Okay. Good morning. Welcome.
Good morning.
Welcome everybody to AGI's investor talk this morning. It's great to see everybody. We're here in Toronto at the TMX. Welcome. Thanks everybody that is joining us here today in person, traveling out to meet with us and spend some time getting to know AGI. It's great to look around and see a number of familiar faces, and as well, a number of new faces, and I look forward to the opportunity of getting to know everybody a bit better. That's really what we're here for today, is to get to know AGI better. AGI has significantly transformed over the past two to three years, and we really wanna share that transformation story. We stand here today stronger than ever. It is a stronger AGI today than we've ever been.
In many ways, we are just getting started, and that's the exciting part of the story. We're very enthusiastic about our future, and we wanna share that enthusiasm with you and provide you insights into why we're so excited about the direction that AGI is headed. Welcome and thanks for joining us here this morning. Just a quick review of the agenda to kinda cover the information that we are going to go through. I'll just quickly walk through the agenda to kinda ground us in the events this morning. We'll start out with a few key messages. It's gonna be my privilege to step you through an introduction of our leadership team 'cause at the end of the day, it is the people that make the difference. It's very worthwhile spending some time in getting to know the new AGI leadership team.
An overview of the company, where we've been, where we are today, and the direction that we're going. We've talked a lot about our strategic priorities. We're gonna review those here this morning, and we're gonna go into a little bit more detail to share some key insights relative to each of our three strategic priorities. Very exciting part of the presentation is regional highlights. You know, as we discuss our business and we go through our results, we touch on our results in each of the regions. This morning, we're gonna have an opportunity to explore a little bit further some of the details and some of the activities going on at the regional level. Give you a little bit more of appreciation of where AGI is and the different areas in which we are participating. Turn it over to Jim later in the presentation.
He's gonna give a financial overview and outlook. Then we'll wrap up and there is plans to spend some time at the end with Q&A. Look forward to the Q&A. Before we get too much into the presentation, I know, you know, we kind of all gathered here this morning just to make sure we reorientate ourselves. In the unexpected event that there is an emergency, right? Exits directly behind us, take a left. Out the doors, take a left, that will take you out of the building. There's also an exit door right there. Go out the exit door, take a right. That also takes us out. Obviously, we're not anticipating any issues this morning. Always good to be safe. It's all about getting to know AGI.
It's great to be able to tee up a video that was put together, kind of gives you a broad overview of the company. It really came together fantastic. I'm gonna turn it over to a video to kick us off.
In an increasingly complex and connected world, so much depends on the systems that link our industries, people, communities, nations, and our planet as a whole. One of the most important to keep running smoothly is the global food infrastructure system. This is where AGI operates and where AGI excels. Food infrastructure encompasses the range of equipment, processes, and systems required to facilitate the movement of inputs to the farm, and then the movement of grain along each node of the commercial supply chain. From farms to commercial processing plants to terminals and ports, AGI products are there. In a world of uncertainty, one thing remains constant: the need for food and the systems to support its production and distribution from farm to commercial. AGI's annual revenue has grown 40% since 2020, with record EBITDA several years in a row.
Our business is globally diversified, our backlogs are stronger than ever because consumption drives our business, and the products and systems needed to fuel that ever-growing consumption require continuous maintenance and investment. AGI's growth is stable. Our margins are resilient. We have a diversified business model and a strong outlook for continued growth. Despite trade wars, a global pandemic, regional conflicts, and more, our annual revenue has grown from less than CAD 1 billion a few years ago, with CAD 2 billion to become the next goal, and the road to CAD 3 billion and beyond is just beginning. One company, one team, one vision.
AGI has the people, the products, and the positions to play a key role in the ongoing development of the world's food infrastructure, and in the process, strengthen our relationships with our customers, enrich the lives of our employees and shareholders, and contribute to the communities of which we are a part.
Okay. Fantastic video, right? I've seen the video a number of times. Every time I watch it, I just get more and more excited. Does a fantastic job of describing AGI very quickly at a high level and the type of business that we're in and the type of customers that we support. There was a number of key themes in that video that we're gonna come back to throughout the presentation and build on and provide further details and further explanations. Okay, kick off with a couple of key messages. Before doing so, I'd like to make a very exciting announcement. Perhaps some of you caught it in the press release this morning, but we have two individuals that I'd like to introduce, maybe ask them to stand up.
We've got Bill Lambert in the back, a member of our board, and Janet Giesselman up front, also a member of our board. We're very excited to announce, if you saw it in the press release this morning, that the responsibilities of chairman of the board will be transitioning from Bill Lambert to Janet Giesselman. I would like to sincerely thank Bill for his outstanding leadership that he has provided as chairman of the board over the past several years. Truly has been outstanding. The company has accomplished quite a lot, under Bill's tenure as chairman of the board. Bill will be staying on, as part of our, of our board. I'd sincerely like to congratulate Janet. Look forward to working with you and partnering with you as we continue to take AGI in a very exciting direction.
Maybe just a quick round of applause for Bill and Janet. Okay, as I mentioned, we did put out a press release, so if you're interested in more details, you can reference that. Couple of key messages. You know, these are the four points that we're gonna emphasize throughout the presentation and are the key messages that we want everybody to walk away with a good understanding. The first one is about our people, because at the end of the day, you know, that is really what is driving our performance, our people and our talent. We've had outstanding performance over the past two years, it's really the team, ultimately our team around the world, that is delivering that exceptional performance and is that team that is going to lead us in the future.
I'm gonna take some time and review our executive leadership team with you here this morning. Another very important message, and one of the reasons why AGI is so excited, is we have what we need. We have what we need to be successful in the future. We have what we need to continue to drive growth and deliver profitability and ultimately shareholder value. We're gonna spend some time reviewing our products and our capabilities. We're gonna talk about our people and our talent, and we're gonna spend some time reviewing our key market positions around the world. The third one, as I mentioned at the beginning, is our corporate priorities. We are extremely focused. We know what our priorities are: profitable organic growth, operational excellence, and balance sheet discipline.
We are extremely confident that focusing on these priorities is gonna deliver the results that we expect in the future. We'll spend some time talking about those priorities. Lastly, growth. Growth is such an exciting and compelling proposition for AGI that we're gonna spend additional time deep drilling growth. We have a lot of opportunities to grow. We're gonna touch on three primary ones. That is the opportunity that exists within AGI by better leveraging the products that we have today, product transfers. We're also gonna talk about our initiatives to expand more into processing equipment, a key part of that food infrastructure. Finally, our geographic positions. Our positions both in mature markets and emerging agriculture economies. Those will be the four things that we touch on throughout the presentation. As mentioned, it all starts with people.
I'm gonna take four slides to review our senior leadership team. A little bit more of a detailed review of my background. I'll invite Jim Rudyk, our CFO, up on stage. He can give a review of his background. We're gonna step through our executive leadership team, our global executive leadership team. As we step through that leadership team, we're gonna highlight it in two different components. First, our business leaders around the world, and then our functional leaders. Let me start with a quick introduction of myself. Again, a lot of familiar faces. It's great to see you again, and some people that are a bit new. Let me take a moment to introduce myself. Again, Paul Householder, President and CEO of AGI. I joined AGI about three and a half years ago.
I was initially hired in to lead the executive or the international part of the company, so everything outside of North America. I ran our executive businesses for about a year. After that, my responsibilities expanded, and I took over the business responsibilities for North America, and at that point, largely had responsibility for the P&L of the company. I did that for about a year, I moved into the COO role and added the responsibilities for the business functions like manufacturing, supply chain, and product management. Was in that role for about a year before moving into the CEO role a little over four months ago. I have a B.S., mechanical engineering degree, an MBA, and then as well, a black belt in Lean Six Sigma.
Before joining AGI, I spent about 28 years with a large global industrial gas company. Spent the first eight years in different engineering roles, then moved over on the commercial side, starting in sales, progressing up to general management. I lived for about four years in London, supporting business across Europe. Significant time in China, leading a major build-out of a facility in China as well as across Southeast Asia. Then I lived in São Paulo, Brazil, for three years leading our Brazil business. Again, been with AGI for three and a half years. It's been absolutely fantastic. Couldn't be more pleased, and I'm extremely excited about the direction that we're heading. That's quickly my background. I'm gonna invite Jim up on stage, and he can quickly introduce himself.
All right. Well, first of all, I would like to echo Paul's opening remarks and thank everyone for being here today and also those that are online. I know it's a big time commitment, but I wanna thank you. Let me just give you a bit of brief background, more information about myself. You know, I've worked for 36 years, believe it or not. Wow, 36 years. 20 of those years it's been as a chief operating officer or as a CFO in various companies. I've been very lucky throughout my career to work at companies that have similar characteristics and similar strategies as AGI. All the companies that I've worked at have all been very high growth companies.
Companies that with that high growth typically go through a lot of transformation, a lot of evolution and changes that you need to deal with. A lot of the companies that I've worked for also have been, have done acquisitions. I've personally done 45 acquisitions and also did the integration of those acquisitions through my career. Through that as well, also had the opportunity to lead three fairly significant system or ERP-type conversions through that, through that time. I've also been lucky to work and gain a lot of international experience. In the companies I've worked at, I've got exposure and spent time in Africa, a lot of European countries, certainly the U.S., Australia, and then a lot of Asia countries as well. I'm, I'm very comfortable operating outside of Canada.
I've been here at AGI now for two and a half years, and I think as you listen to our story and understand a little bit more about our future and our opportunities, you'll see why my energy level still remains very high, and I'm really excited about being part of this next chapter here at AGI.
