Good morning to everybody here in the room at this beautiful building at the Royal Society of Chemistry. Very good morning to everybody in the office or at home on the screen. Since becoming Chief Executive, I had the chance to present my thoughts about the business on two occasions, with both the full year and the interim results. This slide captures some of the topics I have talked about previously, the opportunities that I see and my priorities going forward. These are framed around three areas, focus, strengthen, and grow. Starting with focus, Synthomer's platform has evolved significantly over the last five years, not least as a result of the acquisitions the Group has done.
One of my first actions was to extensively review our portfolio to fully understand our strengths and weaknesses and where we can grow market share, something that had not been done for a while. That also highlighted a number of non-core areas that are either cyclical in nature or where we don't have sufficient scale to generate strong, consistent growth going forward. I will look to rationalize the portfolio over the coming years, and there will be a number of benefits that come from doing that. It will reduce our complexity and make Synthomer a more efficient, more focused business. It will increase our end market orientation and bring us even closer to our customers and more embedded at an earlier stage of the product development cycle. It will help expand the specialty nature of what we do, enhancing our focus on higher value, higher growth products.
It will enable us to allocate our capital better, so we invest exclusively behind those areas where we know we can win. Next, we need to strengthen. Firstly, innovation. Synthomer are better innovators, and I think it is perhaps appreciated. We have consistently met our target to deliver 20% of revenues from products patented or launched in the last five years. But it is clear that we can do even more, not least with regulation driving the requirement for cleaner, environmentally friendly solutions and renewable raw materials. Synthomer has a strong sustainability offering, which we'll hear more about this morning. Secondly, we are optimizing our network to further enhance our operational excellence and our footprint. Thirdly, and as a priority, we need to strengthen the balance sheet, returning leverage to our target level of between one and two times. I will expand on this in a moment.
Finally, we want to grow. Just as our evolution over the last five years has created opportunities to streamline our portfolio, we also see a huge opportunity to realize significant value from being a larger scale, more focused business. We will be driven by a clear set of strategic objectives that I will come on to, and we will be focused on achieving a clear set of financial and operational targets, which includes delivering an attractive return on invested capital, consistent growth and increasing margins, and a strong cash flow. Before I come to talk about strategy in detail, I would like to return to the balance sheet because it is understandably in sharp focus. Lily will come to this in more detail after my section of today's presentation, but there are several ways by which we will take our leverage back to the targeted range.
First, as I have said, we have identified several parts of the business as being non-core, and exiting them will be an important part of our strategy. Some of these areas are relatively standalone, while others are more intertwined within the group and will take longer to separate. We therefore expect to make some strategic divestments in the near term, with others following in the medium term. We will be very disciplined as we go through this process, and as we are doing this for the strategic reasons I outlined on the previous slide, these disposals will inevitably help to reduce our leverage. We are in discussions regarding at least one disposal already. Second, we announced a working capital improvement program alongside our interim results in August. The focus here is especially within our new Adhesives business, and we are making good progress.
We are also actively optimizing our supply chain, aided by reduction in raw material prices. Third, we will reduce CapEx from GBP 130 million by GBP 50 million to GBP 80 million this year. We have also implemented a number of initiatives to reduce our operating cost. Fourth, we will lower our cost base as we streamline the business and reduce our complexity. Fifth, we are in discussions with our banks to ensure that there is sufficient headroom for our covenant through the remainder of this year and through 2023. As part of the waiver process, we have announced today that we will suspend dividend payments until the end of 2023, including the payment that is due in November.
Finally, we recently entered into an agreement for a GBP 450 million facility with the UK Export Finance, a competitive form of finance that we will draw upon as required. In summary, we have a clear plan to exit non-core businesses, which will meaningfully sharpen our end market focus, enhance our specialty offer, and make us a more streamlined, efficient organization. That activity, together with a host of other initiatives, will enable us to strengthen our balance sheet and return leverage back to the range we have in target. Let me now turn to more details of our strategy, how it will look like in the future. You can see here the strategic direction we are taking. We are now a business with a portfolio of about 50% base business, about 50% specialty.
We want to increase our specialty weighting, and our clear definition is to be 70% specialty, 30% base. It's important to note that the 30% base is mainly the NBR business or our Health & Protection business, as we call it, going forward. That will be the main part of the 30% in the next three to five years. Geographically, a more balanced geographic distribution. We are still heavy on EMEA, 50%, which is not the easiest region in this world, as you know. I believe also going forward, the U.S. will be in better shape than Europe. I remind you that our company only two or three years ago had a U.S. stake of less than 10%. We are now at some 28%, 27%.
I think a huge step through the acquisitions of OMNOVA and of Eastman Adhesives has been done, but the focus is clearly to increase this to 35% over the time to come. Lastly, if you look at our footprints, I truly believe that for a company of GBP 2.8 billion turnover, a factory network of 43 sites is a lot. Probably it's even too much, and we will streamline this by means of either divestments or by means of consolidations, of focusing where do we produce what, and we'll probably come to a network size of around 30 sites over the cycle, over the time. Let me discuss a bit more what we understand as base and specialty. I always see there's a big discussion, sometimes almost becoming a bit philosophical, what is really base, what is specialty.
I would like you to be able to frame how do we see our businesses. A base chemical business we describe as GDP growth, basically as cyclical in nature. The mega trends drives the volume. Supply, demand drives the profitability. It's about the position on the cost curve. It's about privileged access to raw materials. It's process innovation rather than product innovation. Entry barriers, the biggest one is CapEx intensity, because you usually need a lot of CapEx to get into the business, but then you run it by the fundamentals of a base business. If you see this, it is very clear that all the businesses that are mentioned below, they clearly qualify as a base business within the portfolio of Synthomer. Now, also important to note, a base business, and that sometimes the notion is kind of not a bad business and especially better per se.
You can make money with both. When I come to this later on, you have to put it in a differentiated steering. You have to allocate capital in totally different ways. If you look at our examples, it is clear that our Health & Protection NBR business has all the features of a base business. As you can see now, as we're going through this downturn, it is driven clearly by supply and demand, profitability, and if the demand is not there, our profitability suffers, as we have told you a few weeks ago. It will come back. You see the acrylic monomers, which is also a base business, and you see the SBR business for the paper and carpet market, also clearly a base business within our portfolio. If you look on the specialty side, it is higher growth features. It is less volatile.
The megatrends drive for novel solutions. It's about customer intimacy. It's about application development, innovation, how much you know your customer that you can differentiate against your competition. Application expertise, customer access, and again, as I mentioned, innovation. We have plenty of those businesses in our company. Pressure sensitive adhesives, specialty tapes and labels in our AT division. We have in FS, current FS division coatings. I especially would highlight our waterproofing membrane business, fiber bonding. Plenty of examples, and I come to this later on. Also in our IS division, which is a bit of an assembly of smaller businesses all over the place. We have our lithium business out of the U.K. here, out of Stallingborough, which is clearly a specialty business.
That's about the definition, how we see them, because later on you will see it is extremely important how we do differentiate. Come to the next, that is an important slide here. We have sliced our business over the last few months within 10-23 sub-businesses, let's call it. Twenty-three value sales, as we also called it. We come to the conclusion it was a very granular work, by the way, really into every detail of those 23 sub-businesses. I come to the conclusion that we really have at Synthomer three types of businesses. We have our specialty growth platforms that is lumped into the segments of coatings, adhesives, construction. That is robust growth dynamics. We have sustainable leadership positions, and you can grow these businesses, you can differentiate from the competition. That's what we clearly say.
In line with the definition I gave before, these are the businesses we consider specialty. We have a second type of business. That's our Health & Protection business, which is a good business, attractive growth dynamics. I come to this later in the medical glove market. It is a base business. It has to be run in a differentiated way, like a base business has to be run. It is, as we sadly see these days, it is a more cyclical business. That is the blue dot you see in the middle. Again, if you look at the axis, X-axis is Synthomer ability to extract value, which we do have in this business, and market attractiveness, which is also not as high as some of our coatings, adhesives, and construction business, but it is a good business for us going forward.
Base and core. Then you see out of these 23 value sales, you see nine of them, the orange ones, we consider them non-core because they have limited synergies with growth platforms, and it's more difficult for us to achieve the critical mass in order to make real money. Now our chosen segments, a few words about them. We have mentioned coatings, construction, adhesives. These are GDP plus growth features 4%-5%. We assume a long-term GDP growth globally of some 2.5%-3%. This is GDP plus, not plus plus, but plus. There are sustainability tailwinds, low carbon footprint, bio-based, lightweight in coatings, battery applications for EV vehicles. We have a strong specialty position to build on, clear specialty dynamics. We have a construction business, our energy solutions.
Eastman, I mentioned before, the amorphous polyolefins out of the adhesives division coatings. We clearly, as always, at Synthomer, we have leading position because we are water-based. We have now pressure-sensitive adhesives, sealing, fiber bondings. I don't want to go into the technical details, but it shows you there is a wealth of specialty business within the coatings, construction, adhesives term. We have our Health & Protection business. We see in our target market where we have a chance to play about 6%-8% as GDP plus plus. I know that in the past, we mentioned sometimes 10% plus. At this day, I do not consider this realistic, but I would still say 6%-8% is a very, very attractive growth. Why we took it down compared to my predecessors?
Because 10%+, first of all, the world is changing, and second of all, that includes growth in China. China has a huge catch up to do. That's why I believe the domestic market in China, supplied by domestic players in China, will grow over proportionally. Now, we do not have a position in China, let's be honest, and that's why in average weighted, it takes it down. Again, 6%-8%, I don't know many markets, honestly, where we believe or everybody in the industry believes that we have a 6%-8% growth opportunity. We are also well-positioned to benefit from global mega trends.
I would like to mention our presence in building and construction in adhesive solutions, which clearly caters to the accelerating urbanization, which also kind of in the, in the new world and post-recession world, I think will prevail in many parts of this world. We have nonwoven consumer products. We have adhesives and textiles for automotive and food beverage. Those are very concrete examples will be found which are addressing the demographic and social change. Probably most important, we have emission reducing low carbon and circular economy products also coming a lot out of the adhesives division. Toby will elaborate on this later on. We have growth in renewable raw materials, and that is clearly catering for the irreversible trend of climate change and sustainability.
Even so, I know that coal has kind of a renaissance due to the energy crisis, but in the long term, this will reserve, and I think climate change and sustainability will win. We have a shift of economic power to Asia, I mentioned partially also to the U.S. We have launched 1.5 years ago, one year ago, our Asian Innovation Center. We will move more and more activities into there because I believe that we have a true asset there, and we have other opportunities to grow our business in Asia, referring to my first slide. We will expand our engagements in Asia. I think these are mega trends that will help Synthomer. Now, this is kind of the summary slide of our new strategy. You can see we have five pillars.
Everything what we will do in the future will be addressing one of those five pillars. We have three themes that go across the five pillars. I come to all of them in just a moment. At the end, the target is that Synthomer is a specialty solution platforms and very reduced complexity for Coatings & C onstruction, for adhesives and for Health & Protection market segments. Long-term ambition, also referring to what I said at the beginning, a specialty chemical company focused on select attractive end markets. Everything end market-oriented, what we are doing. I go through the pillars briefly. Organic growth in attractive end markets. I think that is something that as Synthomer been a little bit neglected over the past several years. I believe it is still the most attractive form of growth because in a way it's the least capital consuming growth.
