda of our customers. Our brands work hard to reduce and use recyclable or reusable plastic packaging. Delhaize Belgium, for example, is reducing plastic by removing unnecessary plastic lids from all own brand yogurt, desserts, sour cream and plain cheese. That's equal to 23 tons less plastic per year or 7 million less lids. And earlier this month, Albert was the first retailer in the Czech Republic to offer its customers more than 80 dry and drugstore items, like nuts and detergents, by using reusable smart containers or the customers' own refillable containers. As we look forward, we will continue to work on our ambition to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030 compared to our 2016 baseline. And we have an ambition to achieve a 100% recyclable, reusable or compostable plastic packaging from our own brand product. All this work must lead to the radical decarbonization of our full value chain as we transition to a net-zero business. It's imperative that we drive the decarbonization of our business partners to a 1.5-degree future by becoming net zero. That's why I'm excited to announce that we're committing to reach net zero carbon emissions across our own operations by 2040 and becoming a net-zero business across our entire supply chain, products and services by 2050. Let me walk you through our plan to achieve this. First, with an overview of how our carbon emissions are distributed through our company. Based on our current target to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 from a 2018 baseline, we can see that 2/3 of our emissions come from our Ahold Delhaize USA brand. 53% of carbon emissions come from energy consumption, 46% is electricity and 7% is from heating. 36% of carbon emissions come from leakages in our refrigeration systems and 7% of carbon emissions come from transport. So energy consumption, leakage from refrigerants and emissions from transport, what can we do to reduce these elements? On the first element, energy consumption, we build and remodel stores in the most energy-efficient way by installing LED lighting and retrofitting refrigeration systems by adding doors and seals to save energy. We also look at how we can shift to low-carbon heating initiatives by switching to heat pumps and district heating. This is not only good for reducing carbon emissions, but it will also help us to make financial savings as we reduce energy consumption. As a result, we've reduced absolute energy consumption by 8% in the last 4 years. For the electricity we still need to consume, we can abate this simply and effectively through PPAs, power purchase agreements. On the second element, refrigerants, this is much more complex to abate and more costly. To minimize costs, we phased replacements with planned store remodels, with the approach adjusted and tailored to the refrigerant system installed and coolants currently used. Since 2016, we've reduced the global warming potential of our refrigeration systems by more than 11%, and we will continue to bring this number down. When our brands remodel stores, they'll use refrigeration systems with a lower global warming potential or where possible, use natural refrigerants. The third element is logistics. As much as possible, we'll make use of low energy transportation methods, like electric vehicles or fuels with low carbon emissions. Our brands also utilize technology to improve route optimization to reduce last mile costs. In the U.S., our brands are working on a new last-mile enterprise routing solution and automated route planning. And in Europe, our brands are working to improve the fill mechanism of their vans to allow for more orders per trip. To wrap up, I'm confident that we can achieve our net zero ambition. And the reason is twofold: first, because we're on track to deliver a 25% reduction against our 2018 baseline for this year. Second, we've already shown that we can do it. For example, Albert Heijn has reduced their emissions from Scope 1 and 2 by more than 90% in the last 10 years, and our Delhaize brand in Belgium has reduced its emissions by 70% in the last 12 years. We have achieved this through efficiency initiatives, such as LED lighting, solar panels on stores and distribution centers and switching to green energy. To minimize the impact from refrigeration, they're installing natural refrigeration systems and covering their cooling equipment with doors. As a result, 50% of Albert Heijn stores already have natural refrigeration systems in place. A key enabler to amplify our commitment is partnership, following our mantra of leading together. To collaborate and advocate for action with other businesses, we've joined the science-based targets initiative, Business Ambition for 1.5 degrees, a global coalition of UN agencies, businesses and industry leaders in partnership with the Race to Zero. This includes our Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. To measure our Scope 3 emissions, we engaged with more than 120 A brand suppliers and asked our own brand suppliers to provide their carbon emissions as well. This way, we can build a more solid baseline and work with them to implement abatement plans for the coming decades. Last month, I presented this health and sustainability ambition at our annual leadership meeting. We spent around 25% of our time on this topic and discuss the challenges and opportunities and some of the enablers for action across Ahold Delhaize. Our leaders are fully engaged. And with our track record, culture for innovation and desire to make a difference, we're hungry to meet and exceed our ambition wherever possible. Next year, to further support action against our targets, we plan to increase the incentive percentage attributed to healthy and sustainable performance, both for the long-term and the short-term reward schemes. In summary, I'm sure you'll agree that we have an exciting opportunity to make healthier and sustainable choices easier for our customers and a clear plan to continue to integrate our Grounded in Goodness approach into our business. We're focusing our efforts on where we believe we can have the biggest impact that make sure we transform our business and contribute to a healthy and sustainable food system. I invite you to continue the conversation with us to question and value our efforts. We believe putting healthy and sustainable at the heart of our vision and purpose, our customer value proposition and our strategic drivers, we will create long-term value for all of our stakeholders, for our customers, for our associates, communities and for you, our investors. We will proactively seek to engage with those who value this approach and want to be part of our journey. Thank you, and back to Frans to continue with our program.

Thanks, Daniella. I'm so proud to see how we are making healthy and sustainable choices easy for the benefit of both people and planet. Now let's go over to Natalie to show you how it all comes together in our numbers and updated financial ambitions.