Well, perfect. Thanks, Jim.
We'll talk to you.
Yeah. Okay. The next two slides introduce, the executive leadership team of AGI. As I mentioned, I'm gonna spend some time to go through these and introduce each of the individuals. One of the reasons why we're gonna spend that time is this marks a pretty significant transformation for AGI that has occurred over the past three years, and in many ways is indicative of why AGI is stronger today. Roughly 70% of the individuals that we're gonna review are either new to AGI or they're in new positions at AGI, just to give you an indication of how much the company has transformed and the amount of time we have spent in talent and organizational development. These are the business leaders.
These are the individuals that are responsible for the execution of the business on a day-to-day basis and ultimately have the accountability for delivering on our financial and other operating metrics. I'll just go quickly through these, introduce each one. Paul Brisebois, longtime AGI employee based in our Winnipeg office, and he leads our Canada farm business. Francisco Prado, and exciting we get to hear from Francisco in a video a bit later in the presentation. Francisco is based in Cândido Mota, which is in São Paulo State, a little outside of São Paulo City, and Francisco runs our Brazilian business. Cristiano Carpin, we also get to hear from Cristiano later in the presentation, based in Bologna, and he runs our Europe, Middle East, and Africa business. Scott McKernan, been with us for about four years.
He leads our U.S. farm business and in many ways is a partner with Paul. Between Scott and Paul, they have responsibilities for our very important North America farm business. Rajan Aggarwal, an outstanding leader in AGI. He is based down in Bangalore, India, and he runs our India business. We are very fortunate that Rajan joined us as part of our Milltec acquisition in India that we completed three years ago. Brian Harder, longer time AGI employee, recently undertook the responsibilities for leading our global food platform. He is based in Chicago. Rustom Mistry out in Bangkok, Thailand, recent AGI employee within the past few years. He leads our Southeast Asia business, which includes Australia. Southeast Asia and Australia.
Mike Hand recently joined AGI, part of the transformation that we stepped through in our North America commercial business, a significant success for the company over the past two years. Mike runs our North America commercial business. Noam Silberstein, here with us this morning, based here in Toronto, recently stepped into the responsibilities of leading our feed platform. Finally, from the business side, Justin Paterson, based in Miami, running our LatAm business. Next slide, we'll transition to the functional leaders, tightly integrated with our business and supporting our business leaders to achieve our objectives. In many ways, this team, from an organization and talent standpoint, is an indication on how AGI is stronger today. A lot of these leaders, a lot of these roles and functions and capabilities fundamentally did not exist in AGI just two to three years ago.
We've spent a lot of time over the past few years developing this talent and developing this capability. You'll hear that as I go through the introductions. Henry Palomino, recent addition to AGI, based in our Chicago office, leading our global supply chain. Nicolle Parker, long-time outstanding AGI employee based in Winnipeg, leads our finance, working with Jim. David Postill, also here today, part of our outstanding creative team, leading marketing and customer experience. Harsha Bhojraj, also very new to AGI, based in our Chicago office, leading our manufacturing. Ryan Kipp, longtime AGI employee based in Winnipeg, great partner for me on the legal side. Marie McKeegan, also based here in Toronto. Amongst many other responsibilities, Marie leads our talent and organization development, and again, just outstanding progress we've made in that area over the past two years.
Shannon Hinrichs, another longer time AGI employee, very recently promoted into the role of leading our sales execution here in North America, also based in Chicago. Subroto Pyne, new to AGI, based in Chicago. Very important, leading our global product management team. A very key capability again that we have today, fundamentally, we did not have just two to three years ago. Wrapping up, Justin Paterson, based in Winnipeg, leading our global engineering organization. We went through those by individual 'cause again, it is just so important. At the end of the day, it is down to people. I feel very privileged to have such an outstanding leadership team to work with. Let's now change gears and provide an overview of AGI. Again, a little bit more details as we start to get to know AGI a bit better.
Talking about not only where we are today, but where we've been, and giving insights into where we're going and why we're so confident about our future. We'll first take a look at a geographical overview, and there's a couple of key pieces of information that is contained within this slide. The first one, you see the green circles. This represents where our manufacturing concentration exists. You can see in North America a very strong position. We have over 20 manufacturing facilities in North America. Our manufacturing in Brazil is down in Cândido Mota. As I mentioned when I introduced Francisco, that is our manufacturing facility that supports Brazil as well as South America.
In Europe, we have five manufacturing facilities between Italy and France, supporting Europe, Middle East, and down in Africa. We're gonna talk about Africa a bit more in the presentation. Down in India, in Bangalore, we have four manufacturing facilities that support our business in India as well as across Southeast Asia. The gray area is an indication of where AGI employees are dispersed, where our sales offices exist, and most importantly, where our customers exist. It is in this area that our AGI employees are working closely with our partners to deliver on one of our commitments on improving global food efficiency. To the extent we can help customers improve their operations, we are eliminating waste and improving efficiency right at the front end of that food supply chain.
That helps with our proposition of feeding a growing population around the world. That's a key part of our sustainability focus. We very much believe in that AGI is a strong play in the sustainability space, and we're gonna come back to and provide an overview of other initiatives that AGI is doing within ESG. Let's talk about where AGI is today, and as I go through this material, I'll make comments on how significantly AGI has strengthened over the past two years and as well provide some additional insights on why we are so confident about our future. We'll start with some of the financial measures. Sales, $1.4 billion within the trailing 12 months, and EBITDA of $228 million.
Just to put that in perspective, it wasn't long ago that AGI was celebrating crossing that important threshold from a sales standpoint of CAD 1 billion. Very quickly, we're at CAD 1.4 billion. CAD 22 million of EBITDA represents a 50% increase in profitability in just two years. Five zero, a 50% increase in profitability. Now let's talk about the segments that we serve. As AGI manages our business, we predominantly look at it across two key segments: farm and commercial. The key thing that you see here is the balance that AGI currently has across these two segments, almost 50/50. Almost a 50%/50% balance. That's important because it provides a lot of resiliency in our business. If you go back four years ago, six years ago or beyond, you would have seen a weighting that is much more sided towards the farm side.
Ultimately, that is where AGI got its start, serving the farm market. We've made key investments over time, and we've seen significant organic growth on the commercial. Now we're in a position where we have nearly that 50%, 50% balance between our two key segments, farm and commercial. Again, adding resiliency to our business. We can talk about our regions, a very key part of AGI. First, you can see the outstanding positions that we have and the large and mature ag economies across the world, Canada and the U.S. Between those two regions, it represents roughly 65% of the sales of AGI. We have great positions in Canada and the U.S., and excitingly, those positions are growing, and we have our opportunities to further grow. Also extremely exciting, and you'll hear me comment throughout the presentation, is our position in emerging ag economies.
Positions that we have in Asia Pacific, India, Southeast Asia and Australia. Positions in Europe, Middle East and Africa, and then down in Brazil and LatAm. Each one of these regions now represents at least 10% of the sales at AGI and almost 35% in total. Significantly different from where we were just two to three years ago. More important, we are confident that our positions in these emerging economies is going to represent 50% of AGI in the near future. There's just so much growth potential in these areas, and we're going to talk about that a bit further. This geographic position adds strong diversity to our business. We are very resilient, we are very diverse, and that adds to the strength of AGI.
If you look at our performance over the past two years, I commented that our EBITDA is up 50% in the past two years. This is amongst the challenges that we all know that we faced over that two-year period. COVID, a very disruptive supply chain, a lot of variability in our key raw materials such as steel, a conflict in Ukraine, and challenging agriculture conditions in one of our key markets. Significant challenges that faced the business over the past two years, we delivered record results. There's no doubt we're going to be facing challenges in the future. You know, we're looking at recession concerns around the world, rising interest rates, inflation. We will continue to face challenges.
The balance and the diversification of our business adds a resiliency and gives us confidence that we will be able to continue to deliver outstanding results despite the challenges that we face in the future. Pretty exciting position and worth spending some time reviewing. Let's talk a little bit more about the two segments that we support: farm and commercial. In doing so, I'm going to comment on the customers, the products that we provide, and our value proposition. Just so that when you know, when we talk about farm and commercial, you know, in a little bit more detail what we're referencing. I'll start with farm. AGI has the privilege of working with outstanding customers, farmers. Farmers around the world. We work closely with farmers in Canada, in the U.S., in Australia, in South America.
It is our privilege to work with these farmers to provide solutions that help them run their business better. Sorry about that. We provide bins, material handling and conditioning equipment. Again, all to reduce waste and drive efficiency right at the front end of that food supply chain. That is our value pro-proposition, and that is the activity that we do in the farm segment. When you go over to the commercial segment, our customers are some of the largest ag companies in the world. The ADMs, the Cargills, Costco, and Mars, and others. In the commercial space, it is where AGI is partnering with those customers to build out that food infrastructure and to support the transportation of food from where it is grown on the farm to ultimately where it is processed and consumed.
As you understand that food infrastructure and how food has to travel from where it is grown to where it is consumed, you understand that a lot of infrastructure and equipment needs to be put in place. Building out large port infrastructure like you see in the pictures here. This port infrastructure efficiently stores and handles the grain as it is loaded onto and then loaded off large ocean barges as the food gets transferred around the world to feed that growing population. Very quickly, that's what we mean by our farm segment.