You don't spend a cent on goodwill or on organic growth. I believe something in our core markets where we have plenty of opportunities. Rigorous and consistent portfolio management to build focus and leading positions. I really believe in these leading positions. If you don't have them, you have to either exit them or do something against it. Portfolio management, also probably a bit of the change against the past. It's a two-way street. It includes divestments and includes acquisitions. Now, knowing our balance sheet situation, it is divestments and acquisitions. If possible, they come after we have fixed the balance sheet. Again, it's a two-way street.
Also, if you look at the way we would like to do acquisitions, in the past, it was probably a bit more opportunistic, which brought us to the size we have, which brought us to the U.S. position we have, but which also brought us to the need to streamline the whole thing a little bit now. So we will go more into kind of programmatic M&A, really strengthening the core businesses, which I have laid out before. The third pillar is operational and commercial excellence in how we run our business. I come to this, we do have good examples of excellence in our company, but we have it in isolated pockets, such as safety or such as manufacturing excellence.
We do miss an overall end-to-end excellence that goes basically from the beginning when we're procuring the raw material until the truck goes to deliver the final product to our customers. Pillar number four is the differentiating steering on how we allocate the capital. We will have a very disciplined approach in doing this because it's clear that you cannot spread capital, especially in our situation, all over the place. I'll come to what I mean by this, but it's the differentiation between our base business and our specialty business. The last pillar, which I believe is an important one, even some people think it's a more softer one, is diversity, equity, and inclusion, holistic people development.
I still believe in the old phrase that the people make the difference, and I believe that diversity at the end of the day will lead to better EBITDA, very simple. I come to the achievements, what we have done and our plans to go forward. Now looking a bit more into pillar number one, organic growth in attractive end markets. Just a few examples on our focus markets construction, which is a little bit more than 10% of our portfolio right now. It's a GBP 3.2+ billion market, so it's large enough to play a role. I draw your attention on our European position. It's unfortunately known in Europe, but I explained to you, since we do have the presence in the U.S. now, we are very confident to roll out our business success also in the U.S. and partially in Asia. That is a good opportunity.
We are number one, two or three p layers. I would say a special focus on waterproofing. I think that is a high-growth, very profitable segment where we do have the technical solutions. We have water-based solutions. Again, water-based dispersions to drive for net zero. We can enlarge our European position going outwards. An attractive segment we would like to grow, especially on the industrial side, like in coatings, where I come to in a minute. Our coatings business, it's an even larger business or larger market at almost GBP 6 billion. We do have a good position there as well, more in the range of number two to four player, which is still a leading position, again, predominantly in Europe. The largest piece of this market is in architectural, but I believe for our company, we are slightly underrepresented on the industrial side.
You see with 19%, I think that is a future growth area for us, especially also in the current situation. Clearly, the coatings market, especially on the do-it-yourself side, on the consumer side, is down after we were all painting houses for the last two COVID years. I think here, especially in industrial, it's a good moment, but again, we do have leading positions in this business, and it will be a core for our company. Again, water-based technology, I would refer also to the increasing evolution of market to more functional coatings rather than just coatings to cover something. They are functional coatings with lots of features behind, and we will go to this in a little bit more detail afterwards.
Our third platform, and I don't want to say too much because we have Toby Heppenstall with us, who is running the adhesives business, and he'll go much more into detail. But just from my side, I believe that's a very attractive business going forward. It's GBP 8 billion. It's actually the largest business of our three core areas. It's a GBP 8 billion market plus. It's hygiene, which is kind of resistant or resilient also when you have economic downturns. It's packaging offers a lot of opportunities. Tapes and labels also relatively stable situation. Especially interesting these days is our performance additives for tires, which mainly came through the acquisition of Eastman. Especially also in view of electric mobility, sorry, you have much higher requirements on torque or abrasion for the tires.
That is something where the market is changing. That is something where a company like Synthomer, who does have innovation capabilities, good innovation capabilities, we can play a massive role here. I don't wanna steal now anything from Toby. I move on to our Health & Protection business, which again, I want to say it's a GBP 3 billion market. It's GDP plus or plus plus position, whatever you take. We do have a leading position. We are after one Korean competitor, we are number two globally, not in Europe, globally. Again, mega trends are behind us. I think the trend for hygiene, for food safety is increasing rather than decreasing on a global basis. You have big imbalances. In some countries, the consumption of gloves per capita is much, much higher. In the U.S., it's the highest.
In Europe, in some countries, it's much lower, and in Asia, it's clearly much, much lower. I believe that this will level out over time, which is a huge chance for us as a global leader with our, I think, also very cost-efficient operations we have in Malaysia. I come to this, even this, we are going to improve and to slightly change. Fundamentally a good business, GBP 600 million business. We do have critical mass there, leading position, good market growth, hygiene, food safety. Maybe a last sentence to this one, what is important, even so we are in crisis right now, clearly, the glove consumption. At the end, the glove consumption is pretty much on pre-COVID levels of 2019.
That gives you the security, the belief really, that after this stocking has finished, this market will come back, and we will play a good role in it and a very profitable role again in it. Again, it's our base business. The first three were our three specialty businesses. I go then to pillar number two, portfolio management, building leading positions. I have mentioned already a lot of features of it. Again, our three platforms, and when we are able again to deploy some inorganic capital, it will go into coatings, adhesives, and construction. Again, it will be programmatic, it will be enhancing the core. It will be either for technology or for increasing the footprint where we underrepresented. If you look at our second business, our H&P, Health & Protection business, we will take good care of this business.
We will invest in it if the timing is right, which right now it is not right. That's why we have stopped massive investments in Malaysia into our Health & Protection business, because for the foreseeable future, we just don't need the capacity as the whole chain does not need the capacity. We have opportunities to, A, cut CapEx, and B, reroute CapEx into the green area of the specialties. That's why it's important to say at one point, if we are on the strategic cruising altitude, let's say the green areas, the specialty areas is inbound, the blue one is neutral. We will not do any M&A in this area. Of course, there will be nothing in the paper and carpet area. If you look at the orange one, that's probably more on the outbound situation.
That is because we do not see synergies with core platforms. They are isolated businesses, or they just do not have, for us, the margin pools that we need or the mass that we can build up. Also here, very clearly differentiated where it will go. There's an in component, there's an out component, and there's a neutral component. I mentioned already a few things about operational and commercial excellence in everything, how we run the business. We have created recently a Synthomer Excellence with existing employees, so no additions of cost. We are operating with black belts. We are operating with green belts. I believe that is a very professional form to get the benefits and to increase our productivity of everything what we do. As I mentioned, I believe. Sorry, I'm one too late.
As I have mentioned before, I believe that we have in Synthomer excellent pockets of excellence, such as safety, health, and the environment. In the middle of the chart here, which is purely illustrative. We have good examples in manufacturing excellence, where we are tracking value gaps in terms of margin opportunities, in terms of cost opportunities. I think we have a lot of opportunities in our company in commercial excellence, in functional excellence, and in innovation. Again, I think for me, the most important is that we do it end- to- end, and that's what the new Synthomer Excellence organization is taking care. Just a few ideas on commercial excellence. Sales productivity, key account management, value selling, I think here we are behind. Analytics-driven commercial management.
I think in the modern world, there are plenty of opportunities to improve here with our dedicated excellence organization. You know, when you have to do excellence in the evening after five when everything else is done, you don't really do excellence. That's why we have now a dedicated organization taking care. Very, very small central excellence teams. All the other people, like I mentioned, the Green Belts, Black Belts, integrated, embedded in the operating divisions so that it's also clear accountability, responsibility for the benefits. Granular pricing optimization. I believe we have done an excellent job in the past when raw materials were rising. I think we passed it all on. I think that showed our excellent pricing power that we have.
I am also confident that now when things are turning and raw materials are going down, that we can hold on as it seems right now because our margins are still on a good level. I believe that some pricing optimization is still there. If you look at manufacturing excellence, I believe that production process efficiency, lean decarbonization, plenty of opportunities. That was less of a focus, I believe. Another one I would like to mention is deployment of digital and analytics tools to drive performance and cost management. This doesn't cost you a lot. Again, with the site network of currently 43 sites, I believe that we need some efficiency and productivity gains. With some digital analytical tools, you can get it without the need to invest big things.
Functional excellence. I said repeatedly that I believe that Synthomer in the past had an excellent procurement approach coming from the mindset also over the last five to 10 years. This procurement excellence, we will continue, of course, because it works very well. As I said, we will embed it in the whole excellence journey from the beginning end to end. They're obviously more at the beginning of the chain that I believe there we have a good chance to make this end- to- end. Excellence in everything what we do. I go to pillar number four, the differentiated steering. You know what? I think in a way, the worst what you can do is if you mix the two businesses, because then you allocate, let's say, too much cost and capital to a base business.
I say sometimes even cynically almost, not enough into a specialty business. You do not get the returns and the margins you need. Because a specialty business you do need to support. You need R&D, you need a technical sales force, you need those things. In a base business, you basically run it from the production straight to the customer. You probably don't need key account management. You don't need elaborate analytics on the sales side. You don't need a lot of innovation. You don't need a huge technical sales force. I think that is something where we were probably in the past, a little bit spreading it all over the place. What do we mean here? Very, very concrete. Specialty platform, the objective is it's a growth focus. Leadership mindset is end market customer orientation.
I always mention these are the people that think consumer backwards, what does the consumer want? Going backwards, what does it mean for us as a chemical company? Not the other way around, that we try to sell our chemicals and go upwards to the customer. CapEx, of course, specialty will get the over proportionate share to capture the growth. We defined 2/3 for specialty, 1/3 for base. In R&D, also clear allocation of funds that we have. We spend right now about 1% of our sales for R&D for innovation. I think that we have a potential to increase this slightly when the time is right, but the big measure will be that we allocate it mainly to our specialty business.
What we do on the base side is we invest into process efficiency, because that's the key to win on the base side, namely of our NBR business. Then the last one, also the talent has to be a clear allocation. These are the top sales, strategic marketing, innovation people. I know if you look at the CapEx, I mentioned before that we are going down for this year to GBP 80 million. You can still do quite a few things in CapEx to support the organic growth of the business. If we have a depreciation of about GBP 100 million, in the growth scenario, you would have a reinvestment rate obviously of more than one. Now due to our situation, we have to cut it for this year and for next year.
Even if you have another GBP 80 million for next year, or even if you take the one-to-one ratio, GBP 100 million, and you allocate GBP 75 million to specialty, you do have a chance to grow the business. In case somebody would like to think that we do not have enough funds to do it, I can tell you with a strict allocation, we can still do the most important projects where we do see fast returns. The base platform is a cash focus that you mainly redeploy then into the specialty areas, but we are also going, as I mentioned, to support this business. Our NBR, our Health & Protection business is core to our company and when the time is right, we will support it again.
We support it now as we speak because we try to reduce costs there, because we have time now, sadly, because we are at 40% capacity utilization. We are now reviewing all the production processes, the whole process optimization and the cost leadership program, that when the business comes back, and it will come back, that we are very much on the left side of the cost curve again. We use this time, I believe, wisely. Smaller pool of CapEx, I mentioned 25%, and only things that have a reasonably short payback. The famous strategic projects with the seven-year payback are probably not going to happen in our base platform.
Again, I'm sure that in some time, which we all don't know exactly when that is, that's why we took a lot of hope and dreams out of the system three or four weeks ago. I believe that when this business comes back, we will all enjoy it quite nicely. Talents, the people there, that's usually top process, top optimization people, and that's the exercise we are going through now in our key assets. The last point, diversity, equity and inclusion. As I mentioned, I believe it's a very important point. Something we do not change in our strategy for now. I think our purpose of creating innovative and sustainable polymer solutions for the benefit of customers and society, I think it's a very valid purpose statement. I believe to be in the center with safety, health and environment, supported by innovation, accountability, integrity and teamwork.