Thanks very much, Frans. Today, you've seen why everyone at Ahold Delhaize is energized and excited by our increasing potential for growth and value creation. We're clearly unique in this industry. On one hand, you've always been able to count on us for reliable growth and free cash flow. On the other hand, we're getting better and faster every day at innovating our business model, adding great value, convenience and relevance throughout the customer journey and at every single touch point. This strength comes from the success of our last strategic plan, the leadership and executional excellence we've demonstrated through the global pandemic, our strong local market share positions, and the introduction of high tech, digital and scalable platforms across our business. And I firmly believe we are ready to accelerate on many fronts. At Ahold Delhaize, we take great pride in our reputation for transparent and consistent financial management. We tell you what we know when we know it. We believe strongly in the value of a promise, and we take a great pride in keeping those promises we make. For example, our sales growth has been something that you can count on like clockwork. While we've continued to optimize the assets of our local, trusted and convenient 7,347 stores across the group, we've also nearly tripled our net consumer online sales surpassing the EUR 10 billion mark. This is a testament to our relentless focus on modernizing our omnichannel go-to-market proposition. Now operational excellence and attention to detail have been key here. These are core parts of our DNA and our culture, and it's exactly this mindset of cost consciousness, continuous improvement and sharing and scaling best practices that has allowed us to consistently exceed and expand our save for our customer initiatives and deliver industry-leading margins through it all. We also believe strongly in that old Jerry Maguire saying, "Show me the money." This means you've always been able to count on us to deliver strong operating and free cash flows and the best balance sheet in the industry. As the CFO, one of my key responsibilities is to take this competitive advantage and use it to help us seize opportunities to drive long-term financial efficiency by innovating and diversifying our sources of funds. With active debt and liquidity management, we've been able to spearhead new innovative funding solutions like the successful issuance of the sector's first euro sustainability-linked bond and the sustainability linked revolving credit facility. We've also extended maturities and have no material debt to be refinanced prior to 2024. Moreover, we've managed to derisk our long-term financials by reducing our off-balance sheet multiemployer pension plan. And we haven't just invested in our core, but also in high-growth, high-potential assets like bol.com, which is yielding big results today and has even bigger future ahead of it as Margaret so eloquently described earlier. We've also added new exciting assets like FreshDirect, clearly signaling our intent to secure key strategic elements to strengthen our position as the industry's leading local omnichannel retailer. And our EPS growth has been remarkably constant too, supported by share buybacks and growing dividends, which have helped us deliver top quartile shareholder returns. As we get ready to close 2021, we're proud of our accomplishments over the past 3 years. We're in great shape financially and operationally. So let's turn to the future. While I'll talk mostly about our 2025 ambitions today, let me start with some high-level comments regarding 2022. We all know there is a lot of uncertainty out there. In addition to getting our first real look at the new normal post-COVID world, we're seeing headwinds on the macro front, especially as they relate to labor and inflation and product availability. As a result, like all other food retailers out there, we're expecting to see tougher comparisons in 2022 once we've initially thought would hit our numbers in 2021. The climate crisis and the immediate step-up in the efforts required to slow down and mitigate the perilous picture painted by the UN climate report and at last week's COP26, will also require near-term action on our part, a headwind we clearly and are fully ready to take our part in resolving. However, it's important to note that we are also expecting structural tailwinds, outlined earlier by Frans, to help us in 2022 and beyond. Our customers are buying more fresh and healthy products, more private label brands and utilizing our growing omnichannel ecosystem, as outlined by Kevin and Wouter. As a result, despite many puts and takes, we're confident we will again increase our sales in 2022. You know this is an area where we don't give explicit guidance, but we firmly believe that being a leading local food retailer means you have to grow both relative market share and brand strength year in and year out. So expect to see that trend continue in 2022. We're also confident that despite continued investments in the future growth of our business, we will again be able to maintain our industry-leading operating margin of at least 4%. You can also expect to see our operating cash flow stay strong, and we will continue our successful share buyback program with a new EUR 1 billion tranche ready to go. This was just a short sneak peek at a more detailed guidance that you'll receive from us at Q4 when our results are out early next year. Moving beyond 2022, my colleagues have done a great job in illustrating the building blocks that will move the dial for our company going forward. While we execute against these great plans, we're also laser-focused on how they translate into the financials and meaningfully unlock more shareholder value as we run the playbook up to 2025. I already mentioned that we plan to grow our sales again in 2022, and I believe that's just the tip of the iceberg. At Ahold Delhaize, we are in a fundamentally different place with respect to revenue growth as we look at our business moving towards 2025. With our high-quality assets and our finger on the pulse of consumer behavior, we are confident that we have every opportunity to raise the bar for future revenue growth compared to our historical averages. This shift is being driven by 2 fundamental changes. First, we're building off a new higher sales base. We are confident that COVID has brought a permanent shift upwards, and that a higher share of working, shopping and eating from home is here to stay. And that's on top of our initiatives to gain share versus competitors. Increasing share of wallet will always remain core to our growth approach. In food, retail and also in nonfood retail with bol.com, a compelling CVP, great value, relevant assortment and coverage density really matter. The new ingredients in the mix now is delivering a compelling omnichannel journey because that is what customers want to need. And successfully shifting that formula from mastering operational excellence in brick-and-mortar, to leading across multiple food and closely related nonfood retail journeys, by driving more convenience and more value into those moments that really matter for our customers and their families. And it has a big potential to unlock what I believe could be the biggest growth opportunity our business has seen in decades. When we get those things right, market share gains follow. Frans talked about our track record and continued focus measuring how we stack up on this front. As CFO, I care about this metric because it's the nonfinancial KPI with the highest correlation by far to sustained retail profitability that I know. As a result, we expect to deliver a visible and sustained uptick versus our historical growth rates as we move forward and translate this into EUR 10 billion of incremental sales between 2023 and 2025, with all of our brands and regions contributing. We expect at least half of this growth is going to come from online sales and project consumer online sales to double between now and 2025. We're growing capacity in collaboration across our ADUSA brands, especially through the greater integration of pure player, FreshDirect, into our business. But the biggest driver of growth here will clearly come from the development of the food, nonfood platform we are building right here in the Benelux. As Margaret highlighted, you'll see bol.com consumer net sales double as we expand into new categories and better support our merchant partners in growing their businesses. And more importantly, as Wouter outlined, we'll strengthen and accelerate our collaboration across all of our Benelux brands to better excite, unlock loyalty and deliver faster and more conveniently for our customers. So with market-leading positions on the ground, online, at the doorstep and even in the social media space, this is something no single player can match and the space we have committed to making a game changer for how consumers shop and win back time and live better lives going forward. Let me move now on to operating margin, which is something we take great pride in at Ahold Delhaize. We have an industry-leading operating margin and are fiercely committed to holding that position as we move forward. We start in a great place, and our margin will also continue to be nourished by 4 key drivers, and those are: sales growth and leverage, driving margin mix, omnichannel profitability, complementary revenue streams, all of which feed into support accelerating our saving for the customer momentum. We've already said that relative market share at local scale matters when it comes to profitability, so expect to see us strengthen key positions in markets, especially where we have clear structural advantages to support sustained profitability going forward. This is important, and it provides us with both growth and leverage. We're also committed to continuously improving our margin mix, be it more fresh, private label, healthy and general merchandise offerings. We're committed to increasing our profile and sales in these higher-margin categories. And as Daniella mentioned, food waste is an area we are committed to at Ahold Delhaize. As a food retailer, we're uniquely positioned to have a big impact there. And as a finance person, I know that reducing food waste means reducing shrink and improving margin. It's one of the many