Gone through an evolution, a transition, you've right-sized the cost structure, so I think that's now in a place that is sustainable. So let's talk about kind of, I'm going to open it up, let you answer however you want to, give me the lay of the land of what the business is like today, and then we'll drill down to some of the individual segments.
Great. Well, thank you and good morning. Look, if you step back a bit and think about our business, the easiest way to think about it is we make the equipment and the machines that make the product. And so our markets, core markets are life sciences, regulated food, food safety. We're also in consumer products and we're in nuclear as well as we're in transportation. And if you look at the total business, all markets outside of transportation, all markets outside of transportation have a book-to-bill ratio of above one. And so our markets and our business is continuing to drive expansion and value for our customers. And we like to focus on niche applications that are high value, high impact. And so if you look at life sciences, there are many key areas that we're excited about that continue to drive growth, continue to drive the ability to have high impact for our customers. And one of the ones that's usually easy to talk about is GLP-1 drug and the launch and continued expansion of the GLP-1 space. And we do the auto-injector for that. We make the equipment that makes the auto-injector. And so while people want to think that it's a new product, we've been doing this for almost 20 years. And so we were involved with the EpiPen, but we continue to invest around innovation, around technology. And so fast forward to today, our solution based on the core capability has almost doubled the output and half the footprint. It was through a series of technology developments with our Illuminate product line, which effectively, if you think about it, allows you. It's like a train in motion. You can load the train while it's in motion. We can build the product while it's in motion, which allows us to have a much higher output. These types of things really matter for customers. Additionally, we're in radiopharmaceuticals, which is identification and treatment of cancer. We're in wearable device and the treatment of diabetes, which people often actually thought that that market would go down based on GLP-1. It's actually proven to be increased. When people would go on a GLP and they want to understand their blood glucose, they want to understand and monitor to make sure they're getting the right.
When we're going the right direction, people really want to be on top of it.
That's right. And we're also involved in things like contact lenses, which, well, it's not new. It continues to evolve and customers are investing around the future. And so our view, life sciences is core, will continue to be core to our overall future and where we want to take the business and is roughly around 50% of our business today. Food safety, same discussion. We're now involved in a lot of processing around whether it's primary or secondary processing. And the easiest way to think about that is tomato from the vine to puree is primary processing.
Don't forget about baby food.
Yes. And you've heard this before. Secondary is going to the baby food, which one is tied to a harvest, one is not. And so I would say if you step back, our business continues to evolve, continues to grow. Our core markets continue to deliver. And certainly transportation has been off and it came off very quickly. We've right-sized the cost structure. We've put the business in a position that it can sustain where it's at. We continue to see opportunities. It's just smaller in scale. And we're okay with that. It's going to be, call it rough numbers, it's going to be between 8% and 12% of our business next year or into the future. And we're okay. This has always been a harvest strategy. This has always been. We can utilize our technology to bring high value for customers, but we can also moderate and make sure that we structure the business to be successful in that.
Is there prospective R&D or CapEx being deployed into that vertical, or is it now kind of fully loaded and essentially can start being a cash cow for you, just given the evolution of that market and maybe the outlook of that market being a little bit weaker?
You're asking about EV specifically?
Correct.
From our capital deployment standpoint, we don't have a lot of, aside from working capital, in terms of R&D, CapEx, there's very little that we need to spend in that market. Customers are still spending, they're still developing product, they're still evolving their technology, but from our perspective, there's not a lot of CapEx or capital that needs to be deployed.
Okay. Can we talk about kind of putting it all together, food, life sciences? What is actually kind of the growth algorithm for the business? Because there's an M&A piece that I want to get into and you guys have done phenomenal M&A and it's interesting because it's such a decentralized model, but you're still able to kind of buy things and make them accretive to the overall enterprise. So I want to talk about that next, but let's just talk about kind of on an organic basis, how do you expect the growth to kind of evolve?