I think these are features, values, core values of our company which do not need to be changed, and that's why we keep them. 5,250 skilled and talented people. We did end of last year, early this year, an employee engagement survey. 73% of the people contributed, answered the survey, which if you look in the general industry, is a very high rate. That means we do have engaged employees. I can tell you that we all took very seriously in the executive committee the ideas, the proposals, the things that people like, the things that people don't like, the suggestions what we can improve. We take this very serious and is something that is in a very granular way being worked down. We have in excess of 500 innovation and customer-facing technical experts.
That is again, especially if you look into the specialty area of our business, that's the differentiator compared to our competition. That's a lot of people. That is 10% of our workforce. These are really the differentiators at the end, at the customer or in the lab who make the new solutions, innovation, sustainability really happen. One more point on the right side of the slide. I mentioned 43 sites, 24 countries. Take the last bullet. Over the last 10 months, we have a target. We defined the target before of 40% of gender diversity in senior management. That's about the top 80, 90 people. To have a target of 40%, I think Synthomer historically was not very famous on this topic.
We were at 20% in the past, and now within the last 10 months, we increased it to 31%. Again, that's not for the sake of the ratio. I believe that enhances the quality of the decision-making and at the end, our profit and probably also our balance sheet. I think that is a big step in just a few months. I come then to the three areas kind of underpinning all the five pillars. One of them, the first one is really the end market orientation, everything what we do. Again, not chemistry upwards, but consumer or at least customer downwards. Sustainability as a value driver and principle for everything that we do, mainly in innovation. That's why also organization-wise, is sustainability and innovation are run by our Chief Technology Officer, Marshall Moore, so in the same hand.
Innovation as a critical enabler, I also believe that is the future of a company like Synthomer, especially again, on the product side, in the specialty area, on the process side, in the base area. A few examples of what we are doing here on sustainability. We have our water-based polymers. I think that per se, by logic, is already a strong position for us. We have 43% of new products with sustainability benefits. In our 2030 targets, we have 60%. I think 43%, if you compare with the industry, that is a very remarkable achievement. You can see the focus that we allocate on it to get to the 60%. We had, since 2019, a 34% reduction in Scope 1 and 2, which also I think is remarkable.
It's one of our key priorities, and obviously we work more and more rigorously because you can also track the numbers better and better. We work on Scope 3 because I believe for the world that's the grand prize, that we look at the whole chain, and you see the whole industry is developing into this area. I believe we are quite in a good position to capture this. As an example, I think we mentioned it already once, but I think it is important. The London Stock Exchange awarded us the Green Economy label , and this you only get if you have revenues, 50% of the revenues coming from sustainable solutions. I think we are very proud on this, and it gives us also a bit of a acknowledgement that we are on the right track.
By far not at the end of the journey. We are maybe at 50% of it, but at least we are progressing and we have opportunities. Also here, we try to do it in a very granular way. You see our growth platforms of construction adhesives and coatings. We have opportunities in sustainability-driven segments, bio-based adhesives. Toby will speak about renewable rosins, architectural coatings, fiber bondings, and that would go all into the bucket of bio-based end products. We have opportunities, Toby will touch on it, in circular packaging. Also something we are collaborating with our former friends at Eastman. Energy efficiency, renewable energy, carbon capture in the construction business. You see there are plenty of opportunities, but also here I feel the risk sometimes in the industry is that we are all over the place and get nothing done.
I think with such a matrix, where exactly do we wanna play? What do we want to achieve in a world of generally constrained resources and probably at Synthomer even a little bit more constrained resources these days? I think that is really the way to go forward. At the end of the day, we would like to have a product portfolio that is really linked to sustainability, and that's why it's one of the critical enablers of our strategy. The last one of the three themes is innovation. I think the old framework of idea, develop and launch is a good one. We apply it in a very methodological way. We have organized to drive it by end market focus again. Again, innovation not from the sake of innovation, but coming backwards, calculating backwards. It's a busy slide.
You can read it afterwards. Just a few examples. You know, label and packaging, there are plenty of opportunities to have this more functional, that it basically looks better for consumers like us to buy these beers or orange juice. Recyclability is an important feature in there. Another example would be formaldehyde-free crosslinkers for insulation and roofing systems. That's something I mentioned before in our construction. Plenty of opportunities. Toby, for his segment, he will touch on a few of them. Maybe next year we give you a little bit more of a d eep dive if time is right on what is really our innovation possibilities. How do we attack it? We have four global innovation centers, one in the U.K., one in Germany, one in the U.S., and one in Malaysia.
That's the one we are really pushing more and more because there are very good conditions to do innovation. Only four centers, I think that is the right approach to do kind of the true innovation bit. Then we have locally 16 application laboratories. Those ones, they do the last mile tweaking of the product, adjusting the product for our customers, and that's why you need a little bit more. If we need 16, it doesn't matter, but it shows you the approach is really to be close to the customer, to be in the market, and that's why we have these labs where the market is. That at the end delivers and will deliver a baseline of minimum 20% of patented or of newly introduced products. I think that is also something, yeah, a focus of our strategy.
What do we do concretely on this? Here I have to say that that is kind of an aggregation of our eight initiatives. If you look in our internal documents, they are much, much more granular. Everywhere there are clear responsibilities, accountabilities and timelines to it. Here's a bit of an aggregation because internally, obviously, we have to work on very different levels of detail. Maybe I can draw your attention to number four. They're all linked to the strategic pillars. Logically, everything should be consistent, that we are not again getting all over the place. I think number four, enhance Health & Protection through disciplined organic means. We mentioned it before. We are pausing.
We are not canceling at all, but we are pausing our investments of some GBP 120 million into NBR Malaysia because again, simply supply and demand. We are developing this business. Again, process innovation in our sights. Number five, network complexity reduction program. Here, the big two project is one in the U.S., which is a consolidation project. Through the acquisitions over the last five years, I believe there's plenty of opportunity to rationalize sites and to focus more, again, where do we produce what with a kind of competence center approach. This will be a very hard exercise, but we are doing it. Some of these exercises, to your potential questions, they will consume capital. Also here we have to face it properly.
Some of them are easy, and they don't require capital, and then some of them, they go much further, and they take capital, and that's why we have to phase it in the right way. One of them, a large one in the U.S., as I have mentioned, and a second one is the disentanglement in Europe between our SBR for carpet and paper and our NBR. These are assets in several factories all over Europe. That is an easier one, and that is less, CapEx involved or little CapEx involved, but it will give us a much better strategic flexibility to treat the businesses differently in SBR carpet paper and in the NBR space or in other spaces of the division.
I think the other things I have mainly mentioned, but basically wanted to show you that they are behind all the pillars. There are clear initiatives behind. Now, obviously, when you do this type of evolution, it's not a total revolution, but evolution of our strategy with a lot of features being changed, we had to look at our organization as well. We have right now our PE division predominantly in the NBR space. The numbers here, they are last 12 months, 6/22, so second half of 2021, first half of 2022. Obviously the numbers are changing, as you know, because predominantly our nitrile business is in the downturn. These numbers, if you would take it then for the whole 2022, just when you make the ratios, please bear this in mind. These numbers are last 12 months, 2022.
PE division, we have Functional Solutions division. We have Adhesive Technologies, which is purely the Eastman business we acquired the first of April. We have IS, which is an assembly of eight, nine smaller businesses not linked to each other. They are kind of lumped up into the IS division, and we have our acrylic monomers division, which we also report separately. Now, in the future, we'll have first of January, we'll start with a truly end market focus. We organize everything based on the end markets, and it brings us reduced complexity because it will only be three divisions, which means that it is more efficient. You have less complexity, and at the end you have less cost because you have only three divisions, overheads.
Number one, it's not valid, but I come from the left side, our Coatings & Construction Solutions division. Then we have our Adhesive Solutions division, specialty, two specialty divisions. One base division, Health & Protection and Performance Materials, run out of one hand, one management team, but we have a Health & Protection bit core, and we have a Performance Materials bit non-core. What is the constitution of this? Coatings & Construction is a large base, is our former Functional Solutions business. What comes on top are two very attractive businesses in the coatings space coming out of the current IS business. Again, end-market orientation. Adhesive Solutions is basically the Eastman business we acquired, plus a big chunk, GBP 200 million-GBP 300 million coming from the Functional Solutions adhesives of legacy Synthomer.
The customer doesn't want to see Toby in the morning and Rob in the afternoon. I think we have big opportunities also on innovation parts. You know, these are big customers. They are big blue chip customers. Some of them, I think Toby will show they need a harmonized approach from our side, and that's why I think that this end market focus will pay out nicely. Again, Adhesive Solutions will be the Eastman adhesives bit, plus the whole Functional Solutions adhesives business, legacy Synthomer, plus this Lithene business I mentioned now for the third time today, coming out of the Industrial Specialties business, and that makes up the new Adhesive Solutions division. As I said, Health & Protection is pretty clearly defined.
Performance materials, these are all the businesses that come out of other divisions and out of the IS divisions, which we consider non-core. If you now add up, and you can make the math with another slide, we have identified GBP 635 million last twelve months of non-core business. That's about 27% of our total revenues with slightly dilutive EBITDA features. That is made up out of the performance materials bit plus the SBR business for the carpet and paper. That's the GBP 635 million. That is the logic how we defined our new divisions. That's how it looks then as of January 1. We have about 1/3 of our GBP 2.8 billion in Coatings & Construction. We have about one-quarter in adhesive solutions.
We have 26%, and this will change downwards because of the mix before it comes upwards again. Health & Protection, we have 17% in Performance. I mentioned before, the rest is NBR and SBR for paper. For these three sites, 5,000 people, GBP 2.8 billion. You see the numbers here behind two specialty divisions, one base division core, half non-core. I would like now maybe to ask or maybe one more mentioning on the Performance Materials side. That's important. About half of this in terms of sales and EBITDA, about half of it is our films and laminates business. You have one big chunk in there, and then the other half is made up of several much smaller businesses. I think that is an important point to mention.
I would like to briefly introduce Toby, who will afterwards have a long speech about his division, but I would like to introduce you our division heads now, three of them only going forward. Rob Tupker. You have seen Rob, I met a few years ago at the Capital Markets Day.
Two years.
Two years ago. Some of you then know Rob still. He takes over now our extremely interesting, also complex but very important going forward business of Health & Protection and Performance Materials. I'm extremely happy, Rob, that you take this challenge and I'm sure that, yeah, we will see much better times in NBR going forward. Which is not a management issue. This market has to recover, but we have to capture it when the market recovers, and we are positioned to do this. Adhesive Technologies, Toby Heppenstall, who will come later on. He will introduce himself. Coatings & Construction Solutions will be run by Ana Perroni . Ana also is in our company since several years in various functions. Five years in our company, so she knows Synthomer, but she has held very different positions before.
As we speak today, Ana is running the IS division, so she knows. She worked in other chemical companies and she knows the specialty aspect of the business. She knows the value selling, the innovation potential, the application opportunities. I think we have here a very strong leadership for our three divisions going forward. My last slide here, again, market orientation. Just that you see the end markets, Coatings & Construction. Specialty coatings, we are still a bit of a niche player, which serves our margins well even now. Construction, fiber bonding, energy, specialty adhesives. Additives, sorry. Adhesives is clear. Toby will come to it afterwards. The other ones are pretty self-explaining. Performance materials, again, it's a bit of a mixture, but as I said, these are non-core businesses because they don't really fit to the rest. Coated fabrics, laminates and films.