Bins, material handling and conditioning equipment that we sell to farmers, driving efficiency at the front end of the food supply, and then partnering up with very large customers to build out that infrastructure so that the food can move through the supply chain efficiently to feed that growing population. You've heard me mention several times food efficiency and eliminating waste. That is a key part of AGI's value proposition and one that we're very proud and excited about. It is a key part of our sustainability program, but it is just one part. AGI is very excited to be embarking on a very robust ESG program. We've had a couple of landmarks that we've achieved within the past two years. If you look back in 2020, we published our inaugural sustainability roadmap.
Exciting, just this week, may have been yesterday, just this week, we released a comprehensive sustainability progress update. This is on our AGI website. I encourage everybody to take the time, go out, and read through this material. It is outstanding, and it gives you a very good indication of the commitment that AGI has to the ESG program and the direction that we're heading. Touches on a few key items: the well-being of our employees, sustainability manufacturing, responsible care and conduct, and the complete solutions that we offer to continue to drive sustainability. Again, it's out there. It's really good. I encourage everybody to spend some time and go through that.
Next few slides, I'm gonna provide some details on our financial performance over the past few years to further emphasize our focus on profitable organic growth and operational excellence and give you an indication of the direction that we're headed. We'll start with sales, and you can see on the graph, we've kind of broken up our sales performance into two different time periods. The first time period, from 2014 and 2020, that is indicative of the period when we refer to growing through acquisitions. 2014 to 2020 represents our growth through acquisitions. The more recent two years is organic growth. You can see on the chart from 2014 to 2020, AGI grew CAD 600 million in sales across that six years.
In the last two years, we've grown another CAD 400 million. Again, that growth was predominantly, if not entirely, organic. You can see the excitement that we have for focusing on organic growth and the confidence that we have that is gonna continue to drive top-line expansion going forward. Next, we'll turn to EBITDA, to profitability. As exciting as our top line and our sales performance has been, we're even more excited about our profitability. Again, broken up into the exact same 2x periods. You can see the EBITDA of the company from 2014 and 2020 grew approximately CAD 70 million. In the last two years, our profitability has increased CAD 80 million. That's that 50% increase in profitability that I was referring to.
This is where you see the combination of our profitable organic growth combined with our focus on operational excellence. It is building out those new capabilities, adding those key important functions and functionality that fundamentally didn't exist in AGI two to three years ago that is now driving expansions in our margin and an acceleration in our profitability. It is that top-line growth and that acceleration in profitability that we are expecting to continue in the future. Why do we expect it to continue in the future? It starts with understanding fundamentally what drives AGI's growth, and it's consumption. At the end of the day, what drives AGI's growth is consumption, and it is providing food and feed to that growing population. As the population grows, then our farmers are gonna continue to invest in equipment.
As their yields improve, as their crops grow, they'll continue to invest in equipment. As the maturity of some of these emerging ag economies improve, additional investment in equipment. As we have to build out that global food infrastructure so that the food can travel from where it is grown to where it is processed and consumed, we need to make continued investments. This is a powerful macro growth driver. Population is going to continue to increase. There's gonna be a continuing increase for food and feed around the world, which ultimately drives investment in AGI's products as we partner with our customers to support global food and feed around the world. Now that we understand some of those macro-level drivers, we can go a little bit lower into how does AGI execute across those opportunities. We're gonna talk on three key areas.
One is our geographic positions. We are well-positioned in all the major agriculture markets around the world. We have access to multi-billion dollar and growing industries. We will look to continue to partner with our customers and deliver performance within these strong markets. We're also very excited about our positions in the emerging ag economies, such as Brazil and India today, and Africa and Southeast Asia tomorrow. These are parts of our company that are growing exponentially. I wanna take a little bit to explain why we're so excited about our positions in these emerging economies and why we are seeing so much growth now and we expect to see so much growth in the future. There's really two items that are driving the growth in these emerging economies. One is they continue to get more and more efficient in just their crop production.
If you take example, we can look at Brazil. In 2022, it was a record crop in Brazil. As we enter 2023, we are expecting a 10% increase in the crop production in Brazil. This is a trend that we expect to continue. As the markets in Brazil continue to mature, they implement new technologies, better fertilizer, and able to drive higher yields off of their farms and increase grain production. As that grain production increases, you require more investment in storage, handling, and conditioning that AGI provides. The second one is those markets are still relatively early in their maturity. A great example is you look at the amount of grain that is under storage in a mature market, such as U.S. and Canada, and you compare that to Brazil.
In the U.S. and Canada, you have about 50%-60% of the crop is under storage. As the farmers harvest their crop, they put about 50%-60% of that under storage. You go down to Brazil, that's about 10%-15%. Think about the opportunity to continue to eliminate waste and drive efficiency with continued investment in storage, handling, and conditioning, and capabilities as Brazil moves from where it was a few years ago, down to, you know, 7%-8% to where it is today, 10%-15%, and where it is going to be tomorrow, 20%-25%. We see that trend in Brazil, we see that trend in India, and we expect that trend to continue. You have those two compelling items that are driving growth in these emerging economies.
Their crops are increasing, they're gonna continue to make important investment to eliminate deficits that they have in key agriculture storage capabilities. The third one that I'll comment on is product transfers. This is a key takeaway message for today, and it's one that we are extremely excited about. It is related to the comment that I made. We have what we need today at AGI to meet our growth and profitability expectations. We have the products, and our opportunities with product transfers is to take products that we have today that are successful in current regions and transfer those to other regions where AGI is positioned, where we don't have those products. We know there's very attractive markets for these products in other regions. We know these products are successful.
Our opportunity is to transfer those products and broaden out our amenable markets and continue to serve a larger customer base. Very important. We're gonna spend a little bit more time later in the presentation talking about product transfers. When we're talking about growth, very important to mention our digital business. We're very excited about our digital business. We're very committed to our digital business. We have extremely exciting products that we know there is a strong market for. We are directly hearing from our customers a need. There's customer pull, and we're seeing that across the major ag economies around the world: U.S. and Canada, down in Brazil, over in Australia, and down into India. You saw in December that we announced a restructuring of our digital business.
That is really to focus down on these key products in which we know there is a very strong demand, accelerate our innovation, and accelerate our market penetration as we move more towards profitability. We are gonna right-size the business, improve our cost structure under the umbrella of operational excellence. It's all around restructuring our digital business today so that we can deliver stronger digital products in the future and continue to grow our business, providing value to our customers, and differentiating ourselves from our competitors. Very excited about our capabilities in the digital space and the digital products that we're developing.
As an overview of AGI, commenting on where we've been, where we are today, a little bit of our financial performance, understanding the geographies that we participate, getting to know our customers a little bit better, our value propositions, and how we're participating in the building out of that global food infrastructure to help a growing global population. Now we'll pivot and spend a little bit of time reviewing our corporate strategic priorities. We've reviewed these. We're all very familiar with these: profitable organic growth, operational excellence, and balance sheet discipline. For each of these priorities, we have well-established KPIs that are in place and that we use to measure our performance. Across each of these KPIs, we have targets set at the corporate level.
More importantly, we have these KPIs cascaded throughout our organization so that we have clear visibility down at the operational level, what we need to do, and the activities that we need to prioritize to drive performance and achieve these results. We have a very well integrated and balanced scorecard across the organization that encompasses KPIs across these three priorities that we will be managing on a monthly basis. I'm gonna come back to that point in a little bit. We'll spend some time reviewing each of these three corporate priorities. Obviously starts with profitable growth, there's three areas that we're gonna touch on as we go through profitable growth. First of all, that structured process, our operating cadence, how we run our business.
Second, elaborate a little bit more on those product transfers, give you an example, a real example of what we've done and the success that we've had in product transfers, and then as well, touch on how AGI is expanding our capabilities, strengthening that relationship with our customers, providing full service solutions. The structured process. Before I review in detail our structured process, I wanna comment on exactly why we're spending some time reviewing this. It is because fundamentally, this did not exist within AGI to the extent it does today just three or four years ago. Implementing a disciplined operating cadence has been a key part of driving and managing our growth and business performance over the past two years. It starts with our strategic planning process.
We have a very well-vetted and institutionalized three-year regional strategic planning process that is updated on an annual basis right around mid-year. Each of the business leaders that we introduced at the beginning of the presentations, they are responsible for developing, managing, and executing across a three-year strategic plan. We then take those regional three-year strategic plans, aggregate them up, review them, and they become an important data feed into our annual budgeting process. We review all the potential that exists within our regions. We understand the priorities that those regional leaders came up with that are gonna be critical to delivering on that potential. We develop our plans for the year where we outline our objectives, our measures, and our performance expectations. That's part of our annual budgeting process. Perhaps most importantly is the cadence that we have on reviewing the business.
We get together on a monthly basis and review the performance across each and every region individually. We look at where we are performing well, comparisons to prior year, comparisons to budget and objectives, and we have honest conversations on where the opportunities are to improve so that we can make those important course corrections and ensure that we're delivering against our objectives for the year. These are reviews that both Jim and I participate in, each review, each month, each region. Just to give you an idea of the very robust, very, well-vetted operational cadence that exists today and how key it has been for our performance over the past two years.
Next, this is worth spending some time on, the product transfers, because as I mentioned, this is going to be a key part of our profitable organic growth in the future. Again, this is taking existing products and capabilities that AGI has today, very successful products, and transferring them from regions in which we're currently promoting those products to new regions where AGI already has an active business. Let's explore that a little bit. I'll start with giving an example. It's an example with Enclosed Belt Conveyors. One of our best product lines across AGI. It's manufactured at our Sioux Falls manufacturing facility in the U.S. About four years ago, we fully transferred the capabilities around Enclosed Belt Conveyors down to Brazil. Now Brazil is fully self-sufficient in Enclosed Belt Conveyors.