things we can do on the healthy and sustainable front that support our CVP and profitability. So expect to see us keep chasing those aggressively as we drive towards our target of reducing food waste by 50% in 2030. I'd now like to make a few comments about improving our profitability in our omnichannel business because we know it's one of the most important contributors to our overall profitability going forward. In the last 2 years, we've taken the time to evaluate our rich data to ensure that we are measuring e-com exactly the same way across our business, understanding its primary levers and benchmarking what is best practice internally and externally. And while you may hear stories from other retailers about being profitable or close to it today, if you listen closely, you're likely to notice the word "profitable" is usually modified by words like incremental, marginal or flow through. That's step 1 in how you measure profitability. At Ahold Delhaize, we care about fully allocated long-term sustainable profitability. That means we're looking at what happens when you add marketing costs, incremental labor, headquarter support and everything else, it really costs to make online sales happen. And despite this much stricter definition, we've got lots of positive stories to report already. As you heard Margaret mention earlier, bol.com is highly profitable. In fact, all of our aggregated nonfood business is. So are our online B2B sales, and we have several high-density catchment areas where we're already clearly profitable. And while the devil is in the detail, we firmly believe there is a special sauce to delivering profitability online. It all boils down to how we maximize our performance across 4 key areas, delivering sales density and ultimately scale, which is just as essential in e-com as it is anywhere else in food retail; ensuring that local demands and the CVP are leading or at par at least competitively; and these expectations are changing rapidly and need constant attention; optimizing operations, fulfillment and last mile delivery, which are time intensive, expensive and we believe strongly that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. It's just like our great local brand philosophy. We're a tailored approach to each marketplace, to the specifics of the market, the culture and the catchment area make all the difference. And building complementary revenue streams, which can both significantly enhance the customer journey and provide a direct boost for our profitability. We have clear plans to make e-commerce profitable on a fully allocated channel basis by 2025. But I would like to emphasize that we are also thinking about omnichannel much more holistically. In addition to a pure channel profitability approach, we're also working hard to better understand the complex cross-channel halo effects and trade-offs it causes for the rest of our business. You've heard the impressive loyalty statistics that Selma and J.J. are talking about incorporating into our thinking. When we enticed consumers to join our omnichannel ecosystems, they buy more products and they buy more frequently and they spend more and we're much better able to customize the experience and curate their product offering. This creates a virtuous cycle for everyone, and we are convinced it leads to a more rewarding shopping experience, significant gains and customer lifetime value across our brands. This is a new way of thinking, and we are working hard to embed it in our culture and our performance management in a similar way to what we've done we see for our customers. And a key component of that shift will be also based on complementary revenue streams. We see big potential to drive this, not only through our big efforts at bol.com and our enhanced collaboration in the Benelux, but also there's big upside in the U.S. business as well. This will primarily consist of activities in digital and in-store media, retail media services and data insights. And we believe we can triple our current revenues from these areas to generate over EUR 1 billion in revenue in this key area by 2025. In addition to these big moves on e-commerce and complementary revenue streams, every year, you've seen us doing this consistently for many years now, too. At our company, we are focused on reducing cost and improving our cost structure every single day. We've been continuously investing in our operations, the infrastructure, standardizing and harmonizing our platforms, processes and relevant parts of the portfolio. I believe we definitely have more juice to squeeze in this lemon regionally and globally. These activities are all about driving savings for our customers, and this is a muscle we're going to continue to flex and it allows us to be consistent and drive price competitiveness and test and learn and grow in the highly omnichannel space. So we plan to step up our game plan here on this front, generating EUR 4 billion of savings in the next 4 years. This is almost twice what we've delivered since 2018. And when we first introduced this program, this has become a core element of our culture, and we will continue to build upon that. This is by no means an easy lift, particularly in the current environment. And certainly, it's going to require a lot of hard work and discipline. But these are all things you know we're good at. To get there, investing now is critical, which provides a great segue for me to share our thoughts on how we are planning to use investment and CapEx to underpin that journey. Again, we start here as always with customer lens. We plan to further strengthen our position as a technological and an AI leader in the food industry. We will clearly over-index to omnichannel and Digitec projects, real-time data capabilities and automation. Our growth agenda at bol.com and sustainability will also require significant funds to realize their full potential. On this journey, we will not leave our stores behind. We will continue to deliver vibrant, new modern store formats and experience powered by technology and featuring tangible sustainability improvements. As such, we are lifting our medium-term guidance on CapEx from 3% per annum to around 3.5%. We know this is a level above most of our peers, but with more tech-savvy customers and diverse competitors than ever before, leading in Digitec, omnichannel and sustainability are the key differentiators to successful food retailers going forward, and that's where we plan to be. These are key growth drivers. They require significant upfront investments to reach scale. As I mentioned in my opening, everyone at Ahold Delhaize is energized and excited by our increasing potential for growth and value creation. Our plans are built on the premise that has sustained this company and its brands for over 150 years. Build relative market share strength, know your customer inside and out, relentlessly to deliver a high-value, high-touch customer proposition. While many players in the industry have ridden the wave of the last 2 years, when times get tougher, which they will, there are not many companies with the financial strength to ensure that they are ready, willing and able to keep pace with the changes and transformations required to stay competitive. For me, financial strength and having the courage to take on the growth and investment plan we are laying out here today is firmly rooted in our continued confidence in the strong cash flow generation you have come to know and expect from us. And we will continue to deliver on this front going forward. I expect operating working capital as a percentage of sales to improve post 2022 as we implement self-distribution in the U.S. supply chain. We will unlock productivity gains through more connected and end-to-end processes and unlock the power of data across the value chain. While there will be a significant step-up in CapEx, particularly at bol.com, through our strong balance sheet, the intended sub-IPO of bol.com and of course, our ongoing operating strength. We will be able to support the investments, while at the same time, delivering industry-leading cash return for our shareholders. Bringing all of this together, our group focus for the next 4 years is going to be all about 4 key priorities, delivering a winning CVP. That sets us apart from our competitors with a distinctly local, trusted and omnichannel approach. Continuing to deliver operational excellence because we know that's the bread and butter that allows us to be brave and visionary in other areas. Making health and sustainability a key focus, where we help make choices for customers easier and act as a responsible steward across the whole value chain at the same time. And pursuing new business models, either as a consolidator of choice or via creative partnerships to help us explore new areas where we can add value for consumers. Our financial ambitions for 2025 are increasing our sales at faster than pre-COVID rates to deliver EUR 10 billion of incremental sales between 2023 and 2025. We're going to double our net consumer online sales to over EUR 20 billion. We're going to continuously deliver an industry-leading underlying operating margin. You'll see us grow EPS at high single-digit rates between 2023 and 2025, ensuring that cash generation continues to be a priority in all of our operations. There is plenty to be optimistic about as we introduce this next chapter of our Leading Together strategy. And while we are expecting some macro headwinds in the short term, I know that we can navigate them with confidence. Confidence because we have a track record and great momentum. Confidence due to our unique portfolio of leading local brands, strong market positions and our clear path to drive growth. Confidence in the robustness of our margins with more financial upside in our financial model and increasing e-com profitability. Confidence that we have a strong balance sheet that allows us to put our money where our mouth is and accelerate our efforts at bol.com, omnichannel growth and in sustainability because this is where we believe we can generate the most value for customers going forward. And most importantly, confidence that we will continue to deliver outstanding financial returns that you have come to know and expect from our team. Thank you very much for joining us today. We'll now take your questions.