It's a wonderful business, but it's more a mechanical business rather than a chemical business. A very interesting business as we see these days. Inorganic additives, we are organic chemistry company. Acrylic monomers is more on the commodity side. This will make up then our Performance Materials business unit. With this, I think I don't know how we are on timing.
We have a 10-minute break now, and we'll restart at 10:05 A.M. with Toby's session. We can take some coffee, which is available next door. Anybody at home on the webcast, refresh your cup of tea. All right.
Thank you very much. Ten-minute break, 10:10 A.M., then we have Toby's section. A very interesting one. Then we have Lily, a bit more on our balance sheet and then our financial realities and solutions, which there are plenty, as I have outlined at the beginning. I will make a wrap up, and then obviously we are open for your questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone, and I hope you've enjoyed your coffee. I'm Toby Heppenstall, President of Adhesive Technologies. I've worked in the chemical industry for 24 years and joined Synthomer in 2016. I'm thrilled to be here today. In the next half an hour or so, talking about this new division of Synthomer, for which I'm privileged to be responsible. As you know, we acquired this business from Eastman on the first of April. Our rationale for doing that transaction was that we had long identified adhesives as a very attractive growth market. It represents, for Synthomer, increased specialization and is margin accretive. It really supports our sustainability goals of creating renewable products and exciting circularity options, which I'll talk about.
The business is also very end market-focused and in line with the strategy that Michael has set out, we'll make it even more so, encompassing Synthomer's full product range to the adhesive market. I've got to know this business very well over the last year. Initially through the tinted visor of due diligence and for the last six months or so in the blinking daylight of actually running it. Taking a business through integration, of course, is really two jobs in one. We've made excellent progress in a relatively short space of time, as you'll hear. That's thanks to a lot of dedicated and knowledgeable people right across the business, three of whom are in the room with me today.
Andrew Rashid, VP Finance, Amy Castle, VP Commercial, and Michaela Hofbauer, VP of Sustainable Innovation and Marketing, who will be on hand to help me answer your hardest questions later. Let me start by saying that in this period, I've really become even more excited about adhesives and this business and its future potential than I expected to be. It may be tempting to interpret from the outside that this division is basic chemicals, has that character and behavior. Part of it is products that may have been around for many years, playing a critical role in the supply chain. A huge part of the business at the heart of it, there's a specialty portfolio of smaller, high value, high growth markets competing in different ways with unique advantages.
Some of these products are also becoming more important compared to other technologies driven by various megatrends, perhaps the most transformational of which is sustainability. This business is abundant with opportunity, and I want to share some of that insight with you today. Business generates approximately $100 million of EBITDA and accounts for 11% of group revenue based on 2021 numbers. Now, in a year when our PE, our Performance Elastomers division will be normalized, AT will be more like a fifth. Our financial performance has been broadly in line with the investment case, with the business becoming part of the group, as I said, on April 1st this year. In a nutshell, we develop, manufacture, and sell tackifying resins and polymers that are used primarily in adhesives, but also as modifiers of rubber and plastic.
We have strong exposure to attractive markets, covering growth areas such as hygiene and packaging and tires. The business model is very similar to the rest of Synthomer. As you'll hear, we have some big key accounts, some distribution, and lots of close and long-standing customer relationships. We also provide technical support, which embeds us further with our customers, and that's all backed up by strong marketing to ensure we're future-focused in each of our important end market segments. There are six manufacturing sites, four in North America, one in Europe, one in Asia. The increased exposure to the U.S. is something we're especially pleased about because it's a market where we see strong opportunities for growth. There's a timeline here, that you can see and, the company started out at its earliest roots as the Pittsburgh Soda products company.
Actually, our site in Jefferson celebrated the landmark of 100 years just a couple of years ago. It began by manufacturing dyes in 1920, evolving to make resins based on coal tar. It was named Picco a few years later, and you can actually still find that prefix in some of our brands. Then during the 1950s and 1960s, the product line expanded from coal tar resins to resins based on other petrochemical and bio-based feedstocks. Hercules added the pure monomer resins for PMR product range, and a state-of-the-art site in Middelburg in the Netherlands. Eastman acquired the business in 2001, adding a couple more very important product lines at their Longview, Texas site, including the amorphous polyolefin, the APO polymers. Turning to what our products do, functionally speaking. The best of both worlds. Finally, compatibilizing.
The combination of the unique polarity and small size of our molecules helps to compatibilize different materials or provide specific adhesion from one surface to another. In adhesives, it really helps to bond dissimilar surfaces, which is notoriously difficult. This property of helping two dissimilar materials to mix turns out to be useful to help things disperse. Think of color in inks or helping cosmetics, perfumes stay longer on skin or silica in a tire matrix. For example, promoting homogeneity in mixed plastic streams, which should ring bells for all of us as a familiar theme, allowing, for example, a higher proportion of recycled content. The illustration on the right-hand side here gives you a flavor of the many interesting application areas where our products bond, modify, and compatibilize adhesives and materials in both consumer and durable products in our everyday lives.
I thought it was a useful part of the education process to talk now about the different products and also provide some context of our competitive position. The first point I'd like to make, Synthomer has the broadest offering in the industry in this business, with number one and two positions in EMEA and the Americas across all of these tackifier product groups, which are the important ones. The breadth and depth of our portfolio is a big point of difference strategically that our competitors don't replicate. Now, high volume of the traditional hydrocarbon tackifiers on the left-hand side are produced in China and Asia, but it's significant to the value and potential of this business to appreciate that we're really not the same type of animal as those producers and indeed most of our competitors in that segment. We're not chasing the kilotons of Chinese hydrogenated capacity or share.
We haven't competed head-on for years. We don't treat our products as co-products. Customer demand for our resins isn't subservient to cracker economics. It's our main product. Our strategy across all the product lines as a division is to play where it suits our assets and to find white space and change the shape of the addressable market. Pure monomer resins, PMR, are made from a different and purer feedstock to these on the left. Here, we're the undisputed leader in EMEA and Americas, with a good proportion of our grades having really no direct competitive equivalent. Specialty rosin products are manufactured in a couple of sites from a natural feedstock found in pine trees. This is actually Synthomer's first completely bio-based product line that we're really excited about. APO is the final one of AT's specialty product lines.
We hold second position here in a very exciting and fast-growing market. That APO is the only product, for now at least, that we sell as the main polymer for hot melt adhesive, as opposed to an additive or tackifying resin. Several megatrends, and I suppose sustainability tailwinds are driving the APO substitution of other main polymer technologies, which are largely styrenic based. I'll cover more of that later. As an aside though, the tackifier they tend to work best with is the hydrogenated hydrocarbon tackifiers. As hydrogenated hydrocarbons have grown, that's also favored APO adoption, and we're the only supplier with both technologies in our basket. This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that we help customers to develop formulations that work.
The bottom line, with this broad offering of products, we claim to be the most customer-centric supplier of our market. I'd like to take next an application lens. Most of our products actually are used across these multiple diverse segments and end use applications, and that gives us a lot of built-in resilience to fluctuating demand. Also creates barriers to entry. It'd be very hard work for one competitor to replace our presence across the board. That's the first key takeaway from this slide. The second is that we're not just a hot melt business. It is the largest segment, but it's by no means the only one. Within hot melt, there are three sub-segments. Hygiene, growth here is determined by birth rates on one hand, and the adoption of diapers or nappies on the other.
Adult care and fem care are smaller segments, but actually growing more strongly. In hygiene, we're repositioning our value really here from just supplying products towards providing formulation insights to partners and giving them a big head start in fixing their customers' problems. That's what formulation is about, really. For example, we introduce a new APO, amorphous polyolefin, polymer, and we'll also provide information how the combination of that polymer with all of our different tackifiers, which covers the market, gives different levels of adhesion to different substrates. That's how we give our customers a head start. In packaging, our products appear in hot melts, which close cartons and boxes, both at the end of a production line and when they're prefabricated. That's mainly for food and fast-moving consumer goods.
You can imagine how both hygiene and packaging tend to be pretty resilient to downturns as well, being associated with goods that people don't choose to do without, even if they might switch from Waitrose to Aldi for their shopping. Tapes is an important segment, and there are several different types for end uses. I have an enormous stack of tapes here that I'm gonna excite you with later, on a kind of deep dive. In tires, our resins are used in the tread compound and to tackify the adhesion of the plies in the middle of the tire between the tread and the inner. You may have heard of the tire magic triangle, with the three points representing three performance features, rolling resistance, wet grip, and wear that are mutually incompatible normally.
The use of hydrocarbon resins to modify rubber enables tire manufacturers to break that paradigm, allowing improvement of one. For example, take rolling resistance, which is key to achieve fuel efficiency standards of the future without compromising the others. The wet grip is also crucial to meet, I suppose, increasingly stringent safety regulations. This business was front and center of that whole resinization of tires over the last 10 years, as it has spread from initially just high performance tires to all passenger vehicles. That evolution is far from complete, hence still offering high single- to double-digit growth as it also spreads to mid-range and low-range cars, and it also rolls out across the world. In polymer modification, let me speak about that.
We're already in adhesive systems for flexible packaging as well as cartons in the hot melt segment on the left. Think of blister packs and hot seal lacquers. A very promising and relatively new area is the modification of the film or packaging substrate itself, which is what this segment here is about. Plastic packaging is still growing, it's changing a lot, and this area also has its own slide later. Finally, I wanna say just a brief word on the evolution of the portfolio. This business was clearly built on tackifying hygiene and packaging hot melt adhesives. That's great for volume. Doing the same thing for too long obviously is bad for differentiation.
This business is and has been on a journey of diversification across the whole product range into these many newer applications and segments I've mentioned, which are the strategic platforms of the future. From applications, we go to customers, arguably the most important slide of the presentation. We have over 300 customers with our products being sold in more than 600 locations around the world. With very strong relations, I said already with our customers who've been with us on average for 15 years. That means many have been much longer than that. I'm sure you'll recognize a lot of these names. They're a collection of blue chip companies with important brands, demanding standards. Distribution is also a significant channel for us and represents far more customers than our direct customer list.
We have one of the strongest distribution partnerships I've known in this industry, actually, which, wherein value creation through really good application work and cooperation more than offsets the margin shared. We have a large and highly technically capable customer-facing team to deploy our unique value proposition of providing insights that help our customers to develop solutions. That bears repeating, does that. We listen, we understand, and in that way, we garner 100 incremental head starts with each grade development that exactly matches that customer's needs or that customer's needs. Finally, the significant overlap between AT's original customer base and the rest of the group is another compelling rationale for the present restructure that Michael just introduced. Many of the names you see on this slide were already shared customers, in fact.
The opportunity to convert the gaps we've identified as cross-selling opportunities is significant and gives me very good confidence on revenue synergies. As evidenced from the customer overlap, unsurprisingly, the products we're bringing together now are highly complementary. In some cases, the technology is similar. We offer an alternative viable solution which our customers like, because we're giving them more choice. The bigger part of what we do is to bring complementary technology or different bits of the same system. I've set that out on the left-hand side of the slide, which I won't go through. Hopefully, it illustrates the point and to bring that to life, ladies and gentlemen, a little more, for the first time in the history of chemical industry investor presentations, I believe, I am going to dissect this nappy.
What you might not appreciate is that a nappy is a complex composite article. It's essentially a five-layer lamination of nonwoven fabrics and some important fiddly bits. The backsheet is laminated using our products for the next layer, which is a polyolefin ethylene waterproof membrane, and ensures that mother's hand touches soft baby's bum cover, not sort of a plastic bag feel. Then there's another nonwoven layer behind that, and in the middle is the core, the inner sort of cotton fluff and beads of super absorbent polymer. Those beads are not ours, but the AT products and FS dispersions can all be found in the bonding arrangement in the core of a nappy. Finally, the frontsheet, which is also laminated to the backsheet all around the edges to form a sealed envelope. We're also in that, what's called a construction adhesive.