They can engineer them, they can design them, we can manufacture them, and we can sell them out into the marketplace. Enclosed Belt Conveyors are a key component to building out that food infrastructure. It is a key element of those large port infrastructures that we saw when we reviewed the commercial segment. It has been key, it has been fundamental to the growth that we have achieved in Brazil in the commercial segment, which has been extraordinary. We'll show you that growth when we get to a review of the Brazil region, This is a perfect example of the potential that exists by taking our current products and capabilities and transferring those to new regions. We talked about the example four years ago in Brazil. We are just getting started. We recently transferred storage bin and material handling capability down to India.
We have an outstanding business in India. It is growing exceptionally. You'll see that in a couple of slides. It is 100% focused on rice milling. We have extensive capabilities in AGI beyond rice milling, in which there is a very strong and compelling market in India. Our opportunity is to transfer our existing products and capabilities down into India and get access to that market. Storage and material handling. Front end to rice milling, right? That's where you store the paddy and you handle the paddy as it feeds into rice milling. We get to go out to the exact same customer base, our exact same channel, and now promote a whole new range of products that are very successful within AGI. Transferring fertilizer over to EMEA. Fertilizer is a key growth vector for Africa.
Part of our strategic plan going forward, continuing to develop our business in Africa. We transfer that product, that technology, that capability over to EMEA. We're now able to execute that and grow our business in Africa. There's dozens of these examples. We've mapped all of them. We've assessed the amenable addressable markets for each of those products in these new regions. We've prioritized them. We're conservatively estimating that this opens up over $4 billion of addressable markets in these new regions. Our goal is greater than a 20% market share for those products. You can see why that is such a exciting growth proposition for AGI, taking our current capabilities, our current strengths, and transferring those to new geographies. Another opportunity for us. Broaden our relationship and partnership with the customer.
If you go back to AGI a few years ago, we were predominantly an equipment supplier. That's how the market looked at us. That's how our customers looked at us. That's how we looked at ourselves. We would provide augers. We would provide storage bins. We would provide conditioning equipment. The exciting thing is, as we've strengthened the relationships with these customers, we've been able to convey the broad capabilities that AGI has. That's increased their understanding. Now they are asking us to not just provide equipment, but provide full solutions. They no longer just want a conveyor or a bin and conditioning. They want us to provide everything. They want us to design the system, manage the project, oversee the installation, lead the commissioning and startup. One-stop shop for the customer, full end-to-end solution. That's now the conversation that we're having with our customers.
It's the conversation that we're having with our customers all around the world. It is a great opportunity for us to strengthen that partnership with our customers and continue to provide AGI equipment now under the umbrella of end-to-end solutions. Terrific opportunity. Spare parts and service. We look at our business, we analyze it, we would expect spare parts and service to represent 10% of our revenue. We are currently significantly below that. It is a tremendous opportunity for us to increase our focus on service and parts business, add a whole another dimension to the company and grow our top line. We have examples in the company where this is working extremely well. India, their service and parts business is greater than 9% of their total revenue. We know how to do it. We have the capabilities inside the company.
Let's transfer those capabilities to other parts of the organization and now grow our service and parts business globally. That's our focus. To do that, we recognize we need to enhance that customer experience, make key investments in our customer service and call centers. Again, we have an outstanding capability in India. This is well built out. We're making investments in Chicago so that we can consolidate, integrate, and strengthen our customer service center. This will strengthen that relationship with customers and support our progress in the service and parts business. Lots of opportunities for AGI in broadening that relationship with the customer and being a full service provider. The third one that we'll touch on, another key message for this morning is AGI getting more and more involved in that processing space.
When you look at opportunities from our customer's lens, particularly our commercial customers, they look at it under three different components, three different capabilities: storage, handling, and processing, right? This goes back to that rice milling example. The rice milling is the processing. You have the storage and the handling that handles the material as the feed into processing. Our focus now is providing that full capability. We have capabilities in processing. We have rice milling. We have fertilizer. We have a food business. We're developing feed milling business. We are going to accelerate our focus in these businesses and continue to build out our process capabilities globally so that we can now provide that full solution to the customer. This unlocks multi-billion dollar markets for AGI. It is an extremely exciting opportunity for us.
Much so that we want to explore it further in a video, from our new, executive leading the global feed platform, Noam. I'm gonna turn it over to Noam.
Most recently, over the last five years, we've added processing capabilities. Four key areas for us in processing: food processing, feed milling, rice milling, and fertilizer blending. We now have the ability to deliver engineering, project management, equipment supply, installation, and commissioning of food processing facilities. An example where we've put our food processing capabilities to the test is the recent Maple Leaf London poultry project.
This is a CAD 700+ million investment by Maple Leaf, where we supplied engineering, project management, equipment supply, and installation. Our feed capabilities are focused both on the farm application as well as commercial application. We've got a FLEXmill product line that addresses the farm, as well as a fair amount of experience in commercial feed milling projects. An example of a feed milling project is the HyLife feed mill in Manitoba. 250,000 ton per year feed mill focused on swine application, and we've provided engineering, project management, as well as equipment supply.
In fertilizer, our offering encompasses the blending side of it, so declining weight and batch blending systems, as well as fertilizer storage and fertilizer handling equipment. For the rice milling segment, we deliver everything from the front-end parboiling and drying through the core milling equipment and into the back-end color sorting and packaging equipment. Our customers are increasingly requesting turnkey solutions from us, and the combination of our processing capabilities with our core grain handling and storage capabilities allows us to now deliver these integrated solutions to our customers. The future is bright. There's an opportunity now to leverage our regional hubs and to transfer the product lines and the capabilities across these processing sectors around the world. This will enable us to offer local engineering, local equipment manufacturing, and ultimately a tailored solution for our clients. The opportunity for AGI in these processing segments is massive.
These are large addressable markets, multi-billion dollar addressable markets, very positive secular growth trends, and limited market share for AGI today. All of that makes for a very compelling organic growth opportunity for AGI.
Excellent. Excellent. I think Noam said it very well. The opportunity is massive, and it's why we're so excited. You can see just in some of the visuals there, right? These are significant scale projects. These are significant scale investments that some of our customers are making. AGI is very well positioned to support those investments in the future. That will be one of our focus: processing equipment. That was a lot about growth. Growth is exciting. We can talk about growth the rest of the day, but we got more material to cover. I wanna pivot a little bit to operational excellence, and let me just kind of frame out operational excellence a little bit more.
If you reflect back when we talked about our sales growth over the past, two to six years and the acceleration of our profitability, I referenced, the initial work that we have been doing from an operational excellence standpoint. In the past 18 months- 24 months, we will have increased our EBITDA margins by about 150 basis points. Our expectation across 2023 is we will continue to grow our EBITDA margins by another 100 basis points to get to 17% EBITDA margin. Continuing to focus on operational excellence and building out these capabilities will not only deliver that 100 basis points, but also position us for continued margin expansion in the future. Three key areas on operational excellence.
We're gonna talk about culture, we're gonna talk about those important functional capabilities, and then some investments that we're gonna continue to make in process and systems and tools. Perhaps something that doesn't get talked about enough is culture, but it is something that AGI is extremely committed to. It has been part of a transformation that has occurred over the past two years. We've made significant progress in advancing our culture. There's more work to do. At the end of the day, culture drives our performance, creating that exciting environment for our employees to work, enhancing the customer experience, and delivering value to our shareholders. Culture plays a key role in all of that. When we talk about culture within AGI, we talk about One AGI.
That is the culture that we are striving for. It is a culture based on a highly integrated global company delivering exceptional performance through collaboration, inclusion, and cooperation. That's our culture mission. Significant progress, more work to do. We're fully committed to continuing to advance the culture within AGI, as it's gonna be such a cornerstone, not only of our operational excellence, but our performance in general. The significant transformation stems from the fact that AGI grew substantially through acquisitions. Through that acquisitions, AGI inherently had a very division-centric culture. That's the transformation we're making. Division-centric to One AGI, fully integrating our teams, fully integrating our capabilities so that we can provide enhanced solutions to our customers. It's the customers that are driving our performance.
Very exciting progress, one that we've talked about quite a lot internally and was important to share with the team here this morning. There's lots of different ways to measure progress that you are making in culture. You can, and we do employee surveys, employee pulse surveys, hear directly from the team, get feedback, understand how things are going. Another important measure for me on culture is safety. This is an indication on how well the teams are coming together and focusing on some of our core values and core objectives. We increased our performance on safety two years ago. We significantly ramped it up. It was important. It is important, and it will continue to be important. Our goal in safety is that each and every AGI employee around the world returns home in the exact same condition that they came to work.
One lost time injury is one too many. You can see the significant progress that we've made over the past two years. We've reduced lost time injury rates by over 50%. Phenomenal. We're just getting started. There's more work to do with safety. Safety is a key part of our culture, very indicative of the direction we're going. We'll continue to make important investments to ensure that our employees have a very safe work environment. You can see some of those initiatives that we've been progressing over the past two years. There's other initiatives that are very active, such as near-miss reporting, that are gonna continue to drive our safety performance in the positive direction and help continue to strengthen that One AGI culture and help us deliver on operational excellence. Let's talk about those centralized functions. AGI grew significantly through acquisitions.