Wow, that was a lot of contents. And thank you very much for being with us today in this Investor Day of Ahold Delhaize. I hope you appreciated the passion and the confidence and the pride our leaders talked about our industry and about our company. But now it's time for Q&A, like Natalie already mentioned. With me in the studio are Natalie and Wouter in Quincy, Massachusetts in our studio over there, also Kevin is joining us. And we will be moderated for the Q&A session by JP O'Meara, our Senior Vice President for Investor Relations. So JP, let's move over to you. And let us know what the first question is, which came in.

Thank you very much, Frans. Our first question today is going to come from Andrew Gwynn from Exane BNP.

Yes. Thank you very much for the presentations. I just wanted to go for 2 questions actually, if I can. So firstly, obviously, the CapEx is being guided up. You're guiding to around about EUR 1.5 billion of free cash flow per year. Dividend cost loosely EUR 1 billion per year. So should we anticipate that maybe in time, the share buyback program is scaled back, maybe before it's reinstated a little bit later on in the plan? Second question, and it's actually -- so 2 parts. So firstly, I think at the very beginning, you mentioned that convenience is obviously really increased importance for consumers. And then in time, obviously, the expectation is that health, wellness, the planning is going to increase. So do you think those are both margin opportunities for the group?

Thank you very much, Andrew. Natalie, the question on the share buyback and the CapEx balance.

Yes. I think when you talk about the share buyback, we made a big point today to come out and give you right away our guidance for 2022, which is we are planning to do EUR 1 billion share buyback again. As we look out in future periods, there's always a lot of different factors that are moving and may influence that in terms of waiting on our CapEx front, the macro front. So we haven't given any guidance on that yet. But what I would say is, to your point, in terms of CapEx, we are stepping up that ambition. We do want to go from 3% to 3.5%. It's really a place where we're going to focus on omnichannel, on bol, on health and sustainability and, of course, making sure that our stores are getting everything they need.

Yes. And Andrew, on the margin question, we already indicated for '22, a margin equal or slightly higher than 4%. And this is included also in the total gross margin components we see. We have to figure that out what customer behaviors will do. We think that customers are going to keep eating healthier. And normally those products have a better margin mix. So -- but we are careful here to see how that -- how the stickiness of behavior will be there over time.

So our next question today is going to come from Rob Joyce at Goldman Sachs.

I've got 3 of them. First one, just 2 little clarifications actually. On bol.com, the EUR 5.5 billion in net consumer sales, is that equivalent roughly to sort of EUR 2.7 billion in reported revenues? And I'm doing the right math there. Second one, just on bol as well. Wonder if you could give us an idea in that CapEx budget, how much CapEx annually bol is going to roughly be taking over the next sort of 4 years in that plan? And then the final one the EUR 1 billion in complementary revenues, it's a big number. It looks big relative to what some peers maybe have come out with. Can you just give us a bit more granularity behind how you come up with that number? And what kind of drop through you expect on a revenue number of that size in those channels?

Natalie, if you take the first question, then I try to take #2 and 3 away, if that's okay with you.

In terms of the bol sales, we don't disclose specifically the bol direct sales. We have the net consumer online sales. But in terms of your math, you're pretty good, which is we basically have said you heard in Margaret's comments, 60% today is coming from our Plaza partners and 40% is coming from our first-party sales. The only thing you need to add in there is don't forget that we also have our subscriptions and our commissions on the third-party sales, which also get added into that number.

The question on the CapEx breakdown, Rob, this we don't give. We don't give the CapEx breakdown by brand for the company. And the other question was on -- JP help me here.

EUR 1 billion.

This was on the new revenue -- the new revenue sources with the EUR 1 billion target, and that sounds like an ambitious target.

You want to take that one, Wouter?

Yes. I think the EUR 1 billion is coming from, I think, the monetization flow. We also see new opportunities in generating advertising money for us, which we will use, by the way, to invest in our proposition, in our online or in our CVP. So this is a new income stream for us, which is, I think, between the U.S. and Europe about 50-50.

And I can add to that if you look at where is it coming from, we're really talking about -- this is going to be stuff that you see in terms of digital marketing, things that we do in store, the data retail services, those are really going to be the core things in that area. And we are pretty ambitious about it. We were talking about tripling that number from where we are today. But we believe we've got a lot of unique assets, whether it's in the U.S. or especially here in Europe with our new winning in Benelux combination of bol and our other brands that are going to allow us to be able to really seize that opportunity.

And is the assumption that, that will be reinvested? I mean, is that part of the growth driver here? Or do you see that in 2025 been quite a substantial part of EBIT?

From my perspective, I'd say I absolutely believe you're going to see that become a substantial part of how we get to profitable e-commerce over time, but it's also something that we believe is core to how you look at our profitability going forward, whether in a -- I'll say, a more holistic omnichannel sense of the word.

Before we go to the next question, JP, in the studio here in the background, there's a little bit a lot of noise. So if you could check that one as well, and then go to the third question, JP.

Sure thing, Frans. Our next question is going to come from William Woods at Sanford Bernstein.

Just 2 questions from me, please, on bol.com. Firstly, you've kind of said that you expect sales to double to 2025 and EBITDA to double to 2025. Is it fair to assume that you're not expecting margins to expand over that time, and therefore, the majority of the online profitability increases from the grocery business? And then secondly, on bol.com, a question around Amazon and the competitive positioning. How are you feeling about the competitive positioning versus Amazon? And why is now the right time to look at an IPO in the context Amazon just launching its own performance centers in the Netherlands in the -- this year?

Wouter, can you take the Amazon question on the competitive side in the Benelux? And you take the first question and then I'll come back to why we think that the timing is right for the IPO.

Go ahead.

No, no. I think what Margaret really well said, by the way, there are a couple of components that we are currently competing with Amazon. And not only Amazon, by the way. In the Benelux, we have a couple of other players, too. I think our customer NPS is outstanding. I think our current fulfillment capacity, next-day delivery is outstanding. And I think the third one is, of course, the bol brand is very strong and very likable. I think also, if you look at the shopability of bol.com, that's really a strong component. I think what I also tried to explain in the collaboration with the brands is something where we see also bol benefiting and it sets us really apart with the current competitors in the Benelux, like Amazon and others as well. So that's -- we feel very strong about further growth, and we've also looked in the past and bol has always gained market share. So we are quite confident in the future in that part.

And when it comes to what's going on, on bol profitability, there, our view is really clear. We believe that our sales are going to nearly double and that's going to drive a lot of EBITDA growth for us. There is also that piece of being in the bigger win in Benelux ecosystem that's going to also deliver additional profitability. But I think the reality is we're 4 years away. If there's going to be some moving levers left and right. What we want to do is the most important thing is how do we drive growth, and we believe very much that the profitability will follow. So expect us to be pushing really hard on that, and that may be -- there may be trade-offs we need to make to ensure that we're able to maximize the growth in the marketplace.