This is all bonding mode I'm talking about here. The fiddly bits are critical. Here, elasticated leg cuffs. Several strands of elastic, at least three, are bonded to the nonwoven using our products. Very, very important to prevent leakage. The failure mode that you can imagine will most decidedly cause a loss of parental brand loyalty. The elastic attachment formulation is much trickier to get right. It's under tension. The tape tabs are on stretchable ears. Rather this side, and that's also tricky for formulated adhesive. The tab is both hot melt glued and ultrasonic welded. You saw it here first, folks. Nappy dissection. Bet you weren't expecting that. Tape, I'm gonna talk about next. I've a few different types of tape to discuss here. For packaging, sort of box tape, that's for boxes which are only made up and sealed at the point of shipping.
You have a couple of choices. You have water-activated technology that's preferred by people like Amazon, where our products bonds the glass fiber reinforcement into the fabric of the tape. That works like an envelope or a stamp. It only becomes sticky with water. You got regular packaging tape, brown or clear, whose pressure-sensitive adhesive, PSA, can be applied either as hot melt using AT products, or indeed as water-based dispersion from legacy Synthomer. Most of the tapes are more like this example. They're sticky. They're ready to stick to anything with the slightest pressure. They're sold in a form where the entire product is wound onto itself in a roll. Have you ever contemplated how much of a minor miracle this is? Take this masking tape as an example.
The miracle is achieved using our water-based acrylic release coating on the top side so that you can, in fact, unwind it, no problem. Glad that happened here and not with the nappy. The sticky side is provided either by a different acrylic PSA, our dispersions products, or again, a different hot melt PSA tackified by AT resins, depending on whether the use is for indoor or outdoor use. You'll appreciate that difference if you've ever got them the wrong way around and pulled your wallpaper off. 50% of our business, the tape business, is these packaging tapes. The other half is more specialty tapes used in automotive wire harnessing, for example, medical tapes or in the assembly of mobile phones. We've had regulatory discussions with a large mobile phone brand on the subject of renewable certification. The end markets that we serve are all large.
As you can readily appreciate, many are growing at higher-than-GDP rates. Driving that growth among many factors are four mega trends which all have sustainability at their heart. Like everyone else, we're seeing a huge interest here, ranging from content claims to the carbon impact. Let me talk about them a little. Sustainable convenience first. In packaging, consumers have conflicting interests. They still want to eat on the fly. They want to keep food fresh and clothes clean, but they also want less and lighter. Brands are looking for ways of building better conscious features without sacrificing convenience. One shift you can see is the shift from plastic to paper. Another is lighter weighting. Yet another is built-in recyclability. You can readily see what a crucial role adhesive formulation has to play in this whole journey.
Actually, not only in packaging but also in durable assembly. In order to make complex articles recyclable, you either have to engineer them to disassemble, to fall apart easily at the end of their life, which is all about how you glue them together in the first place. To be all recyclable, so-called mono materials. You make the rigid bit, the flexible bit, the textile bit, all out of the same fundamental polymer, which also requires a different suite of adhesives. How are we helping? More paper-based packaging means more hot melt and different types of hot melt to construct. More use of mono materials and practically recyclable materials tends to trend away from styrene and PVC towards polyolefins. That is the absolute sweet spot of our resins compatibility, and there's a case study coming on this. In sustainable mobility.
Well, in automotive, we contribute to fuel efficiency through upgrading tire performance with resinization, as you've heard. Consider also the car as a computer. You have masses of bundles of cables now threading through the motor, which we help to keep neat with our specialty tapes. Thirdly, as electric motors make more noise, drivers become more sensitive to the other sounds. The bar is higher for sound damping, and our products contribute here as well. The dispersions, the tackifiers, and the Lithene are all going into complementary types of liquid applied sound damping. Finally, we're seeing tremendous interest for our recently launched high heat amorphous polyolefins, the APOs, because of both lightweighting and recyclability. More use of polyolefins like PP in auto interiors are taking over from heavier non-recyclable ABS.
The auto OEMs would love to use polypropylene, but it's difficult to stick to without highly energetic corona surface treatment and using, for example, a two-part reactive liquid adhesive, which tends to be messy, but also tends to be toxic. You can see why they would like to move away from those things if they could. What if they had a hot melt solution, neat and tidy, optimizing space on the assembly line that also sticks very strongly to your lightweight recyclable polyolefin substrate? That's what our new APO product promises, and it's patented technology. Finally, climate change, carbon footprint. We're in a lot of consumer markets, both FMCG, disposables, and durables. The need for renewable and circular raw materials from partners up the supply chain is very much in the spotlight. We're in the front line here.
We are well advanced in the development of a waste stream-based circular feedstock for two of our product lines, which will deliver a significantly reduced carbon footprint. Now, I'm super excited about progress here. We have the right partnerships with the right types of cracker assets and with companies who care about actually doing this and making it a reality. Appreciate here also the importance of the basket effect. Customers are interested in all our products in these spaces. When you can start to sell one part that's circular already, it pulls two sales of the others as we take time to convert all our products into that way round. Now, let me build on that with two slightly more in-depth examples. No more pulling nappies apart, I promise.
On the right-hand side here in tires, the main story is in the tire use phase in terms of our impact on a tire's sustainability. I discussed how resinization with our products enables tires with low rolling resistance, which significantly improves fuel efficiency. Now, this helps hybrid and mixed cars to meet emission standards and is becoming even more relevant for electric vehicles, as the performance of tires must increase in this space due to higher torque and wear of an electric motor. In fact, the difference between a good and a bad tire can be at 10%-15% of fuel efficiency, and that all means that we expect, as I say, high single- to double-digit growth for our products here. The left-hand side is improved beginning of life story.
There's a lot of interest from tire manufacturers in improving Scope 3, them and everyone else. We had our first successful customer recently using bio-based rosin esters in tires. I should point out there's a real renaissance in interest for rosins for this reason in other applications too, both traditional ones and adjacent ones. It's not limited just to tires. The second example is plastic packaging. Here we're really active at all three stages of this life cycle, sort of idea, in a strongly growing application segment. Recall that our products are acting as modifiers and compatibilizers here. At the beginning of life, the main point is helping customers to design for recyclability by enabling readily recyclable mono materials and closing the performance gaps that appear between those new materials and perhaps what was used in the past.
Regarding the CO2 footprint, the second thing our additives do is to enable down gauging of the substrate and not only maintain, but actually improve strength. The third thing, they enable a compatible incorporation of recycled along with virgin material and maintaining the properties in the final article. That allows you a couple of pathways. The brand can either choose to use more recycled material, get more recycled material in there, or to upgrade the application in which that material can be used. Maybe they can now use it for consumer packaging instead of just a bin or, like, a park bench or something. In the use phase, polymer modification acts not only on the mechanical properties of the final article, but I mentioned on the melt processability.
This allows lower energy usage during manufacture and less process waste 'cause it's easier to stamp and fabricate those pieces out. In this area, the value chain is complex with a lot of smaller players doing different things. Honestly, part of the trick of our success is navigating that value chain and finding matches for our capabilities, not always in the traditional places. That's one of the reasons why our marketing team is so important. I mentioned at the outset that we've made a lot of progress since we got the keys to this business. I announced a leadership team very early on with members from both legacy businesses to oversee a smart and rapid integration progress, and I'm pleased that this has delivered some immediate results. We've implemented organizational changes to streamline and simplify decision-making.
We've pushed prices quite hard, partly to offset inflation, but also to ensure that we get the right value for those specialty products I've talked about in our portfolio. At the time of the deal, we identified $23 million of synergies. Now that we have our hands on the business, I've raised that target to between $25 million and $30 million. That'll come from further cost streamlining as a result of the latest restructure, but also from increased revenue synergies that can be achieved as a result of all these exciting conversations we've been having, looking at applications, identifying gaps at customers, and innovation possibilities that we see at the interface of our product chemistry platforms. We expect to deliver a $12 million run rate from the end of this year with the balance coming through between 2024 and 2025.
To conclude, what underpins my confidence that Synthomer can win in this market in the years ahead? I hope my genuine enthusiasm about the business has come through as I've spoken today. Firstly, we have leading market positions across the markets that we serve, and that competitive leadership is protected by the fact that we have the broadest portfolio of tackifier and resin products so that we're best able to identify and fulfill all of those varied customer formulation requirements. Relatedly, the breadth of our segment presence gives resilience both to fluctuating market demand and competitive pressure. I've talked about us being the leaders in customer intimacy. Our large and highly technically capable customer-facing team and marketing delivers knowledge and support, which is why customers choose to work with us on those new things and those trickiest specialty applications and their most important joint developments.
We have a lot of examples of that. Thirdly, our portfolio is uniquely positioned to help drive circular solutions. Recall how we can enable built-in recyclability and more recycled content and flexible packaging, advanced tire performance, and adhesion to lightweight substrates for automotive. The markets that we're exposed to, fourthly, are resilient, with GDP plus growth fundamentals in many. We covered a couple of examples of innovation projects, but by no means all of them. Our R&D pipeline is both long and broad, but crucially, it's completely end market-focused. We have a strong and successful track record in this business of bringing innovative products to the end market. Our raw material processing expertise and our ability to source from a wide range of feedstocks, including natural ones, because we're not an integrated player in that style, is actually another competitive advantage that I haven't even had time to explore today.
Finally, we're confident that significant synergies will come from being part of the wider Synthomer Group. All in all, it's really an immensely exciting business to be in. I'm gonna stop there, and I'll be delighted to answer any questions that you've got about this division at the end. Thank you.
Good morning, everyone. Now you can see we are truly diversified team, and we're pragmatic. We adapt ourselves to all situations. Good morning again. I just want to spend a few minutes to reiterate key actions we're already undertaking to improve our balance sheet. I will then touch on our growth platform and finish with our medium-term guidance and targets. As Michael said at the outset, deleveraging our balance sheet is a key priority, and we have a clear plan to do that. We have talked extensively to exit non-core asset. Now, in addition to making us less complex and more focused on the growth market, the divestment we make will meaningfully strengthen the balance sheet. Tactically, we continue to work on actions we mentioned at the time of our interim results.
Not least working capital, but which will return to circa 10% of revenue for the legacy Synthomer business and with a clear focus on the newly acquired adhesives business. Given the market environment, we have taken the decision to scale back our CapEx by about GBP 50 million this year to about GBP 80 million, and this will remain broadly similar, at broadly similar level, in the year of 2023. We're also scrutinizing costs across the business to drive further efficiencies. As we streamline the organization, the cost base will reduce and naturally a further benefit of our new strategy. Discussions with our banking group on covenant headroom is progressing well and we will provide update in due course, but I'm very confident we will get there.
As part of the process, we announced dividend suspension until December 2023, including the November 2022 interim dividend. We recently signed the agreement with UK Export Finance for a five-year, GBP 450 million facility. 80% of the facility is guaranteed by the government to promote business success, innovation, and sustainability in the U.K. The terms of the facility are similar to that of our existing RCF. With the actions on the page, we expect about GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million cash savings in 2023, excluding the impact of divestment, which of course add to the benefit. Now, just returning to our new divisional structure again, we will be focusing on three platforms, Coatings & Construction, Adhesive Solutions, and Health & Protection and Performance Materials.