We did not, at that time, step through any major integration. We embarked on that integration effort over the past two years and are taking those capabilities that were inherent in all of those divisions, integrating and consolidating them into a single office, our Chicago office, which we'll talk about. In doing so, we also created new functions and new capabilities that fundamentally did not exist previously, such as Global Product Management, Global Supply Chain, manufacturing leads. Some of these critical and fundamental functional capabilities that ultimately will not only drive operational excellence but will support our growth objectives. In exploring it a little bit further, it's often good to take an example. We'll step through not only Global Product Management, but where our teams are focusing, how they're working together to drive operational effects, excellence, reduce our costs, and improve our operational efficiencies.
I'll just make a comment. You can see on the slide two new innovative products that AGI has recently launched. We continue to be focused on innovation. It's absolutely a critical part of our success in the future, but I want to specifically focus on the operational excellence, so I'm going to take product management as an example. We grew through acquisitions. As a part of that, we have significant complexity in our product lines. Our product management team is focused on simplifying, rationalizing, and standardizing our products. In doing so, we will take cost out of our products directly. We're not done there. As we simplify and standardize our products from a product management standpoint, we now turn our attention to the supply chain. As we have standardized products in our supply chain, we're now able to look at our the standardized products.
We can now look at our supply chain and understand how we can rationalize our supplier base, strengthen our relationships with suppliers, and put in place global and regional supply agreements to drive out costs in our supply chain. We reduce inherent costs in our products. We're amplifying that by taking costs out of our supply chain, and then we're still not done. We turn to manufacturing. Standardized products, rationalized supplier base. We can now improve our manufacturing utilization, move to a position where we can more easily manufacture multiple products across our manufacturing footprint and drive to a higher level of manufacturing optimization. When you look at that effort that started in product management, you get 1 + 1 + 1. It is additive.
In this case, it actually equals five because not only are we driving out cost throughout our integrated supply chain, making, standardizing across that supply chain now enables us to accelerate those product transfers. We have standard products. We have a well-vetted supplier base. We've set up global supply agreements, and we've improved our manufacturing utilization. All of those contribute to us to be able to successfully transfer those products from one region to another. You can see why we are so excited about these functional capabilities. Didn't exist in the past. They exist now, and they're gonna be a very compelling part of our success story going forward. You hear us reference a lot our Chicago office. We're proud of our Chicago office. This is gonna be a very important hub for AGI, not only across North America, but globally.
We opened that office back in August. You can see some pictures of the office here on the slide. Just to give you rough dimensions, about 45,000 sq ft. It's designed to hold around 200 people. We have a little bit under 100 today. It's growing rapidly. It will continue to grow as we step through that integration and consolidate some of our core and critical capabilities in one office. Also accelerating our culture, One AGI, creating an environment where we can be collaborative, we can be inclusive, and we can increase that level of cooperation because we're all sitting together.
The last item to touch on from operational excellence, we have and we will continue to make important investments in standardizing our processes globally, making key investments in systems and tools to help drive efficiency across our core business operations. We've been doing it over the past two to three years. We'll continue to do that over the next three to four years. Final item, very important. We've made a lot of progress in the past six months strengthening our balance sheet, paying down our debt, fully committed to this. We see significant progress occurring in this area across 2023. I'm not really gonna comment on this point because Jim's gonna come up in a few minutes and go through our balance sheet discipline and what we're looking to accomplish from strengthening that balance sheet going forward. Okay.
Moving on to our regional highlights. Spending some time getting to know our business at our regional level and further introducing some of AGI's leaders. Wanted to start by just taking a snapshot, giving you a perspective, further perspective of the AGI business today. This is a great slide. Lot of very interesting information on it, so I'll spend a little bit of time going through it this morning. First, just to orientate us on the slide. The large gray circle with the percentage in it, that represents the proportional amount of sales for AGI in that region. If you look at the U.S., 45%. 45% of our sales come from the U.S. region.
Small box to the right in green with the percent in it, hopefully everybody can see it's a little bit smaller, three-year CAGR sales for that region. Again, you can look at the U.S. Our largest business globally has grown 14% over the past three years. Going down, you can see South America, Brazil, 13%. Very exciting CAGR for our Brazil business. The number's right. 49% is what that business has grown over the past three years. Over to EMEA and into Asia Pacific. I mentioned that each of these regional positions now represents greater than 10% sales for AGI. They're all growing at a greater than a 10% CAGR. I wanna put that emerging economy in our international business and the growth behind it into a little bit more context.
If you go back to the beginning of 2020, the total EBITDA from our international business outside of North America was around CAD 25 million. About two years ago, 2020, CAD 25 million. That EBITDA and that profitability has increased threefold over the past two years. Back in 2020, it represented 17% of AGI's profitability. In the trailing 12 months, it represents 34% of our profitability. It's doubled in the, in the past two years relative to total percentage for AGI. As I commented earlier, our expectation and our visibility is that that part of our business is going to represent 50% of AGI. That's the amount of growth potential that exists in these emerging ag economies. That's the performance that we're seeing today in Brazil and India, and it's the performance that we're positioning ourselves for in Africa and across Southeast Asia.
We have that very exciting manufacturing facilities. That's gonna come out a little bit in the slides. We've got some videos, and I'm quite confident that one of your takeaways is gonna be impressed at our manufacturing capabilities. These really are state-of-the-art facilities. We're gonna do a nice video walkthrough on a couple of them just to give you a little bit more insight into the manufacturing capabilities that we have around the world. We'll explore each of the regions. A slide on each. Exactly the same format for each of the regions, so you can quickly orientate yourself. You'll see trailing four year sales performance. You'll see a pie chart that represents the split across our major market segments, farm and commercial, and then highlighting a couple of the strategic priorities.
Reflecting back on part of that operational cadence where we develop three-year strategic plans, out of that bubbles up growth levers that we turn into strategic priorities, then we execute against them in the forthcoming year. Just quickly, you can look at the U.S. outstanding business. You can see the growth trajectory, extremely exciting. Our largest business globally growing at a very attractive pace. We're confident that growth is going to continue. You can look at our split between farm and commercial. We have an outstanding farm business in the U.S. We have an excellent dealer channel and dealer relationships. We're focusing on continuing to strengthen that dealer relationship, building out our portfolio of products across existing dealers and adding new dealers. That's a key part of our strategic priority. Then you can look at the commercial space, smaller than farm.
That is a great opportunity for growth for AGI. Think of all of those comments that we made around product transfers and the comments we made about entering into the processing area. There's great opportunities in the U.S. for rice milling down in the south, for feed milling across the U.S. That's our focus. That's gonna increase and grow that commercial business, just as it did down in Brazil, which we'll touch on in a minute. Turn over to Canada, another key part of our business. Canada Farm, Canada commercial as well is grouped into here. You can see the sales performance that we've had over the past few years. I commented earlier about the diversification, the balance, and the resiliency of our business. That we were able to deliver record profits over the past two years despite challenging conditions.
One of those are difficult ag conditions in Canada. The exciting thing is we're coming out of those difficult conditions in Canada. They impacted the tail end of 2021, the first half of 2022. We saw that business improve across 2022 in the second half, and now we're looking at 2023 with extremely strong backlogs and a very exciting order pipeline. 2023 is gonna be a great year for Canada. Very confident of that. When we've got very important strategic priorities that are gonna drive that growth, both in our farm and in our commercial segment, transferring up products to support farm, and we're focusing on food. Food is a key commercial segment within Canada. Flipping over to South America and Brazil. I mean, fantastic growth story.
You've often heard Jim and I comment that we reached a inflection point in our business in Brazil. You can see that very clearly on this graph. Right around 2019 and 2020, we turned the corner in Brazil and went on an extremely accelerated growth trajectory. We expect that growth trajectory to continue. You're gonna hear from Francisco in a moment commenting on it, but it goes back to those two growth drivers in our emerging economies. They continue to grow their crop production, and they continue to address the storage and equipment deficit. I mentioned the example on product transfers and how compelling that can be. I gave you the example of moving Enclosed Belt Conveyors from Sioux Falls down to Brazil. Look at our commercial business in Brazil.
This is significantly attributed to the product transfer that we made four years ago. That's the type of potential that exists in many regions as we continue to execute on that, on that product transfer. It grew our commercial business in Brazil, and we have the opportunity to have similar performance in other regions. I could talk quite a lot about Brazil and South America, but let's turn it over to Francisco, and he can further explore it for us.
AGI entered Brazil in 2017 through a combination of a small acquisition and greenfield expansion. In just five short years, we turned a small company of 40 people making dryers into an operation of 950 people making full systems. We operate a 240,000 sq ft plant outside São Paulo. We have successfully built a supply chain, developed channels, established brand awareness for AGI in Brazil, and have greatly expanded our product catalog. We have achieved greater than 100% growth in the past two years and are currently in the number two position in Brazilian market. Our committed order backlog is very significant, and our sales pipeline is strong. We are continually identifying exciting new opportunities within our market. For example, expanding into additional platforms like fertilizer, food, feed, and rice processing products.
The world is depending on Brazil to feed a growing population. It is the largest country in the world in terms of arable land and is among the few countries in the world with the potential to increase agriculture productivity. The country's ability to harvest two to three crops a year in the same plot of land also makes it unique. However, Brazil is behind the curve in terms of having the infrastructure needed to fully leverage this potential, and we operate with a severe food infrastructure deficit. The need for Brazil's agriculture sector to be able to access global markets seamlessly will only grow more pressing. With our grain handling, storage, and technology system, AGI Brazil is well-positioned to support the build-out of critical food infrastructure across the Brazilian supply chain.