And on the timing of the sub-IPO, which is now timed for the second half of next year, we feel that the timing is right. I think bol has more maturity at the moment. We have a great plan, as you heard from Wouter already on a growing bol but also growing the business in the Benelux with all the brands connected to make those customer journeys more attractive and to combine food and nonfood, which will be a unique proposition, and we would like to fund that journey as well. The second thing is that we also think it's the right time to get some online currency. And the third thing, and you know that from our side, we're always a little bit frustrated about the fact that the value of the great business of bol was not properly reflected in the valuation of our total company. So we hope that we can strike those 3 things with going public in the second half of next year.

So next question is going to come from Fabienne Caron at Kepler Cheuvreux.

3 quick ones from my side as well. The first one to follow on Rob's questions. Could you share with us the profitability that we should expect from the EUR 1 billion extra complementary sale? The second question is more a general question. When I look at your forecast for 2022 in terms of top line growth, does it mean that you do not expect the full market to shrink in value term in the U.S.? Is that what we should read behind these numbers? And finally, when you talk about the e-commerce profitability in '25, are you thinking only grocery? Or do you put as well bol.com?

Yes. So Kevin, if you can take the question on the -- what you expect for next year on value and volume in the U.S. You take the first one and maybe Wouter or myself will take the last one, if you still remember all those questions. Maybe a question to you, Kevin. We have a stable growth outlook, a positive growth for 2022 for our company. What do we expect from, let's say, the sentiment in the U.S. on volume and growth?

Yes. I think that the -- as we look at 2022, we're really anticipating some of the, as Natalie said earlier, some of the gains that we've picked up through the pandemic and the changes in the way that the consumer behavior has really kind of manifestly changed for us that we'll be able to hold on to those. And that's a big part of what we're looking at achieving as we go into 2022. We're also very diligently looking at our omnichannel expansion and our ability to actually find growth in that area as well. And also looking at our assortments and how do we continue to kind of curate the assortments that are really, really relevant to consumers today based on the changes that are happening with our consumers. We think next year, for example, in the U.S., that over 30 million of the folks that are actually working from home today will continue in that form or fashion, which gives us a lot of eating occasions that will be available to us in the U.S., and we're looking to really try and gain all of those that we can in order to continue to move forward. As we look at the inflation that we're seeing coming through, we're seeing that in commodities. We're also seeing that in labor. And we're looking at how do we manage that and what does that mean relative to sales versus volume. Volume will be pressured as we go into next year. And as we cycle through that, we're going to have to continue to really focus on trying to drive volume as well. But I think of the 2, I think the volume will continue to have the most pressure.

And maybe on the first question, which was all about what's happening from those complementary revenue streams and how much should you expect to fall to the bottom line? I think there, the answer is are going to spend some money to build up these capabilities because we believe we're in a very unique point in time, which is all about we've got the transactions. Now we want to look at not only how do we build better services for our customers, but how do we monetize that for ourselves as a group. So you can expect the vast majority of that is going to flow through to the bottom line. But having said that, I also want to manage your expectations, which is it's part of our overall margin outlook because it's also very important for us that we take those benefits, and we're able to invest them in the pricing to stay competitive and really making sure we're doing everything we can on the e-comm side to help grow that into an even more profitable business.

And the total e-commerce profitability, food and nonfood, Wouter?

Yes, that's, of course, food and nonfood, including bol, but maybe also nice to reiterate a bit on what we are doing here because this is one of the -- 4 of us big assignments on how do we deal with especially the food grocery profitability part. I think what Natalie well said, it's about density, it's about scale. We are going to use automation, of course, to make sure that we have a high productivity on a couple of our operational parts. And you will see that also in the future that the home shop centers will definitely change in much more of an automated part. I think density in the last mile is very important. And the other thing is that we're working on also together is work with real scalable, simplified solutions for e-commerce, so that we don't kind of think in every market differently, but we really work together in building scalable solutions to make our food e-commerce much more profitable than it is right now. And of course, we also need the benefit of the income streams, which are new, which will help us as well on that journey.

We said earlier, Fabienne that bol.com was already EBIT profitable. We said that for some time now.

In 2019, even.

In 2019 for some time, we know that it's profitable. So if we talk about e-commerce fully loaded, fully allocated profitability in 2025, then it's mainly a food game. And in food, we see the opportunities, Wouter just mentioned on productivity, all the things he mentioned, but we also see there that an omni-channel customer also in food is in richer basket, both in margin and in size. So we see there a higher share of wallet, and therefore, also a nice opportunity also to build those customers stronger. So all those elements together give us good confidence that were fully loaded. And we have all the costs linked to that transaction allocated to that e-commerce sale. We are very transparent there. It gives us the confidence to be profitable in 2025.

So our next question is going to come from Nick Coulter at Citi.

Three questions, if I may. Firstly, what proportion of online sales in the U.S. will have automated fulfillment by 2025 or indeed at the Netherlands? I'm just trying to get a handle on how much the needle is going to shift in terms of your fulfillment. And secondly, on Retail Media and Complementary Services, I guess, a very different angle to Rob. Should we expect the EUR 1 billion to be a staging post to a much bigger number over the long term? I guess it's between 1% to 2% of your sales. I guess implicit within that question is to what extent can you drive retail media from outside of your online sales using your store loyalty data. And then lastly, apologies if I missed it, but just on CapEx. Is it possible to get kind of a few tangible examples around of where the incremental CapEx will go, whether that's on automation, whether that's on tech software or capability.

If -- Kevin, if you can say a few more things about your online business and what you see more in the profile being the click and collect and the delivery, but also a little bit more on automation and the things you do already with automation. Then let's start with that question first, and then we fill in the second and the third one later on. We have on automation in the U.S. and micro fulfillment and these type of things.

Yes. So we've started on the -- in the U.S. as we've built out the omnichannel environment. We've been looking at multiple different environments for testing the micro fulfillment centers and how they can actually play a role in building not only our ability to meet demand and meet that demand on a timely basis. but also for us to drive productivity. And so as we've done that, we today have actually just opened a new center called Island Avenue. That center is running with a company called Autostore that we've used with a bot configuration there that we'll be using to really test what kind of productivity we can get out of that and how we can go forward. As we look at our growth, we do believe that being able to build this in a way that we're staying where our demand is, and we're not getting too far out where we're overbuilding our automation is also important to us. So we're looking at that balance between those two. We've learned a great deal in a couple of the sites we've already built. So we have a takeoff site that we've built. We have the Autostore site. And then with the acquisition of Fresh Direct, we also picked up a fabric site. So we have a great opportunity for us to continue to learn from that and apply it. We also have a lot of manual centers that we do today for also driving productivity into our support of our click and collect operations in our central fulfillment that we do today. As I look at 2025, we don't yet have what I would call a fixed number for what we think that relationship between automation and nonautomated will be. But we do have a belief that as we look at this, it will be a complement of those 2 things working together as we build more and more density and more kind of capacity that we're going to need to meet the demand. And we're looking at how do we use that automation to drive the productivity and the availability for us to be able to meet that last mile across all the channels. So that's how we're thinking about it today, but I don't have an actual number that would say, here is what percent of our total sales would actually be through automated centers. that's yet to be determined for us.