Yeah, I mean, if you step back, and it's hard for me not to start with a high level, then go specifics. But the high level is the global automation market grows at mid-single digits. And that's not our numbers. I mean, you can pull any of the reference points around the broader automation space. We target to outpace that. And so then we'll get into niche applications that we view have higher growth profiles and ones that we can outpace the market. And so we will challenge and we go through a strategic review with every business, every organization to understand their market position, really where they're offering and driving value for their customers, and then set that tone and expectation on where we want to expand to outpace in the markets we serve. And so we know where we want to place the investments, where we want to place the focus and target to really drive that expansion. And if you look at our performance, our organic growth is close to 9% CAGR over the last five years. With inorganic, we've been close to 19%. So we've continued to drive expansion and really build out that capability. But at the end, we're also part of kind of that automation area. And so we generally say mid-single digits and we target to outpace. And we would not change that view for the future. If you look at what's going on on a global scale, there's a lot of tailwinds that are happening right now. Whether you think about it from a standpoint of supply chain de-risking, onshoring, any of the areas that are going to take a product where you have to build capability where there's need, it favors automation. If you think about the potential administration change that's going to be happening, the labor force that's needed to build these products really isn't there. They need automation. They lean into automation or there's massive turnover. One of our customers came to our leadership conference and they were talking about a 25% turnover in their workforce, 25%. They just looked at us and they said, "You need to help us. We need to figure this out because we trained somebody and as soon as they're up and running, they go to somebody else for X amount more." Automation really helps with that general area. And it allows you to maximize your efficiency, reduce your waste, reduce your defects. And we are getting down to almost energy management and understanding where the energy goes to really drive the performance.
If I look at automation just as a broad point, so you guys are exposed to kind of some high growth verticals like life science, which obviously reflects your organic growth, but I haven't seen productivity due to automation across the industrial economy for the last 10 or 15 years. It makes sense. Labor is short. Inflation. At the end of the day, automation makes a lot of economic sense, but when I actually look at the industrial economy and look at industrial production relative to the employee base, I actually don't see as much productivity there, and I've been trying to figure that out because obviously I cover Rockwell Automation, who's a supplier to you guys, I believe, and there's been a huge destock cycle. I mean, how do you answer that in terms of, like, there's a secular case to be made, but when you actually look at the industrial economy, it's relatively unproductive relative to the labor.
Yeah, and I can't justify your number or thesis around that. What I can tell you is our customers, and we focus. Remember, we're not trying to be everything to everybody. We don't do pencil manufacturing. We do high value niche applications. And so these are often blockbuster drugs or areas that are going to be real impactful to the customer. And so we're working on many of those. And so our customers have an algorithm that they'll say, "You know what? There's two major items. One, we want to get our product to market as fast as possible. So all hands on deck, everything going forward. Who can get us there with the highest quality, highest capability is going to really help us." And ATS has a strong brand there. But number two, we'll also work with our customers around what that return profile is. All of them look for a return profile, and we have our ability to understand their labor costs, their energy costs, their defect and/or waste costs, and we can build it in, and so they will look to that return, and I'll tell you, all of our customers see a return. All of them see a drop-through on their ability to execute. As a matter of fact, when I first came on, about two years in, we had a business by the name of Insulet speak at our investor day, and Insulet does the Omnipod, and it's a wearable device in the treatment of diabetes. It's an insulin pump, and it's an amazing technology where if you have to deal with this, you can wear it during sports, and if it gets knocked off, it's fine, and they've really set the tone around this space. And they came and talked to our investor day. And one of the really interesting comments that the leader made during the discussion was they moved from China to Boston. And I know you lived in Boston. So you know it's not a low-cost area. And so they moved their production from China to Boston to be closer to where their R&D was. And they went from a 45% gross margin to a 65% gross margin. 20-point increase. That's a massive shift. And they were talking about it. We were actually surprised that they offered that to the group. They did that through automation. And the reason when he was probed around what really drove that level of increase, they went from almost 2,000 to 3,000 employees to like 200. And so they were able to really bring that production over. They were able to bring it closer to where their core technology and core innovation groups were. And they could still have the output that they needed to really meet that market demand and quality. These things are going into your bloodstream. So quality is going to be an absolute critical area and automation helps that.
Can we talk about the M&A strategy? So just talk about the frequency of M&A, which is pretty meaningful. And then who do you typically target? What are the common themes across all the businesses? And then how do you kind of get the synergies while still kind of maintaining that decentralized model?