Pretty exciting stuff. Yeah. I mean, we've got outstanding capabilities. We got an outstanding team. It was great to hear from Francisco. Asia-Pacific, another tremendous growth story. This is India, this is Southeast Asia, this is Australia. You can see the growth trajectory that we've been on for the past three years. Jim and I often comment about the acquisition, that key acquisition that we made down in India when we acquired Milltec, the rice milling business. To put that in perspective, we acquired Milltec about three years ago. The Milltec business has about doubled across that three-year period, and the potential for growth is significant going forward. You can see the trajectory. You can see the split between farm and commercial. Rice milling exists. It's a processing capability. It exists within our commercial segment.
Farm, again, going back to those product transfers. In our farm segment, that is the storage and the material handling. That is the capability that we literally just transferred down to India. We are now currently making storage bins in India. We're making material handling equipment in India. We weren't doing that previously. That not only supports our growth in rice, providing that full solutions to the customer, but opens up the new markets where we can sell storage and material handling into the grain space across India. Extremely exciting opportunities. Again, I can spend a lot of time going through it, but let's turn it over to Rajan, our fantastic leader in India, who can tell us a bit more.
AGI entered in India market with acquisition of Milltec in 2019. With the AGI's involvement, we have been able to make our capabilities to an entirely new level. We have four facilities in Bangalore area with over 1,000 employees. We are the market leader for premium rice processing equipment and systems. When we joined AGI, we primarily manufactured complete rice milling system for the Indian market. Since joining AGI, we have expanded not only our geographic reach but also product portfolio. We have been able to steadily grow our product exports to the surrounding regions, enabling us to penetrate new markets and diversify our mix. We have also leveraged AGI's resources to add new production capabilities.
We have added storage products as well as handling equipment to our catalog, and we have further initiatives underway to expand deeper into new food infrastructure platforms for fertilizer, feed, and food. We have nearly doubled our revenue since acquisition, and we see significant room for acceleration of these results as we develop increased abilities to support food infrastructure in India and across the broader region. Demand is ever-growing in India as well as across the APAC region. Our facilities are perfectly positioned to leverage this increasing demand and to facilitate exports to the surrounding APAC region. What has most impressed me about AGI is that for a global company, they have a deep appreciation for the importance of understanding local markets, local needs, and I believe that has helped us to progress much further than we could have without the support of a global company.
AGI's move into India was very strategic. India plays an important role in the global food supply. It is the second-largest rice producer in the world and is on the track to become world's most populous country before the end of this decade. Despite all this, India has generally been under-invested in food infrastructure. The growth potential here is tremendous, not only here at home in India, but across the APAC region. With the kind of comprehensive solutions we are now able to provide to our customers, we believe we are well positioned to fully capitalize on that potential.
Terrific. You can see why we're so excited about our India business, and it was great hearing directly from Rajan. Okay, turn our attentions last region, EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. If there's one region that defines resiliency for AGI, it is absolutely EMEA. When you think about the COVID and supply chain and conflicts and all the disruptions that have existed, it really impacted that EMEA region. Despite it all, we've been able to consistently deliver sequential growth and increased profitability. It is largely a commercial business. You can see a little bit of the participation in farm, just as with our other regions, this is opportunity. This is opportunity for us to continue to grow our business. In this case, it's around geographic expansion, further penetration into Africa, and setting up a strong farm business across Africa.
You can see as you look at some of those strategic priorities, that's what they're focused on, building out our capabilities, strengthening our position in Africa, and transferring some of the key products and capabilities that will enable us to penetrate and grow our position in that geography. Just like with, the other ones, let's turn it over to Cristiano so you can learn a little bit more about our EMEA business.
AGI EMEA primarily services the European, Middle East, and African market with a focus on commercial-level projects. We operate out of three facilities in Italy with the main 230,000 sq ft production site based out of Venice. Our focus is supplying the food infrastructure required to move, condition, and store grain within Europe, as well as support critical exports in Africa, Middle East, and occasionally to Asia. Since the pandemic, regions that were net importers of grain have been seeking self-sufficiency by increasing their domestic handling and storage infrastructure capacity to account for future events. This, in addition to rising crop volumes and the general catch-up of developing nations in building their food infrastructure, is a source of sustained demand for AGI EMEA. Conflict in Eastern Europe has altered the global patterns of trade, production, and consumption of grain commodities.
Given our wide network of customer contacts and deep sales pipeline, we are well positioned to source work from outside the affected regions. When an eventual rebuild of the areas impacted by the conflict begins, AGI will be ready to immediately support the effort to reestablish critical food infrastructure capacity. The potential for growth in the EMEA region is significant. We are expanding into new geographies as well as broadening our capabilities. For example, we are currently working on a fertilizer equipment tech transfer from North America to widen the breadth of our product offering. We recently opened a new commercial office in Nigeria to help support increased demand we are seeing across Africa. We are nurturing strategic partners in project construction and automation controls to enable us to offer more turnkey solution while serving as a single point of contact for the end customer.
We have a multi-year roadmap with additional strategic priorities to execute in the future years, which will help AGI continue a strong growth path over the long term.
Terrific. Great leader, Cristiano, great team, outstanding capabilities, and a wonderful customer base across EMEA. You've heard a lot from me. I'm excited to turn it over to Jim Rudyk, who's gonna spend some time, providing an overview of our finances and our outlook.
Thank you, Paul. Okay. We've got a few more minutes left before we can get to Q&A. I'm gonna spend some time talking about our financial overview. There's really three key financial takeaways that I wanna make sure you leave with that come from these five bullets here. First of all, as you've heard from Paul and you've probably looked at our numbers, our results are very resilient. They've been resilient for several years. I think as important or even more importantly, I'm gonna talk a bit about how we're confident in being able to deliver despite the growth and the resilient results, increasing margins. Let's talk a bit more specifically about our margin improvement there. That's the first takeaway.
Second one, that is extremely critical is balance sheet does matter to us. We will focus to significantly de-lever our debt. I'll talk about some of the reasons and exactly how we're going to accomplish that. Lastly, I think you've seen as you walk through the slides, we have a very high degree of confidence in our outlook and really our outlook to grow at better than market rates. I'll cover those three topics, margin expansion, balance sheet management or de-leveraging, and our growth. Let's start off just quickly and take a look and recap what our sales, our adjusted EBITDA, and our margins have been over the last four years.
As you know, we've talked about, everyone knows about all the turbulence in the world, but during these years, you look at our results, they've been pretty steady and growing. Actually, if you look at the last two years, growing quite significantly. Through all this, if you look at our gross margins, top right there, they've been pretty consistent, which is a good reflection of the diversified business we've now built up over the years. The only exception that you see there in the chart is in 2021, wheref our gross margin percentage did dip a bit, largely a result of the crazy quick increase in steel costs that everyone experienced. You know, in a weird way that it did catch us off guard, but in a weird way, it was a blessing. It allowed us to then look internally and readjust.
We adjusted quite quickly, I think, and improved our process to better manage that to make sure that we stay on top of any changes in costs going forward. If you look at our EBITDA margin, you see last few years, we've made some investments. We've touched on a few of them, particularly in SG&A, where we've built out capacities in our sales group, our supply chain groups, engineering groups, our customer experience or customer service groups. Now you're starting to see the benefit of that. We've improved our margins in the LTM, and as Paul mentioned, our target is to get those margins up to at least 17% in the very near term. I'm gonna talk a little bit more specifically about how exactly we're gonna do that.
For the margins, there's really four specific reasons why we're confident in being able to get our margins to improve. First one, which I think is the easy one, quite frankly, is as a result of the investments that we've made and the capacity that we've built, we'll be able to leverage those investments and not invest as much in the near term. That'll naturally drive up our margins as a result of those historical investments. You see that in 2022, and you'll see that going forward. As important, I think, is what I call price management. You know, in the wake of some of the extreme cost volatility, particularly with steel in 2021, we've developed very strong pricing management disciplines. If you think of our business, we've got two types of businesses.
We've got the commercial market, and we've got the farm market. In the commercial market, a lot of those orders are engineered to order, so they're all unique. We price them when they happen. What we've been able to do now, is we've effectively are able to lock in the margin when the customer places the order. We're able to. How we do that? When you place an order and you're committed, we go out and buy the products.
We procure the steel at the cost that we've quoted, that we've quoted in the price. We also, in addition to that, because some of these projects can take a lot of time, so we've also been able to modify how we deal with the contracts and inserted clauses in there that allow us to revisit the pricing for any significant material changes that could happen, depending on how long the project ultimately goes from order to when we fulfill it. We feel very comfortable and protected there on the commercial side. On the Farm side, it's a little bit of different approach in terms of pricing. Farm side, typically people are buying from inventory, and so think of a catalog list price approach. Historically, we would set those prices annually and maybe revisit them once a year.
Again, in 2021, with all the changes, we got caught off guard. Now we've developed fairly disciplined, rigid approaches to take a look and analyze what the competitors are doing, what the markets are doing, what our costs are doing, and then making sure our pricing matches to make sure our margins stay intact. I think price management is a very critical initiative to help us ensure that our margins not just stabilize, but we're able to grow them going forward. The third area, and we've talked a lot about this, is our focus on operational excellence. You know, if I had to describe where we're at in terms of opportunities here to improve our costs, if I use a baseball analogy, I'd probably describe us in the sixth inning.