This is nice to see here, Nick, and then we talk about an international company. When we talk about Europe and the U.S., we see a lot of those learnings and practices coming over from U.S. to Europe for MFCs, micro fulfillment centers. But the other way around, we see also from -- we have a number of very big and very successful DC automation projects here in the Benelux, which you also find its way with the learnings to the U.S. So you see there that internationally, people work together to learn technology. It's not all set in stone, right? There's quite some experimenting with new technologies. The examples Kevin mentioned. But I think this is the strength of an international company that you have this cross-fertilization between the regions, not only for automation, but also for a lot of other things. Then Nick gave us a target on -- almost give us a target on complementary revenue.

Beyond the EUR 1 billion.

Yes. So I think what I'll do is I'll actually answer the last question next, which was on how do we split the thinking about the CapEx and what are the big buckets there because I think it fits really nicely on the back of this one. So I mean, I said it in kind of the prepared remarks, which is, first of all, stores are always going to be the thing we spend the most money on. That continues to be the biggest part of our business, and we want to make sure it's flourishing. But when we look at where is the incremental money being spent, and I think that's the real question. bol.com is the #1 in terms of where we're spending new moneys because we really need to accelerate that growth. In addition to that, you're going to see us spending it on what are we doing with the, I'll call it, the win in Benelux. So that bigger ecosystem of how we really bring that to life. And then you hit right on the other big item which is everything that we do in on the omnichannel side, and the biggest piece of that from a cost perspective is going to be around DC's automation and fulfillment. So I think that piece is really important kind of getting at what your big topic was there.

And we spent a bigger proportion on digital and automation in systems and system support and data, all the things we discussed today, right?

All those things and health and sustainability, too. So there was another question...

The other question, beyond the 1 billion, if you see more bigger components beyond '25.

We definitely see more.

I'm not -- Kevin and I are a little bit more -- let's go after this one first.

Yes. I think it's definitely -- that's past '25. But as I mentioned, when you look at what's going on with everything on these alternative revenue streams, I think most important thing is it's an opportunity right now to go out and utilize that strong position we have, where we've got all the transactions where we're able to translate that into, I'd say, a real foundation for the future. But are we stopping at EUR 1 billion in 2025? Definitely not.

But also there, we will also learn they're underway, and our data strength is phenomenal like Selma and JJ said so. The EUR 1 billion is already a great next milestone. So let's work first on that one. Next question, JP, and thank you, Nick.

So our next question comes from Fernand de Boer of Petercam.

I had a few questions left. I think, Natalie, you said something about working capital. Could you say what kind of improvements you foresee in the coming years? And then on the CapEx, you also said that the investment would be probably front-loaded, but could you say something about the phasing of this CapEx? Is it going to be the first in 2022 and '23 and then later on, the to drive the cash flow and the profits. And then the -- on the complementary revenues, is that going to be booked in the store sales or in the other income line as not directly then in comparable [ sales graph ]?

Okay. There were a few in there, so I'm going to have somebody repeat those. The first one was working capital. And on working capital, basically, the position there is '22 is a little bit of a tricky year because we've got some puts and takes and COVID unwind, that kind of thing. But as we go forward, I mean you know basically from a working capital days outstanding, we have negative working capital. So as our sales grow, our working capital improves. And that's essentially the underlying assumption behind that one.

The other 1 was the question on potentially front-loaded CapEx. We indicated around 3.5%. Over the years, for now, you know that we always were well invested in our business, 3%, 3.5% of our sales, which is quite high compared to the overall industry because we would like to make sure that our store fleet is in a good shape. Where we now, let's say, invest quite a bit in bringing Stop & Shop again into a winning situation. And you heard a lot of positive things about Gordon. We did that 8 years ago with Food Lion. So we do these kind of things on a regular base. So that 3, 3.5% is not abnormal for us. That's normally how we operate because we believe that those stores must be in a good shape. But to which extent is front loaded?

Yes. I was going to say, I wouldn't take my comments as meaning it's all front loaded. What I talked about was what do we have to do to get those complementary revenue streams up and going. When we look at overall, especially in terms of the bol piece, the sustainability piece and what we're doing on the fulfillment, I think you'll see that more evenly spread across the period and actually potentially a little more as we go into '23 and '24 just because of the timing of those facilities going online.

Then the third question, Fernand, what was the third one? Yes, I think it was the media revenue, whether there was sales on stores or -- but I think it's just part of our safe for invest -- for our customers' program.

Yes. That was actually not entirely clear to me. Does this complementary revenues. I also had the impression that, that was part of the EUR 4 billion savings and...

It is.

It is.

It is. So you'll see it flow through in the margin line either in the gross margin or in the operating expenses in either of those places, operating income or gross margin.

Is that clear, Fernand?

Yes.

All right. Thank you. JP?

So our next question, Frans, comes from Andrew Porteous at HSBC.

Just wondering if you can give us a bit of color on the free cash flow, particularly the shape of it over the next 4 years. It's EUR 1.5 billion over the 4 years, but should we expect to sort of start lower and build. Then just thinking about the bol.com free cash flow. I know you didn't want to give the details on CapEx. But is your food retail business. Is the free cash flow there going to be higher than that EUR 1.5 billion on average? Just to give us a bit of a bit of color on that side of things. And then lastly, just around the step up in CapEx. I guess our hole for the past decade is sort of achieved its sort of growth ambitions within that sort of 3%. You built a world-class omnichannel business with that. And yet now we're sort of seeing a step-up in that. Is that just a function of the industry becoming more capital intensive? Or is there something else that you're seeing that really necessitates that real step change in CapEx?

Are you taking the first 2 on the free cash flow, I take the CapEx later?

And on the free cash flow, you don't get too much more color from me. I mean we came out with the comment that you were going to be looking at EUR 6 billion over the next 4 years. You've divided it evenly across those years. It's not a bad assumption, but it obviously will vary a little bit year-to-year in terms of how does that play into what's bol and what's our -- I'll call it, our core grocery business. Everybody is going to play a part in terms of how we improve our free cash flow. So we've talked about investing first in bol.com and making sure we give it all the energy to grow as much as we believe is there. So that -- I think that assumption is fair. But want everybody to contribute to the improving free cash flow of the business going forward.

And on the CapEx profile or do investments get more expensive. Is that the reason for stepping up, that's not the reason. The reason is here that, first of all, we can carry this with our balance sheet and the strength of the company. And the second thing, we just see opportunities. We see opportunities in omnichannel. We see opportunity with our store network, we see opportunities we're densing up in the markets where we are already strong. And we think that we can deepen footprint and increase more market shares, where we are already leading 1 and 2, as you know, in a number of the markets to take more opportunities there. So the brands see big opportunities there. We have to calm down the brands a little bit because we see even more opportunities there. So we increased the CapEx. That's a positive thing. It's a positive thing of confidence and that we also can take more share not only in the bricks and mortar, but also on the online -- omnichannel part. And that's what I think Kevin showed with the strong numbers in the U.S. and online and Wouter showed in Europe plus all the plans we have in the Benelux, which we just mentioned, and what we just shared.