Now, each of these divisions will be managed differently to ensure that we commit both financial and operational resource to those areas of business where we see most exciting opportunities for organic growth. We will report Health & Protection as one segment and separately Performance Materials to the market to provide better clarity. We have shown you that our end markets grow between 4%-5% for C&C and the DC markets, and about 6%-8% for our Health & Protection market. We have set ourselves a target to grow our top line by mid-single digit over the cycle on a constant currency basis. We want to get our EBITDA margin to be above 15%.
The key levers to deliver this margin expansion are sustainable-led innovation, product mix improvement, and Michael mentioned streamlined organization structure, and simpler manufacturing network. Both will contribute to the margin expansion. A recovery in our nitrile business to normal levels will also help. We expect our performance in that segment to be sustained due to our competitive position and ongoing growth in global gloves consumption. Now, we see this business as a mid-teens ROIC business over the cycle, and this will be underpinned by our disciplined capital allocation policy and approach. Our innovation target, which is for 20% of the revenues to come from products newly introduced in the last five years and protected, is unchanged, and we're committed to sustaining this rate going forward.
Now today, we're also pleased to announce an acceleration of our key carbon and diversity ESG targets, which are part of our Vision 2030 roadmap, which was originally launched back in 2021. You can imagine sustainability is established at the core of our purpose and underpins our strategy. Synthomer has developed a strong ESG position through its emission reducing solutions, sustainable innovations, low intensity carbon operations, and measurable and ambitious Vision 2030 program. This provides a tailwind for us for value generation and also competitive positioning. Michael mentioned Synthomer is recognized for having over 60% of our revenue coming from sustainable solutions and achieved London Stock Exchange Green Economy Mark. This recognizes contribution that we are making into transition to a more sustainable and low carbon economy. Now today, we announced our commitment to Paris-aligned science-based targets on carbon.
For Scope 1 and 2, we raised our target to 46.2% absolute reduction by 2030 compared to a 2019 base. This was 40% before. We raised our target on Scope 3 to 27.5% reduction compared to the base of 2019, and this target was 10% before. Now you can see those targets confirm our commitment and confidence in our decarbonization strategy and our ability to work with our supply chain partners as we progress towards our long-term goal to achieve net zero by 2050. Finally, very dear to my heart, we have made great strides to improve our diversity from about 20% - 30% within a year. By 2030, our commitment to have a gender diversity in our senior management team to 40%.
Now, before I pass it back to Michael, let me summarize that we will focus on deleveraging our balance sheet. We're implementing our new strategy, which provides focus on portfolio and choosing end markets and leads to ambitious medium-term financial and ESG target. Thank you. With that, I'll pass on to Michael to conclude.
Thank you very much, Lily. Just a few more remarks from my side, not to stress the things I have said already before. Five pillar strategy. Number one , organic growth in attractive end markets. More focused than in the future on this one. Rigorous and consistent, especially strategy consistent M&A portfolio management. Excellence, pillar four, differentiated steering between base and specialty, and d iversity, equity, inclusion. I think these are the five pillars, the targets of the company you have seen before. Where does it lead to? 70% specialty share in this strategy cycle, stronger positions in the U.S. and in Asia, and a much more streamlined factory network all over the world. The people who are familiar to the chemical industry, the cost in chemicals are really in the factories. This will have a major impact on our future doings.
The last slide here, the key elements. I think number one, leading positions we do have, and I think with our strategy, we can increasingly build on them. Attractive growth prospects. We have number two, a focus on construction coatings adhesives. I think we have a substantial upside as we have proven in the past in Health & Protection. We mentioned we are sure that this market is coming back. We are sure that we have even a better cost position due to our process innovation where we are doing right now. When the market comes back, again, we have a leading position. As we have mentioned in our trading update three, four weeks ago, we just expect very modest profits in the current period of time. I think the upside for us is quite significant. Simplify the portfolio, deliver on the synergies.
You have heard from Toby. I think we are not bad in this domain. We have delivered the OMNOVA synergies over-delivered. Toby has outlined we will do the same in the Eastman Adhesives situation. We have a clear plan for significant EBITDA margin improvement to the 15%+ and sustainability as a driver in everything what we are doing. Clear financial targets, which is also kind of a new disclosure from our side. Mid-single-digit local currency growth, organic growth, EBITDA margins 15%+. I know that specialty chemicals companies sometimes have up to 20% or even more, but you have to see where we are coming from. I believe at 15% with the clear prospect to go clearly ahead of this, I think that already has the profile of a good specialty company.
Return on invested capital mid-teens, I take this more as a hygiene factor. For me, that is more a threshold what you have to achieve. If we would have this 15%, I think that really gives us the right to grow. If I don't take this as an absolute lever, I would like to increase the organic revenue growth and the EBITDA margins. I take the ROIC as extremely important and probably much more important KPIs in the future. I take it more as a threshold which you have to pass, how you allocate the capital in order to grow the company. I think that is a change in our strategy. As Lily have mentioned, and all our actions are absolutely focused on this, you really don't have to worry about this.
We are doing all the deleveraging actions as we have laid them out. I think we did have the first successes, and you will hear in due course in this year, 2022, of our next steps, and I believe they are quite significant steps. I think with this, we can go to the Q&A. How do we do this, Tim? In the room we open up first or?
Questions in the room first of all, and then we'll go to online. There's a microphone coming around.
Sebastian. Second row first.
Thank you. Sebastian Bray of Berenberg Bank. I would have three questions, please. The first to Toby. Thank you for the presentation on Adhesive Technologies. I wonder what has changed in this business over the last five years that puts this more in this specialty category as opposed to base? Because performance was quite volatile prior to the acquisition by Synthomer. Is it a breadth of portfolio question? Has something happened internally? And how has this business been performing over the last few months? My second question is for Lily. I appreciate this is a very theoretical question, given discussions with banks are ongoing. If you were to apply benchmark interest rates and LIBOR as it stands, what would the group annual interest charge move to from if it's about GBP 35 million or so, a little more than that currently?
Finally, for Michael, you mentioned the use of ROIC as a hygiene factor. Is the ROIC post goodwill that you use or at company level or is it just that new projects that are expected to receive investment should generate higher than that return and actually this isn't a particularly relevant figure for the group as a whole? Thank you.
I can start maybe with the last one. It is including the goodwill, so it's really the right number, I would say.
It's the typical net debt plus net equity average and using EBIT as the numerator. Including goodwill.
Without goodwill, it would already be.
Yeah.
I'll take the first one, Sebastian. Thanks very much for the questions. You asked about what's changed, and indeed, there was a period sort of 2018, 2019, 2020, that we were also very interested in when we were looking at diligence, where the business looked more volatile and it even appeared, you might say, cyclical. What was going on at that point in time was a phase of game-changing expansion, particularly in hydrogenated hydrocarbons and particularly in Asia, and one investment in particular, which sort of shifted the market and therefore shifted positions and share and margin position. Our best view is that that game-changing phase of expansion has finished.
When we look at data now, it seems the build is just gonna keep up with demand for HCR and hydrogenated HCR in Asia and elsewhere. We don't expect, you know, any further sort of changes to industry-wide margins from that point of view. What else has changed that's really important is, you know, in the last five years is really the period where a lot of these realizations, a lot of the good marketing work, a lot of the good exploratory work on the developments has been going on in the tires and also in this packaging area where we've really started to see how our portfolio can play in really the white space markets, to be honest. As I look at it, I don't see it being cyclical. I don't see it being cyclical.
Sorry
Especially your second question about benchmark interest rate. The one thing I would draw your attention to is we do have an interest rate swap instrument in place, and that covers about EUR 400 million of facility and that lasts to about 2025. We do have a layer of protection, and that instrument is in the money at the moment, deep in the money at the moment. That's first part of my answer. Secondly, if you look at on a like-for-like basis, assuming nothing else changes, of course, benchmark interest rate is going up, and on that basis, I would expect our interest charge to be somewhere around the sort of 25%-30% higher next year compared to this year.
Thank you. It's Matthew from Bank of America. Michael, a question for you just around the portfolio. You've said, correct me if I'm wrong, but nine out of 23 business units are non-core. That's almost 40% of the company. I appreciate not all businesses are created equal, but you're still saying 30% of revenue is non-core. That's a huge statement. How have you come to such a different view on the industrial or chemical logic of this portfolio? Or have you simply been forced into decisions by the balance sheet and the need to raise capital? I'd like to understand the thought process as to how you screen the portfolio for what you generally think is core going forward.
Yeah. I think the end of your question I take first, because really, since I'm here, I have said that I would like to do portfolio management for the sake of the strategy. I think that we have to focus on attractive end markets. We have identified now the three we have said. I think that's a very clear statement. That certain divestment actions which we have announced that will come, should come, knowing that it always takes two to tango, they help the balance sheet and the leverage, that's clear. The sequence is first strategic and helps the balance sheet and not the other way around. I have said the GBP 635 million is about 27% is non-core. We have identified these 23 value sales. Nine of them, in fact, are non-core.
I mentioned films and laminates is about half of this non-core business. You are down to 13%-14%. I really believe that things we did and what we did in the past was quite aggressive external M&A growth. I think that served us extremely well in some aspects. Because like we see, we have businesses now, we have a critical mass of our company. We do have the opportunity to do portfolio management because in specialty chemicals, when you are a 1 billion company, you cannot do a lot of portfolio management. You have to live with what you have. I think that was an excellent move in general. I believe it gives us the exposure in the U.S., which is now 27%-28%, which is super critical. You cannot be a global specialty chemical companies without having a good share in the U.S.
Credit to all of this. I just, like, think in the evolution of time, it's a good moment now to look at this portfolio and to streamline it. I think that is something which maybe has been less done in the future. It was opportunistic M&A, and I see it, as I said, more as programmatic M&A consistent with the strategy. I know it's a reasonably bold statement. I can put as the disclaimer, like I have said at the beginning, there are some assets where we are looking for better owners currently right now. Some of them are not intertwined. They, let's say, are standalone factories. You can separate them easily. There are businesses which sometimes have really, honestly, little to do with a specialty chemicals company. I mentioned one being a more mechanical business. Good business, again, good business.
I think those ones are easy, and that's why I mentioned at the beginning, some of them, we can look for other solutions, and one solution is obviously divestment. Other solutions are joint ventures that you combine it with something. There are different ways sometimes. I think we will find solutions for non-core business, and the statement is true. It's 27% of our current portfolio, which I believe needs a new approach too. But again, half of this is the films and laminates business. The other one, yeah, some of them are easy to separate and some of them are more complicated. Also, as an example, I have mentioned the paper and carpet business. It's definitely a non-core business, yeah. But you have to separate the assets. That's also a project that I have mentioned. That's the second of the eight initiatives project.
Here, this needs a lot of work or needs some work to be done. That's why you cannot expect, and again, this strategy is three to five years. All those actions, they are planned over the strategic cycle. Some of them I hope will come within the next weeks or months, and other ones, they will take much longer because it needs some internal work. But what we will never go away from is the consistent path of the strategy execution. Something that is non-core will be addressed and dealt with. I think that is an important statement. Even so, it might take a certain time because of all the operational reasons for why we have to do it.
The financial targets that you've given for the mid-single digit and the margin, is that on the portfolio as it stands today, or is that what you think the portfolio is in three to five years time?
No, that is at the portfolio as it stands today. That is without bigger acquisition. I think some small bolt-on at one time or small sales, they wouldn't change. It's a situation as of now. It's a like-for-like comparison.
Effectively, those targets are meaningless because the portfolio is going to change.
Going to change. Right.
What would you anticipate the profile of the future business to look like in terms of its growth and profitability?