We still have lots of opportunity to go to continue to drive operational cost improvements. You know, we touched on a few of them today, but remember, we're going from a very decentralized, divisionalized type approach, moving to where we're starting to think about centralizing some facilities, where we're sorry, consolidating some facilities, centralizing some of the processes, whether it's engineering, procurement, et cetera, and adopting really more of a Lean Six Sigma type approach at addressing our costs. That'll allow us, especially in the coming short term with all the concerns on inflation and everything else, to manage any of that variability while still driving cost improvements and efficiencies.
The last key driver that gives us confidence in getting to our margin targets, and it's really moving forward, is as we move into some of the new service offerings and products. Selling spare parts. A lot of our competitors are able to improve their margins, boost their margins in the spare parts market. We've done that well in some areas, but we have opportunities to do that better in a lot of the other areas around our business. In addition to that is services offerings. You know, we're becoming more of a full service provider to our customers, and those services naturally have higher margins. As that mix of the business increases, you'll see that starting to help our overall margins. Four key drivers there.
Leverage, it's just growing into what the investments we already made, our pricing discipline and management, our operational excellence and focus on cost, and then some of the new services that we'll have to offer give us a lot of confidence in improving our margins. Let's switch now to our balance sheet. What you're looking at here is a chart or a graph that shows our total net debt to our last 12 months or our trailing EBITDA, and it's over the past four years. As you can see, if you pick out some numbers there, you see we've been in excess of 6x . That's high. For most of the time period, you could see we've been at 5x or higher.
A lot of that leverage, though, if you know our history, is, was a conscious effort and is a result of our acquisitive nature, our acquisitions. You can see now at the end of Q3, we've dropped that leverage ratio quite significantly down to 4.1 x. By the end of this year, you'll see that ratio being below 4x, and we'll quickly march that down to our target of 2.5 x in the short term. By the end of 2023, I expect that ratio to be in the very low 3x. How will we get there? Well, fundamentally, it's two ways. First way is, we're growing. As our EBITDA grows, naturally the leverage ratio will come down. That's not probably what a lot of people wanna hear.
The other thing that will be happening is we will be paying down our debt. You know, we generate a lot of free cash flow, and we've had uses for it in the past, but now a big use and a big priority will be to apply a lot of that free cash flow to pay down our debt. You saw some of that in Q3, and you'll continue to see us applying excess free cash flow in the quarters to come to pay down our debt. Those two drivers will help us quickly march down that ratio. However, in addition to that, you got the EBITDA growth and the free cash flow, there's two other vehicles, I guess, that we have to be able to generate more cash, to be able to even accelerate the pay down of that debt.
The first one is working capital management. I'll talk a bit about that. The second one that I think is equally as important is really taking a disciplined approach at our CapEx spend and not doing any more acquisitions for a while. Let's talk about working capital management first. You know, everyone knows this, but with most high-growth type companies, working capital needs is usually a big use or need for cash. We've been making improvements over the years, over the last few years, in our working capital needs.
With the exception you see on the graph here in early 2022, where we consciously went out and decided to, with the outbreak of the war and some of the concerns on the supply chain, we proactively went out and bought inventory. You know, our order book and our backlog was very strong, and so we had a lot of confidence in aggressively going out and securing those positions to make sure we could fulfill our customer needs and make sure that we didn't miss any of those commitments. We actually manage our working capital by looking at our levels of receivables, the level of inventory, and our payables.
More specifically, there's metrics underneath there that look at, you know, how many Days Sales Outstanding are your receivables, how many days in inventory you have, and how many days it takes to pay your suppliers. We made great progress, I think, in 2022 on the receivable management, but a lot of opportunities still to go in managing our inventory and our payables, which we're focused on in 2023. Another way to look at working capital that you see here on the graph here is really looking at our ratio of total working capital to our annualized sales. That target that you see at 16% at the end of Q3, we're actually targeting to get that down to between 10% and 12% of sales on an annualized basis.
Ultimately, what we're really focused on doing for working capital is making sure that we will grow our working capital at less than what our sales growth will be. I mean, ultimately, you know, we're gonna need working capital as we grow, but hopefully we will need less proportionately than what our sales growth will be. Besides working capital, the second big use of our cash or our free cash flow that we've generated has, over the past few years anyway, has been on acquisitions. Also some pretty significant CapEx investments that we've made, particularly as we built out Brazil and our digital business over the past few years. A couple of points. First of all, we will not be doing any acquisitions in the near term, so that use goes away.
From a CapEx perspective on a regular ongoing basis, we'll be very focused, and I use the word disciplined, to manage what we spend things on. Our business is such that we generally need CapEx. We need CapEx for three main reasons. One we call maintenance capital. This is making sure the equipment that we have in our facilities keeps up and running. Historically, that typically runs between 1% and 1.5% of revenue. I've looked back for 10+ years, and it seems to be very, very consistent at that ratio. That's an important data point. On the far right side of the page, we will continue to invest in our products.
You know, keeping on top and making sure our products are what our customers need, innovating them, that is an important part that we'll always spend on. That's the intangible bucket. Then the third reason that we'll spend money on regularly is to continue to look at our facilities and ensure we've got the right capacity. We'll need to invest in some new equipment as we continue to grow, but also to drive efficiencies. You know, we see a lot of opportunities still from an operational perspective, to automate a lot of stuff. You will see us spending money in that growth capital bucket. However, the amounts that we'll spend in a normal situation or normal business will typically be between $40 million-$50 million a year for all three buckets.
That's what we've averaged the last few years, and that's what we think we're comfortable with from a normal operating run rate business. If we do end up spending more, so if you see us reporting CapEx that's more than that, it will be because, primarily because we've got an extremely strong return type investment for organic growth, and we will be well on our way to hitting our leverage targets. We will make sure we will not be spending unless we're confident we're on track for those leverage targets and that investment is very high return.
You can see how, you know, besides the growth in earnings and our free cash flow, the two other opportunities, working capital management and a disciplined CapEx approach, will help us free up the cash we need to make sure our leverage ratio goes down. Okay, finally, last slide here. Let's talk about our short-term outlook on the business. As you know, in the last two years, despite all the chaos in the world, we've been able to grow our business at very strong double-digit growth rates. 2022, we provided guidance of EBITDA of at least $228 million. That's a growth rate of 29%. In 2021, we grew 18%.
What's really encouraging, I find anyway, is that our backlogs and our sales pipelines continue to remain very strong and really give us a lot of confidence that we will continue to be able to outpace the growth of the market. We will be providing specific guidance for 2023 when we report our results on March the 8th. I can tell you that that guidance will reflect our confidence in 2023 based on what we see around the world and when as we talk to our customers. Hopefully you have a better sense here of who we are and what our strategy and what we're excited about going forward.
Tell you, a lot of the heavy lifting that was done over the years through the acquisitions has really set us up nicely, where we can now focus inward. I talk focusing inward and focus on you know, organic, profitable growth, operational excellence, and making sure we have a strong balance sheet. Hopefully that was helpful for you today. I am done. I'm going to thank you very much for your time and attention, and I'll turn it back over to Paul, who will make some closing remarks.
Thanks, Jim.
Thanks, Paul.
Okay. Fantastic. Thanks, Jim. As Jim mentioned, some closing remarks. Keeping track of time here. We do wanna save some time for any questions that the audience might have. Quickly recapping, going back to those key messages, those four key messages that we outlined at the very beginning of the presentation, themes that we wanted to make sure people walked away with today. It always starts with our people. We have outstanding talent across the organization, and we have a very capable leadership team that we reviewed. Second message that you've heard is we have what we need today to achieve on our growth and profitability expectations and targets in the future. Jim mentioned, we're not focused. We don't have aspirations. We don't have plans for acquisitions in our near term.
We have what we need today to continue to grow. Sorry, I lost the slide there for a second. Okay. Our priorities. We're focused on our priorities. We're confident that those are gonna be key to delivering on our performance. Priorities being profitable, organic growth, operational excellence, balance sheet discipline that Jim just targeted. Our growth prospects are very encouraging. We talked about the product transfers and how that is going to unlock over $4 billion of addressable amenable market. We're gonna target 20% market share across that key growth driver for us going forward. We talked about entering more and more into that processing capability, providing full solutions to our customers, expanding and strengthening that relationship, end-to-end solution provider. The geographic expansion. We've got outstanding positions in the key mature markets, U.S. and Canada.
Those are continuing to grow. We've got great growth opportunities when we're very excited about our positions in these emerging economies that have significant growth drivers behind them. Been a key part of our growth over the past two years. They will continue to be part of our growth going forward, Brazil and India, and then our positions that we're developing in Africa and across Southeast Asia. Quick recap, and we have a few times left here for Q&A. Reflecting back on our message that we had at the beginning, we stand here today a much stronger AGI than we were a few years ago. I'm confident that everybody has that impression. We've kinda talked through some of those compelling reasons. It wasn't too long ago that we were celebrating moving past CAD 1 billion in sales.
CAD 2 billion right now as we look at our company and we look at our business, that is well within our operating planning cycle. Our focus now, our ambition, our aspiration, and the direction that we're going is CAD 3 billion. We have very well-vetted strategies, plans, and capabilities to get us there. With that, I am happy to open it up to any questions. Yes. Maybe what we can do as we ask questions, just, you know, very quick, introduce yourself and where you're from.
Jacob Bout, CIBC. You walked through some very good growth prospects in India and Brazil. Maybe start off, talk a bit about capacity utilization of the facilities in both those areas. At what point do you have to start thinking about capital necessary to, you know, either for greenfield or a brownfield expansion with those areas?