And I think I'd just add the sentence, which is we are a company that believes very strongly in keeping that operating cash flow coming. And so you can expect that as we go forward. But we also -- we have the super strong balance sheet, so we want to use it. This is something -- when you see the opportunities, this is something where in the last year, whether it was Fresh Direct or Deen or the Southeastern Grocers opportunities, those were things we were able to jump at because we did have the balance sheet to do it, and you can expect to see us do more of those if they make sense.

We are very, very disciplined how we use and utilize our CapEx. We have strict hurdle rates in our company, and all those investments have to hit the hurdle rates and those proposals we see in our executive committee to pass and to approve those projects. So you can expect from us the same discipline as we had before on the return on capital, on the hurdle rates and which strategically, which projects should get the money if there is more demand than supply from a CapEx perspective. So you can expect from us a strong free cash flow focus but also a very strong discipline on the CapEx.

So our next question comes from Victoria Petrova.

And are you thinking about monetizing your online grocery business into the future? Obviously, it's given a completely different multiple in comparison to grocery business? And I have one more clarification question, out of 3 fulfillment options, takeoff, fabric and out of store so far, which one is the most profitable for you?

Okay. I think that question on the formats of online bricks and mortar, click and collect this kind of thing. That sounds like a typical question for both Kevin and Wouter. So they can shed their light a little bit on this, what is the most profitable business format when we talk about online. And the other question is a simple one to answer. We just announced our intention to float bol.com for a limited share. We would like to be a significant shareholder going forward of bol.com because we would like to work with bol.com in all the things we just heard in the cool things in the ecosystem to strengthen our total business, and we have no intention to IPO or to float our online grocery business because we see this as an omnichannel format and combination of our brands and. And we have to talk a little bit more about this like today to also let you understand how strong that business is and how valuable that is, the grocery omnichannel business. Maybe Wouter, a few things from your side.

Yes, maybe just to shine a light a bit on how we look at e-commerce on the food space here. What I tried to explain is we're looking at 3 models. It's the fast delivery model, which we are testing basically, which is a very dilutive model. Then we have compact, which is, of course, a free delivery model. We are testing and learning that in high urbanized areas, and then we have our complete model. That's a model we have already for a long time. And you see, of course, the secret sauce that Natalie always talks about is how do you get close to profitability? If you just take the ingredients what I just mentioned about scale and density and high drop points then if a customer spends more than EUR 150 in those kind of dense areas, high urbanized areas, then we are seeing really very much light at the end of the tunnel. So we look at it from a fragmented point of view, but we do have a journey to go forward. In the home -- in the online part for food, we don't have in Europe a lot of automated solutions yet. So Kevin is ahead of that curve. We are already testing a couple of solutions that they have in the U.S., and we're going to bring that soon into Europe. But maybe, Kevin, maybe some light on your side because you also have pickup points, which is a different dynamic.

So Europe is very much a delivery business for us, both for bol but also for the food business. We started with next-day delivery business with Peapod in Chicago, a good 20 years ago, but that business drastically changed over time, Kevin. Maybe you can give a little bit of picture where are you now with your various fulfillment formats?

Yes. And I think what Wouter said is also true for us is that density, volume, scale, those really are important as we think about building out our omnichannel network, and how we're actually using different channels for different types of fulfillment and then ultimately, how we ultimately get profitability out of that. In the U.S., in our marketplace, at least about 50% of our total volume, a little over that comes from our click and collects. And at the end of this year, we'll have about 1,500 of those in place. And in a click and collect, what really matters is that getting the volume up so that we can cover all the fixed costs and continue to move forward with that. We also have a big central fulfillment operation today. And in central fulfillment, again, it's getting that center and the routes really optimized in order for you to get the volume and the density that you need to have and then also the transaction size. And during the COVID period, those transaction sizes have been fairly large. And so that's helped us a great deal in getting those centers where they need to be from a flow-through point of view. As we look at automation, like when we talk about takeoff and Autostore and Fabric, these are different types of configurations, and we're looking at different ways to implement them. We run today, we have about 21 to 23 manual war rooms that we run or dark stores that we actually pick from. And again, volume matters a lot there, but when you have volume, you can get a pretty good productivity out of those facilities. Our thinking then is that adding these configurations for automation to this, it will allow us to actually increase the productivity quite a bit. So if we look at like at an Autostore, we're looking at our all-in productivity about double what it would be from a click and collect, slightly higher than that maybe in today. And so as we look at this going forward, we think there's a great deal of opportunity for us to apply the technologies of these micro fulfillment centers in combination with building that demand density that we need. And so as Natalie talked about our CVP, our CVP is just critically important to us because the more that we can connect digital shoppers and build omnichannel relationships the more opportunity it gives us to drive profitability in any of our kind of net channel delivery mechanisms that we're using and ultimately get that last mile where it needs to be for us to be successful with this. So that's how we're looking at it today. Again, we don't have enough time with all of our different technologies that we're testing, but we're looking at a lot of different approaches to this. And we do think, and you saw with Island Avenue, what they're doing in the Philadelphia market. That's one example of a test that we're running to see what do we learn from that and then how do we apply it as we're building out demand going forward, because we do believe that our demand will continue to grow.

It's also clear that click and collect fulfillment model is more profitable than that very expensive last mile. And a lot of customers are very happy with the click and collect because it's the same day and quite flexible there. And with the stores you know and the assortment you know. So I think we found a way there that we can marry both a better customer connect, but also within the more profitable fulfillment model. So we learn on the way and we exchange the information between the Europeans and the Americans. Was that an answer to your question?

So our next question comes from Sreedhar, UBS.

Three quick questions then from me, please. Just going back to the free cash flow, I'm afraid, Natalie, the EUR 6 billion more than EUR 6 billion, any view on how we should see it for 2022? And perhaps more broadly, when do these additional investments actually become accretive to free cash flow because clearly, through the planned period, the dilutive to the prior level of free cash flow that we've come to expect from our own delays. The second one, you've talked about achieving fully allocated ecommerce profitability by 2025. Very helpfully, you shared some details on bol.com. But can you talk a little bit about where it is today for food e-commerce. And in 2025, how we should be really thinking about it relative to the focus in group margin that you're talking about for 2022, for instance? And the last one is, I think going back to Rob's question on the alternative media, alternative revenue streams, so say, EUR 1 billion. I fully understand the profit from this may well be used as fuel for additional investment and fuel for growth. But any helpful hints in terms of how we should think about potential profit contribution at a gross level some of it maybe ends up being reused as fuel for growth.

I will take the question on the profitability of e-commerce, where is it now?