Yeah. I think that is then the question. That's why we mention it 15%+. You know, I think that the 15% we can deliver like this. It's the question how much we can deliver on top. There depends a lot on the portfolio management. What is going out? What is coming in? If you see on one slide, you can calculate the EBITDA percentages, and then you see that our performance materials business is actually not much dilutive. From there, you don't get huge impacts. This you have to go over the sequence of time now and obviously look at the ones that are most dilutive at the time, and we hope that our specialty platforms, they can grow over proportionally. I think this whole mix of the situation makes it up at the end. That's then the difference. Is it 15%?
Is it 18%? Is it 19%? That's the portfolio management then coming in.
I would just add to that, you know, we don't believe the targets are meaningless, even if we do portfolio management. Look, you know, in the event of M&A activities in the future, once we get balance sheet to the right place, we introduce ROIC, right? That is a very meaningful target for us to adhere to meet double-digit teens for ROIC performance over the cycle. I think, I believe that is a strong target.
The 15% we can achieve with the current portfolio.
Yeah.
You've not, you know, M&A is always difficult to predict because it needs two. I think it would not be very cautious and prudent now to say we can achieve 19% if M&A comes in, because M&A you cannot plan to a certain extent. I think that's you have to have it in two categories.
Yeah.
The 15% as is now, and then comes on top if we manage to do smart rolling it up, portfolio management. That's the strategy.
Good morning. It's Maggie Schooley from Stifel. Can I ask you to delve just a bit deeper on the rationalization of the factories, if you can? I recognize that there are sensitivities to it. Going from 43% to 30% is quite significant. Can you help us understand perhaps how many of those or how we should think might go along with divestments, and how much of that would need to happen organically, and when you believe the balance sheet will be in a situation that you can support that rationalization?
Yeah.
of those facilities?
There is no clear answer to it. I mean, obviously we have our internal projects, but it will be a spread over time. The easiest part, the short-term part, are the ones that will go through divestment, and there are several of them. The next step would be the ones what I mentioned, that we would have to do little, let's say, CapEx to separate and to organize it properly. There are the ones, and I alluded to one project in the U.S., which is a much more complex project, and this will go a little bit longer. I think you have to see this as a journey over time with near-term opportunities through also divestments, and then over time, the more complicated ones that go later on. I don't wanna fix now the number of 30%.
I know we put it on the slide, but we made it with this sign. You know, that is not 100% clear. I think it should show you the direction of the travel we are taking, and it should show you that it is not a little cosmetic minus. It is something we are looking really at the change of our asset footprint.
Sorry, as a last question, just once more, but when you say little CapEx, how much is little CapEx?
I think there are promising projects which are, let's say, in the short to medium term, they are single digit. Right.
Hi. Can I just ask a question regarding the UK Export Finance loan? What are the planned use of proceeds? Is there a springing covenant? And what's the margin you're paying?
Yeah. The covenants are similar to that of our current RCF facilities. As I said, you know, we're progressing extremely well with our banking group at the moment, and we'll come back and update the market in due course. In terms of use of proceeds, we're going to use it for general purpose, for working capital, maybe, you know, going forward for capital investment and clearly innovation. We do have a very big innovation center in the U.K., and one with the focus that Michael mentioned. In terms of coupons, that's again, the terms are similar to our RCF facility also.
Hi. Can you talk a little bit more about the cost that all this transformation is gonna take? You mentioned big numbers on the cost savings by the end of 2023. What's the cash costs that we need to expect for everything to be delivered? On the previous question on the export facility, does the export facility effectively replace your RCF? Or do you feel that you're gonna have access to the RCF for liquidity purposes as well? I would love a bridge on the cash flow side is what I'm trying to get to as well, to understand, you know, the cash needs for the business until you bring it onto the state that you have described today.
Sure. Let me just emphasize that, again, that balance sheet de-leveraging is a key priority. In terms of the UKEF and RCF, how you should look at it, we do have. I would point you to, we do have a 2024 tranche of bank debt that we need to refinance pretty much between now and April next year. We are talking to our banks at the moment, and rather than give you a very specific answer today, because discussion is ongoing, I'd like to come back to the point, but you would expect us to have facilities and funding of the business for the long-term success of this business.
Now in terms of cash costs to support, especially for next year's transformation, we talk about and the cost savings we talk about, you would expect that to be sort of, maybe high single-digit millions, and maybe slightly higher. You know, it really is, we are doing our actions, some short-term, quite quick payback, and some are slightly longer term, and including some capital expenditure as Michael mentioned.
It is all included in the numbers.
Yeah.
We have shown you today. What we would have to do next year is included, and then Lily hinted at this year GBP 80 million CapEx. That would be included in the GBP 80 million CapEx for next year, which is 0.8 reinvestment rate, yeah, which we all know is not sustainable, but we have to do it for now. The second portion is also the GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million of cash savings for next year. That's a net number.
Kevin?
Hi there, Kevin Fogarty from Numis. Just on those cash costs and then the savings, could you identify sort of where they're coming from? Help us with a sort of a bridge as to where you think you can achieve those. I just wondered if you'd commit to a timeline on getting back to your 1x-2 x leverage target. Just finally, in terms of the disposal process, I just wondered if, I mean, I know it's pretty sensitive, but if you could give us any feel as to sort of level of interest, the environment from a pricing perspective, you know, given the backdrop, if you can make any comment on how that might have changed in recent months.
I think the timing. We always said, even in the past when we had a different balance sheet, even in the past, we said that within two years, within 24 months, we get the leverage back. I still think that we should stick to this number. A lot depends on the divestments. The divestments, again, they are done for strategic reasons and not for the balance sheet reasons at the beginning. I cannot. What I can tell you is that there is one sizable asset, one that does move the famous needle. We have good interest from a very healthy number of parties. I think the rest, we just have to see now how it goes. I think that wouldn't be good to go into more detail right now. Again, very good interest from a healthy number of parties.
Your first question about, you know, the range, we talk about GBP 150 million-GBP 200 million, what it's made up of. About half of that would come from the suspension of our dividend. Majority of the balance will come from working capital optimization. We have already started and with a clear focus to get the Synthomer legacy back to the 10% and clear focus from the DC technology, and clearly, you know, working capital optimization clearly subject to pricing conditions as well as volume development. That's why we have a range there.
Right. Okay. Thanks very much.
Clearly the cost savings would be there as well.
The biggest chunk is the net working capital reduction, which you look at about GBP 100 million.
Yeah.
Hi, David Farrell from Jefferies. One for Toby, and then one for Lily. Toby, can you just maybe talk through who the major competitors are in the business? You didn't go into detail, so I'd love to hear a bit more on that. And then Lily, just in terms of the banking covenant, can you confirm whether it is a period-end FX rate or whether it's an average for the year?
Sure, yeah. Thanks very much. The wonderful thing about our competitors, as I mentioned, is that they really are different groups of people and different companies in different product areas. In some one product area, it'd be people like Cray Valley and Arakawa. Another, it would be people like Evonik and RÜTGERS. In another, it'd be people like DRT, Pinova, and others. Really none of the competitors have the same breadth that we do across all of those different product ranges.
Coming to the question about covenant and how we test it in terms of forex and translation effect, what we do is we do have a choice to pick between period-end rate and average rate for the period.
Okay, thanks.
On slide eight, you mentioned construction and coatings as areas of focus where you think market attractiveness is high. That's actually the areas where you're seeing softening in Europe at the moment, and it's likely to be a challenging sector to hang your shingle on. Could you elaborate on why you're so confident about that market attractiveness?
I think our strategy is a three- to five-year strategy. I think our strongest segment is what we have because we have the right product mix, we have the innovation, the sustainability profile, everything what I have mentioned before. It's very clear that right now Coatings & Construction in Europe is where we see the softening. That's what we have seen, that what we have said three to four weeks ago. You read all our customers' profit warnings. You know, it's clear that this segment right now has softening volumes. Let's not forget the growth of the volumes over the last two years. We are back now at 2019 levels or even stronger. There was quite a boom in construction and especially coatings, especially the consumer-related coatings.
The do-it-yourself coatings in Europe was a huge boom, and now we are going downwards. I think we cannot take it. You know, a strategy is a longer-term thing. I believe that our position in Coatings & Construction is very good. That's why we have those number one, two, and three positions. These markets, they will recover. Those markets, it's not the first time that we are softening volumes, and they will come up. What I also think, and this may be my main kind of proof point, our margins are even now are holding up. They're actually partially even getting stronger because some raw materials are coming down. The famous pricing power. We have shown this when the raw materials went up. We see it now holding up the margins.
I believe that we do have a good position there because this shows me that, you know, six months, nine months ago, we had this doubling raw materials, and we could pass it all on. In a way, that shows me that our offering from a product point of view, from a solution for the customer point of view, that we have the right solutions. That's why I'm very confident. I'm very clear that right now there is a softening in Europe, and what the macro will bring going forward, we will see, yeah. Synthomer is not immune. Actually, when I read our customers, the PPGs and the Akzo and so, when I read what they are publishing, I mean, this is more or less copy-paste what we are feeling.
We are not immune to this, but I believe fundamentally good markets per se and good markets for the reasons we mentioned this morning for Synthomer.
My specific concern is that there's likely to be a period, Q4, Q1, Q2 next year, for example, where you have gloves not recovered yet and you have Coatings & Construction seeing demand destruction, which is going to impact margins, so your cost pass-through is going to be tougher, and so likely to see a softening before the recovery happens. It's gonna be a particularly challenging time.
Okay. I cannot say much more than what I have said before. We see what we see now. Our order books, they're usually six to eight weeks. That is okay with the softening we have mentioned. Basically, little update from three to four weeks, what we have said before. Let's not forget, on the positive side, we have our 28% in the U.S. This will help us. We have our business in Asia. This will help us. Theoretically, your question is right, yeah. We do have an NBR, which we said, will not recover anytime soon. Or let's take it, I just try to change the game, you know? We always said it will recover soon, and it never did. I thought now we say it will not recover for a long time, and we hope that it actually does recover.
I just don't want to be all the time behind the train. I think that's wrong, also for you when you are making your models. Again, there is good business on the coatings, construction, adhesive side in the U.S. The main business focus of Toby is in the U.S. That's where the majority of the business is. We have positions on FS in Asia. I think that should help to rebalance the whole situation. Again, not immune at all to what happens in Europe. Yeah, I cannot say much more.
It's Harry Philips from Peel Hunt. A couple of questions, please. Just looking at the 15% margin and just trying to work out what would be your core assumptions around NBR within that? Because clearly, we're not looking at a normalized margin there. When you look at that 15%, what does NBR sort of have to get to? You look at the performance of elastomers over the last few years, and clearly, that's driven your premium margin in the last couple of years. Secondly, can you give us maybe a little more detail around, again, part of the same question, I guess, more of the detail around the margin of the businesses that are going to be potentially sold? Does your margin just go up on the basis of you exit that, and therefore you get an accretion simply on that mathematics?
Yeah. I think you do have a mix effect. As I said, we don't have one performance material that is a clear diluter, you know, that is kind of zero or very little. You don't have this huge mix shift. They are slightly dilutive. That's probably one of the reasons why there might be a better owner out of there. There you will get a little impact on the mix side. To your question on NBR, you know, it's very difficult with NBR. We had last year some 45% margins. We are seeing now margins which are clearly below the 15%. It's not so easy. I have to go backwards to 2019, 2018, pre-COVID times.
I think also an NBR business, if we do now the right things, we get our cost position down, we do our process innovation, I believe that NBR can be run at a 15% margin level. Absolutely, I do believe. I would see the upside on the Coatings & Construction side to make this 15% with the plus behind.