Yeah. Fantastic question. So if you look at India and Brazil, you know, the easy answer to the question is we have the capacity that we need today to achieve the growth objectives that we have set out, certainly over the next 12 months-1 8 months. We are extremely excited about those growth projections and the opportunities that exist in both of those markets. We expect that growth is going to continue well beyond that 18 months- 24 months period and be a significant amount of growth for us going out in two to three to five years. That does create us an opportunity to continue invest in our core business to ensure that we've got the capabilities in place, inclusive of manufacturing, so that we can meet that demand.
As Jim pointed out, you know, our focus right now, absolutely paying down debt, strengthening our balance sheet. We've got the free cash flow generation to achieve that. As we improve and hit those leverage ratios, that free cash flow that we're gonna continue to generate, we are gonna invest back in our business. We've got the market and the potential and the growth opportunities in front of us. Yes, out in the future, you know, certainly into that 18 month-24 month period and beyond, we will be investing in Brazil and in India, continue to strengthen our manufacturing capabilities, enable us to execute on those product transfers and continue with those growth trajectories.
Maybe just a follow-on question. When you look specifically at the Brazil market, and you look at the retailers in that market, part of, you know, the growth strategy there is you're required to provide credit to the farmers to support that growth. Maybe just walk us through how you handle that when you think about the on-farm?
It is a great, very insightful question. If you again, remember we have two segments, farm and commercial. When you look at our farm segment, we provide the solutions in there to help the farmers run a more efficient, eliminate waste, and improve their business. The farmers get cash as they harvest their crop. One of the programs that is in place, and we put in place down in Brazil, enables us to help farmers finance those upfront investments. As collateral, there's the system in Brazil, they put up their crop as collateral. As they harvest their crop and they sell their crop and get paid, then they're able to pay Air Products back for that upfront equipment.
That was a program that was really helpful for AGI to initially accelerate our farm business in Brazil as we were new market entrants into Brazil. The interesting thing now, if you look at our farm business, growth and activity is much less supported by that type of financing activity. That is part of our brand. That is part of our strength in Brazil. That is part of these important relationships that we're developing with our customers. Probably just as important, it is reflective of the cash that the farmers are now generating. You look at crop prices and commodity prices in Brazil, they're extremely high. Harvests have been outstanding. Farmers have cash on hand that they now are looking to directly deploy in investments to improve their business going forward.
Key point, that was a part of our growth early on and developing that farm segment going forward, we see that less and less. Thank you for that. Michael?
Hey. Great presentation, by the way, guys. What stuck out for me as something new was the product transfers. You talked about $4 billion as an opportunity on a $1.4 billion business. I'd love to ask you know, what the cadence could be of that, you know, going forward in terms of you realizing it. I'd also like to ask, you know, in the last two years, you've grown a lot and how much of the success of the last two years was product transfers? We just get a sense for how much of this growth is really secular.
Fantastic question. you know, cadence, very important question. Love the focus on product transfers. That is gonna be a key part of our growth story going forward. As such, we have developed and cascaded very specific metrics in place for product transfers. We know the priorities, and we know exactly what it is that we're looking to accomplish. Our target, from a cadence standpoint, is we would look to be successful in four to six key product transfers per year. That's roughly what we are looking to have in place. We are putting additional metrics in there to help us evaluate the progress that we're making. Very common metrics in this space are like new product introductions, right?
Companies that are very innovative, they will track new product introductions and the sales generated that as a percent of total sales. That's what we're looking for for product transfers. We put very specific metrics in place that will track the sales growth that we achieve from product transfers as a percent of our total sales to ensure that we're making the progress in that area that we would expect. You know, you can think of the type of NPI metrics that innovative and growth companies would put in place. We have very similar expectations around new product introduction. In terms of the growth that we've achieved over the past two years and how much of that has been related to product transfers, I mentioned the success story in Brazil.
That's certainly been a part of it, the growth that we have seen on that commercial segment. You know, there hasn't really been a whole lot more beyond that in the past two years. A lot of that has just been organic growth and focusing on our positions and building out within our existing customer bases and within our markets. The opportunity is quite still in front of us to untap that CAD 4 billion amenable market. In many ways, we're really just getting started there. That's why it is so compelling. Yeah. Thank you. Over here.
Gary Ho with Desjardins here. Just wanna touch base on the mix farm versus commercial. You said 50% today. I think previously, obviously, farm was much higher. When you look out three years, how does that mix evolve? Does that put a bit of a headwind on margins as you look out?
A great question. There is some margin mix as you look between our farm and our commercial business. Specifically in farm, we have our portable equipment. That's one of our higher profit margin businesses. If you look at the performance of those two segments, you will see higher margins in farm. In terms of the balance going forward, expectations is, if anything, it's going to strengthen. We have significant opportunities to continue to grow our farm business, not only in these major mature markets such as Canada and the U.S., but also significant opportunities in some of these emerging ag economies like Brazil. Very excited about the potential that exists in Africa, and we're really just getting started in India. That India business is predominantly commercial today.
You're gonna see that weighted much more towards farm in the future. We also have expectations that we've got an attractive farm business in Australia. We're making some positioning moves that is gonna enable us to accelerate that going forward. We expect that to continue to remain in balance and the respective impact or non-impact on margins.
Perfect. Thanks for that. Then my second question, feels like you put in a lot of structure and processes in place, metrics to measure. Just wondering how those KPIs that you had at the beginning of the presentation, are they tied to incentive compensation, how you measure the successes of that? Is that tied to comp as well?
Yeah. 100% with that, they're directly tied to comp. It's something that we've got, you know, a lot of focus on. We understand the importance of variable comp and ensuring that we've got a very, a comprehensive variable comp program consistently applied globally that is directly tied to the business objectives and specifically linked to our KPIs. The short answer is yes. It's very well mapped out.
If I could just elaborate, Paul-
Yeah, sure.
just a little bit on that. We spent a lot of time on this, and what I think another word I would use that is critical is alignment. You know, historically, there were a lot of metrics used to incent behavior, and what we've done now is align everyone on the critical metrics. For our short-term incentive plan and our long-term incentive plan, we're really motivated on organic EBITDA growth, our free cash flow, making sure we maximize that, and our Return on Invested Capital. Those are the three critical metrics, and we've aligned those incentive programs across the entire leadership team.
Excellent. Yeah, thanks, Jim. Maybe we have time, just cognizant of the time here, for one more question, if there's another question here. Sure.
Hi, it's Jason Trainor from Laurentian Bank. It's pretty clear that you guys are going back to basics, you know, balance sheet de-leveraging, margin expansion, operational efficiencies, and it's I think it's a well, well-received message. One thing I noticed that was a little bit de-emphasized was the digital piece of the business, and I just wanted to kinda get maybe a little bit more color, you know, because that was a big value creator, I guess, in previous, you know, marketing. Just can you just give us a little bit of what's the status of that now and what's gonna be invested, et cetera?
Yeah, for sure. Thank you for that question. As I commented in the presentation, we are still very excited about our digital business. In terms of the change that is made, I mean, previously, our focus was fairly broad. We had a fairly broad focus across the digital space. There was a number of different products. There was a number of different capabilities that we were developing, with that brought forward a pretty significant cost structure, and in some ways was a little bit dilutive to our efforts. It didn't provide us an opportunity to focus in on a couple of key specific products in which the near-term growth potential was significant. We still see a lot of opportunity in the digital space. We're still committed to it.
It's really just focusing in on the products that are gonna accelerate our growth and accelerate our profitability. As we do that, it puts us in a position where we continue to develop and continue to broaden our capabilities across the entire digital space. Again, it's all around providing value to our customers and differentiating ourselves in front of our competitors. We believe we've got a unique position today, and we'll continue to have a compelling position in the future. Okay.
One more, or is that it?
Maybe one more.
Hi, Andrew Wong from RBC. I'm curious about the CAD 3 billion target, actually, and, you know, any timing around that or, CapEx and investment that you might need for that? I know it's really long term, but it sounds like an exciting target. Thanks.
Maybe we shouldn't have taken the question. What we wanted to do was help people understand and appreciate, you know, how we're thinking internally about how big could be. I've gotten a lot of questions. Paul and I have gotten a lot of questions on the road, and they've always been nervous about, "Okay, well, can you still do more?" We grew a lot in 2021. We grew a lot in 2022. Are you done? As we try to lay out here, and we go around the globe, and we look at the products that we offer, if you start to build, you know, just a chart in terms of the opportunities in each of those areas, and then what we could potentially become, you quickly get to CAD 3 billion and beyond.
From a time horizon, though, we haven't been very specific. You know, the fact that we're talking about it, and as we think about strategic plans, we think in terms of three to five years. You know, to us, that is what we're trying to push for and do as quickly as possible. From a CapEx perspective, you know, again, as we talked about, the focus will be paying down debt. That quickly happens. You know, we will be down. Our target is 2.5 x. We'll be down there quite quickly.
Once we get beyond that, with the cash flow that the business generates, we have the opportunity to invest in, whether it's Brazil or India or other markets, to be able to take advantage of those organic growth opportunities and make sure we have the capacity. We will invest in there where needed. We look at investments in terms of paybacks and the return on investments, and we typically like, depending on the scope, but typically anywhere from three to five years is what we target for a lot of these significant capital investments. So we feel good about that. Okay.
No, that's perfect. Yeah, very good. Thanks for the question. Okay, again, really appreciate everybody joining us here in person today. Those that were able to, call in, on the phone, I think this is recorded. It will be posted. You'll be able to go back and take a look at it further. That concludes our presentation and discussion this morning. Thanks again.