Perfect. And I'll take the first and the last. I can those 2 very quickly. In terms of free cash flow for 2022, sorry, you've got to wait until February with our Q4 results then you'll have more. There's obviously some different moving factors as you can imagine, as we get to the end of the year. And on the question in terms of what's happening on the monetization and how you see that kind of flowing through the P&L. I already mentioned that we expect the vast majority of that will come in our margin line and we're going to be using a good portion of that to reinvest in the other activities so that we can make sure we stay competitive and we hold those industry-leading margins going forward. So sorry, not a lot more specificity for you.

No. And Natalie, just a quick follow-up because I think what we've seen is a step down in the free cash flow, with the new investment plans. But when do you expect that to...

Yes. Sorry about that. That's -- you did ask that as well. And I think the call out on that one, I would just make is I'm not sure if your assumption, which is, hey, there's a lower flow-through is a fair assumption. The example that I like to give a lot is if you look at the U.S., where we put a lot of money the last few years into the supply chain, we're just getting ready to -- this year, it's still 50 million. Next year, it's cost-neutral. 2023, we see it be 100 million of an upside for us. So I think as you look at omnichannel, you can think the time lines are a little longer, but I think bol is a great example of the payoffs are much bigger. So I'd say stick with us. I think you'll continue to see -- you'll be very with the payoffs of those investments.

So on the other question, Sreedhar, on the profitability of the total e-commerce business by 2025, we already shared with you earlier since 2019 that bol.com is EBIT profitable. So we talk here about a food e-commerce challenge. And then your question is, okay, if you make that profitable in 2025, where are you now? Now where we are at the moment is that is at the moment not profitable, it's loss-making. But again, we talk about a fully allocated. We see a couple of competitors in our business. We have a different calculations, talk about incremental and these kind of things. We talk about a fully allocate everything what is linked to that. It is labor in the store. It is, of course, the automation part, if it's the way we deal with our service partners is allocated to those costs. We are very clean and very clear. So it's loss-making at the moment. We have a few pockets where we have high densities. You can imagine that in cities where we have a high density, if it's in Holland or in Belgium or in the U.S. that we see already profitability coming through, but the whole business profitable in 2025. And we do not indicate how much loss making is it at the moment. So -- but I think on bol, we will be much more explicit as soon as you see the prospectus coming in hopefully in a run-up to our IPO in the second half of next year.

And I was just going to add to that real quickly, which is, I think, the most important thing and the reason we feel confident being able to make the comment on 2025 is we are in a great place incrementally. We have seen good improvements in -- as we move from '19 to '20, those are a little more historical, but we have a lot of data on what's driving that improvement in profitability today. And if you look at everything on sales volume and leverage that the commercial guys mentioned, but you add also what are we doing on operations, how are we doing it on the CVP and what do we look at on those complementary revenue streams. -- it's very clear to us what we have to do, what are the levers we have to pull. And that's -- it's a nice place to be in because now we've got to operationalize it, but that's what we do best as retailers is when we get into that retail is detail, and we're pulling those different levers, That's, I think, why we have so much confidence in the 2025 outlook.

Absolutely last point. When you see 2025 food e-commerce profitability, how different do you think will it be to the group level profitability that we are now seeing about 4%. That was my last...

So I'll just close that one up with it's -- when we talk about omnichannel profitability. And that really is the direction that we're moving where you think about customer lifetime value and how does -- what are all the halo effects and the trade-offs? Then I feel very confident about you're going to see something very much in line with the rest of our profitability. If you look at channel profitability, it probably still won't be as profitable as in-store profitability. But it is something where we're going to feel -- we've got a very channel oriented, how do we optimize that channel first and then most importantly, how do we look at it from a more omnichannel perspective because that's really what matters to us as a company is how do we make that piece work.

And we talked about earlier quarters, we talked about an omnichannel customer richer in share of wallet, rich in the total margin profile. That is the name of the game. That's what we believe in. And I think so far, we have not been disappointed the way we are positioning ourselves. I would like to go to the last question, JP. Sreedhar, thank you. I would like to go to the last question, JP. It's a little bit dangerous because then we might get 3 again, but let's give it a try.

I'm pretty sure friend Xavier can control himself with his last question. So hand over to Xavier.

So yes, 2 questions and not 3. The first one, can you elaborate a bit more on the top line growth you're expecting for your in-store business? Just to understand a bit more how it will contribute going forward to the sales growth on the EUR 10 billion incremental sales you're expecting by 2025. And the second question, just on capital allocation going forward. The fact that you're increasing CapEx, does that mean that potentially you are more focusing on organic growth versus bolt-on acquisition, as you used to mention? And do you still believe that you've got the balance sheet to potentially participate in consolidation despite the CapEx improvement and linked to that, what is potentially the read across or share buyback then?

Yes, I'm happy to take both, in fact, but if you should like to fill in, then let me know. The sales number, the EUR 10 billion is roughly 60% coming from online and a 40% coming from our stores. So we are very, very much focused on the omnichannel, we grow with stores, bricks-and-mortar, and we grow it online, but 60-40 is roughly the distribution. And the second thing you asked about CapEx. You know that in our definition of CapEx is talk about organic growth investments. That's the CapEx. If we talk about M&A, it's outside the CapEx envelope. And there also, we have an unchanged view on this. We see -- when we see opportunities in the market, then we will look at those and we have indeed the financial strength, like you talked about before. We have done a couple of M&A transactions in the last couple of years. We're Southeastern Grocers. We had Deen in the Dutch market. We had Fresh Direct. I think we have our eyes wide open. We have, let's say, a or with the balance sheet to act when we see there is a good fit within our strategic framework within our profitability framework, very well disciplined. But the M&A envelope, Xavier, is outside of the CapEx envelope.

Just a quick follow-up on that. I was just thinking that the fact that you're increasing the CapEx, does that mean that potentially organic growth is a key focus a bit more than bolt-on if I compare to what you did in the past?

Organic growth has always been the key focus for us because that's the most profitable, as you know. So it has been always the key focus to grow on the same square meters or densing up with the ones and 2 in the markets where we operate. But let's not forget the strong growth we see with omnichannel and the ecosystem we talked about in the Benelux will give us growth levels and promises to customers we have not seen before because of the unique combination of leading food brands, a leading marketplace in the Benelux, and that's, I think, exactly where we're heading for.

And maybe 1 more sentence on that one, which is it was the headline of the press release today. We are expecting to step up our expectations on growth organically. So that's the reason why we're investing because we believe there's all that opportunity out there.

Okay. That was -- those were the last 2.5 questions from Xavier. I would like to thank everybody on the call, both the ones with the questions, but all everybody who followed us during the day. Thank you very much for your interest in our company. I hope you got a lot of new information about the industry about our company in itself. I'm very proud that we had a strong team, which took you through the day. We are very much looking forward and in confidence towards the future. I hope you're with us. Thanks for your attention today. Thanks for being with us, and see you soon and latest the next quarter, of course. Bye-bye. Thank you.