Just within that, the next question was the sort of debate around keeping NBR as part of the portfolio. I mean, it's capital consumptive, there's big competition. By your own sort of color of blobs, if you like, it's not in the green category. Was it a debate or whatever about its future within the portfolio, or was it always put to one side as a sort of specialty, if you like?
Always debate our portfolio, and we always keep our options. I slightly disagree on the CapEx point. We have said that it's base, yeah, and we allocate 25% of our CapEx to it. I believe that is enough for the foreseeable future. In a way, you can save if a bigger investment comes. If a bigger comes, and we are public about this, that is GBP 120 million we said once. Now we have the time to reduce this, yeah. We have the time to make process improvements and so on. In a way, if you take now the GBP 100 million, which is only one-to-one reinvestment, you have 25%, so this will not come anytime soon, so it's actually not that much CapEx consuming. The issue on NBR is it's lumpy.
Once a new step of CapEx comes, it's a big one. For several years, you don't have to do a lot. Our assets are reasonably new, especially in Pasir Gudang in Malaysia, so you don't have a lot of sustaining CapEx, you don't have a lot of maintenance CapEx, so you can really focus on the additional capacity CapEx. That's what releases then a lot. We have other sites of older nature where you need much more safety and maintenance sustaining CapEx. I think the business is. The point is when is the timing right to make the next big step. That is not within the foreseeable future. Again, I mentioned it, I think it was point number four or five. Going forward, I think this NBR recovery will come, and we do have a position.
You know, we are a global number two. We have shown during the pandemic, we were there. Now some people, they forget this. It's like in football, you know? You score, we were there. As depressing it is now, the numbers compared to last year, we made last year GBP 322 million EBITDA on the NBR business. We were there. That shows you that we do have the position, we do have the customer connections, we do have the innovation, we do have the logistics, we did have the capacity. We were there. If the market comes back, we will be there again at a lower cost position. That makes it, for me, a core business.
There are no more questions in the room. Sorry, Jeff.
Sorry, I just have one question on the dividend. It's Geoff Haire from UBS. Can you just confirm that you will pay a dividend in respect of 2023 and 2024? Or are we to read the statement this morning as there will be also no dividend for 2023? Then secondly, when you think about the dividend, is it based off what you paid last year? Or should we be thinking of a new rebasing of the dividend whenever it is paid?
Yeah. Look, we stated a number of times, deleveraging our balance sheet is a key priority, and we said we suspend it till December 2023. What we would say, what we'll do is we're going to continue to monitor our balance sheet and the improvement of our balance sheet. When time is right, we'll come back to, A, you know, is it a new dividend policy going forward? And B, what do we do about 2023 final?
What we announced today, the idea is to pay in 2024 again. It's calendar year, so you will not pay the November one, 2022, and we will not pay in 2023. Then we evaluate the situation. We will come up with a new dividend policy, which is a little bit more flexible. We just said we don't announce it today because of obvious reasons. We will have a bit more of a flexible dividend policy, but still an attractive dividend policy for the calendar year 2024 to pay out based on 2023.
Okay. If there are no more questions in the room, then are there any questions on the line?
We don't currently have any questions on the line.
There are no questions. Right. Okay. Let's just pick up a few that have come through the webcast. The first one is from Charlie Webb. A couple of points. When you acquired the Adhesive Technologies business from Eastman, you presented a somewhat cyclical earnings profile. Do you see any risk to the volumes and margins in 2023, given a broader market slowdown as highlighted by the recent FedEx warning? The second question, your medium-term strategic target and the end market growth you presented look higher than what Synthomer has presented in the past. Can you help us understand how much of this growth relates to volume versus price mix, and how much of this can be associated to a normalization in NBR?
Yeah. I'll take the adhesives one.
Okay.
Tim, first. Look, I think on the point on cyclicality, I think I picked it up in response to Sebastian's question earlier. Broader market slowdown, as highlighted, what we see in Adhesive Technologies mirrors exactly what Michael's just told you. Yes, there is some softness in Europe, and we see that in quarter four. Difficult to see much beyond quarter four, of course. But the expectation that some softness in Europe is there, it isn't surprising to us or our customers or our competitors. I would say from an AT point of view, Michael's already said we're sort of more than half of our businesses is Americas, and Europe's about a third. So it's perhaps less impactful than on some areas of the other areas of the business.
I'll start the second question, and Michael, please build on it. Look, when we look at our medium-term financial target, especially when it comes to constant currency growth, that was based on our strategy discussion, strategy work that we conducted in the first half of the year. I would draw you back, Charlie, to the end-use market that we talk about, the market that we're focusing on, the construction and coatings and Adhesive Technologies and those markets are 4%-5% growth every year. Plus the, you rightly say, the NBR business. I would also suggest that, you know, we are allocating our capital differently. We're going to allocate three-quarters of the capital into supporting the growth of those businesses.
We'll allocate resource differently. We'll allocate innovation resource, leadership resource differently. Naturally, we would expect higher growth in those sectors. You're right, there will be a contribution from our Health & Protection business going forward. Michael, anything to add?
Yeah. I think one point is that we never really did communicate clear targets. They are higher than. They're probably higher than. Why do we have this mid-single type of 5% type-ish growth? I think that is constant growth. That is without M&A targets. I think the majority should come from the organic growth part, and that is something which we did not focus so much. Like I said, in the past, clearly and very successfully, we focused on the inorganic growth part. I think with the focus on pillar one, on organic growth in these selected end markets, I think it is possible to have this mid 5% growth. Yeah, I think that's an important message.
The 15%, if you look at the 15%, I believe that these end markets and the Synthomer position is able to deliver the 15% +. I think these are markets, and you look at the landscape in these markets, our competitors, other companies, I think these markets provide you the 15% + opportunity.
Okay. Next question that's come in, all relates to NBR. How do you expect to be able to recover? What's the speed of recovery of capacity utilization given significant excess global capacity in NBR? Secondly, how do you view the recovery in margins on NBR? And thirdly, how do you compare on the cost curve to competitors and new capacity that's been introduced?
Yeah. Number one, the industry is running now at about 40% capacity utilization. You can see this with a recent announcement of dividend suspension by Top Glove, which is one of the big players and one of our customers in Malaysia. I think it's safe to assume that the whole chain is about 40%. Now, with specialty business, you can make money at 40% capacity utilization because you have the specifications, you have the application, you can make money if your factory is 40% full. With the base business, you don't make money or not reasonable money to cover your cost of capital. I think that's a clear statement. Now, when does it recover? I think this discussion we just took, it should not open up again.
We said three weeks ago that we do not expect a major recovery until the end of 2023. Again, if it happens earlier, if the destocking ends earlier, we are very happy to take it, and we will be able to capture it. The third part of your question, we do have cost leadership. If not, we would not have made GBP 322 million EBITDA last year. We do have it. It was a very good business for us for the last 10 or 20 years, where you can make these 15% margins, I believe. In addition now, as I have mentioned, because everybody will be doing the same in a way, and I prefer to be a bit of the first one, and that's why we are doing now.
Instead of investing into new capacity, GBP 120 million, we postpone it for now, and we reinvest our efforts, which come at zero cost, basically, into really cost leadership, getting the process improvements into our factories. I think that's a very clear strategy behind, and that what makes me confident. I was in Malaysia two or three weeks ago. That's when I saw this whole market situation, or four weeks ago in the meantime. I believe that our people identified opportunities to take this time now of relatively low capacity utilization to go through this and come up with new process solutions. I can be very concrete, you know, ammonia cooling, new stripping technology. These are very concrete ideas our people have, and we will use the time now until we need the capacity to do it.
I'm very confident that when the market recovers, that we are there to capture it and to get the right margins this business deserves. When do you make proper money in this? I would say 60%, probably something like this. We need a little upswing. You don't need 100% capacity utilization. I think you need 60% to have really decent returns as we were used to in the past. That is now the question, when is this going to happen? A lot of people who are longer in the business, Tim, some people in our businesses, they tell me it can go very fast up. Again, let's not speculate on this, and that's why I took the hopes and the dreams out a few weeks ago. Let's not speculate, but once it comes, I can guarantee you we will be there.
Okay. Next one. We've covered a bit of this on the new export finance facility, Lily, but there are a number of questions coming in, so maybe it's worth just emphasizing some of the points. Is the new facility secured or unsecured? What are your plans for the use of that facility, and how much of it do you expect to be drawn by the end of the year?
The facility is unsecured. As I said, it's very similar. The terms are very similar to our existing RCF facility, and covenants as well. It's similar to the RCF facility. I talk about the usage of the facility is largely to support our, you know, going forward, working capital requirement, the capital requirement, and providing gross fund to the business in terms of innovation. When do I expect to draw down from the facility by the end of the year? Based on our current expectation, we probably have very limited drawdown requirement for this facility. However, as I mentioned a moment ago, we are in discussions with our banking group about refinancing package.
You know, everything would be included into that discussion on, you know, what's the right level of financing requirement for the business for the long term success going forward.
Okay. The final one we'll take on the webcast, and then if there are any others in the room, we can finish up at that point. Two points to this question. One is regarding the normalized, including Adhesive Technologies, EBITDA that we see as being a normalized level of EBITDA performance through the cycle for Synthomer. Secondly, as a result of this strategy work, Michael, what are the attributes of the Synthomer core business going forward that you believe really define what a Synthomer core business is?
If I start with the attributes, I tried to explain it this morning. It's about innovation. It's application development. It's end market focus. It's customer backwards calculation. What does the consumer want? It's about functionality. I think all the issues we have mentioned. It's the product mix to go to higher growth pockets within those three markets. I think it's to have more focus on these three markets. It's the mix, it's the innovation, the application development. I think we went through all the topics in the morning. I think it's very difficult to add now something more. The normalized EBITDA, I think that is our 15% target. I think that's where we should go. Yeah, I can. It's difficult to say more.
Okay. That's it for the questions on the webcast. Are there any other questions in the room or on the line?
Just one more question.
One more question, yeah. Two more questions.
Hi. Just a follow-up on the export facility. These facilities usually have an amortization schedule, or at least they did during COVID. Does this facility have something similar?
Different. This bullet.
Okay. Currently your entire capital structure is unsecured, but I'm guessing, you know, the debt capital markets are in a very different shape, and you know, appetite generally for cyclical debt is not where it was when you guys placed the original bond for the M&A. I was wondering, what are your feelings towards secured debt, which could be cheaper, easier to place, if need be?
Look, we're keeping our options open. We're in discussions right now and looking at all the options. The one thing we are looking at, just to your point about securitization, is, you know, what we can do of our debt book, 'cause yes, that is a cheaper source of financing for Synthomer and for lots of companies given the market conditions. We're looking into that right now.
Yeah.
I can just ask on the European SBR business. I think if I heard rightly, you're looking to sell the carpet and paper business. What's left, and are you eventually just gonna exit that business completely?
I didn't sell. We are selling it. I said it's a base business, and we are looking for a solution. It's a non-core business. That's what I said. It is difficult to find solutions because the carpet and paper market in Europe is a difficult market, and I don't think it will ever be a very good market for none of the competitors. I think here we just have to find solutions. That is one of the topics where I mentioned we need to do first the disentanglement, that we have a clean situation and the strategic flexibility to do whatever we can do with this business, but clearly allocated to the bucket of non-core base. This needs.
That's now one of the projects that needs a little bit of work, this is actually low single digit to disentangle it from the rest. We see what we do with it. You know, there are two steps. First, you need to create the strategic flexibility, which we don't have right now, and then we decide what we do with it.
Okay. I think we're finished with questions. Michael, are there any final comments you wanted to make?
No.
Yeah. Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for coming.
Thank you.
Thank you.