Yeah, I mean, so there's a lot in that question, but I'll walk through it. If you were to join our team, Amit, you'd get two buckets. I tell you this because the first one is the outsiders. The reason why I mention that is we're very big on capital allocation. We want to understand our capital focus. To be quite candid, the number one return is internal investment. We drive that. We drive it through innovation. We drive it through ABM in making sure that we see the result and the performance of the business. So many aspects. The next area is M&A. We have four areas that we focus for M&A. First is the market. We understand deeply where these businesses fit. So when we looked at Avidity, which is water for the biotech space in the lab area, we deeply understood where they fit, where they were, their application, the stickiness with customers, knowing that it's 40-plus% recurring revenue, and really deeply understood that niche capability. Number two, the strategic rationale. Where does this fit within the business? Is this technology? Is this an innovation? Is this geographic? The third area is how we're going to operate. When we acquire the business, is the management team somebody we want to keep in place? Do we need to replace the leader? Is the ABM going to be a foreign area for them? Or do they understand continuous improvement? Last is financial return. When we look at financial return, our number one is ROIC. So typically we're going to state, we want to be double digit within five years. On a lot of our assets, we're able to do that much sooner. When it's a smaller technology, smaller buy, it usually is very quick. And we then look at recurring revenue and margin accretion. So that's the four major areas. But then if you look at where we've deployed our capital, it's been in life sciences, food safety, and services and digital. So those three areas. When you look at our business, one of the unique things about ATS is we're one of the larger players in integration for the life sciences space. So we do the full suite of solution for a product launch. We understand all the applications that go in. And then we acquired technology along the way around filling, around movement, around identifying when there's a defect, around capability, so building out the full capability of the process. And that allows us very quickly to bring the technologies in. And so when we talk about synergies, we're able to bring those synergies to market very quickly. And it was interesting because Hologic spoke at our last investor day. And when he was in front of the group, he talked about how ATS helped them on a launch during COVID and getting a product to market. But then he quickly went to how he was excited about the new acquisition of BioDot because they're doing a certain application where BioDot does, they do picoliter type of dispensing, which is very small, called trillionth of a liter type of dispensing. And they were so excited about the technology. Because they're now part of ATS, they can get the full breadth of capability. They can get the services. They can get the full arm of ATS that helps them get their product to market. They talked about SP and they talked about other areas. So when we bring up synergies, we know going in what the revenue synergies are going to be. We know what we're going to do from a cost standpoint. We know our supply chain execution. We know all those areas. It really does put us in a unique position because oftentimes our customers will reach out to us and ask when we can talk about when they can get exposure to the new technology we just acquired.
In terms of the prospective deal flow, funnel, things like that, can you talk about how that looks in the pipeline?
Yeah. So we just announced three acquisitions. And so clearly we've continued to have momentum around this area and Heidolph being one of them, really excited about that business, Paxiom being another. And then we added another with UReality, we added another technology business, which is around training for employees. And it was in the digital aspect. And so we continue to see good, strong pipeline of niche capabilities that are high value for our customers. And so I would say our funnel today sits very healthy. We have a bit of a mantra around ABC, always be cultivating. I'm always cultivating. And we're constantly looking to really have businesses that are going to be part of that future. We're operating in a decentralized model. Now we will at times, if the brand doesn't have a lot of value in the market, we'll bring the brand into a stronger brand position within ATS. But overall, our team has really been built around this capability and it's continuing to grow in that aspect.
One of the things I thought was interesting is you bought Paxiom in the food business vertical and then you're really maybe selling that technology into life sciences, which kind of talks about the revenue synergy potential. Can you talk about kind of the synergistic dynamics between those two?
Yeah. So we've been talking to Paxiom for two years before they decided to join ATS. And when we finally got the chance, we built a lot of our model around the revenue synergy within food and understanding their position. And they do primary and secondary packaging. So think about like potato chips going into a bag. That whole bag needs to be as hygienic as the process because it's going to touch the food, as well as the secondary, which is then multiple bags in an application. And we did see the ability in life sciences, but we didn't put a big number on it. We said, "Okay, this is a bit of a step kind of difference in the area." Lo and behold, the technology is very much aligned with that. And so what you find is if you're going to have a medical device, it still needs to be in the same kind of level of hygienic packaging because you can't have contaminants in that packaging. And so our business would utilize an external group to do this. We're now quoting with a Paxiom solution. So we actually saw synergies at a much faster level within the life sciences space than we originally anticipated, which is a real positive for us. And so not that we missed it, we just put a lower threshold, lower number on what we thought the potential could be. So it's outpacing, but it's still early. And so while we get excited about funnels, we need to execute, we need to deliver the value, and we need to also deliver the performance of the business.
Can we just pivot away from M&A and towards kind of like the base business now? So obviously the order growth in life sciences was really strong last quarter, like I said before, over 20%. Can we talk about kind of the roadmap there? It seems like the runway there, it seems like there's nothing but growth in a lot of these drugs and GLP-1s, things like that, capacity is growing. But just talk about kind of the runway that you see in the life sciences business that reflects that order growth.
Yeah. So if you look at the areas that we target with customers, so we have a capability, and that capability is very highly valued by these customers and so it lends itself to their critical applications that they're trying to launch and so we talk about radiopharmaceutical, identification, treatment of cancer. Companies are continuing to look at different ways they can understand the radioisotope and what it has as an impact and whether it's Actinium-225, Lutetium, or many other areas, we have the ability to support those launches. And so when we think about the areas of focus, we're in the auto-injector space for GLP-1, which they're now exploring areas around heart disease and other capabilities for this type of application. We view that as, call it the next four to five years as a capacity build-out. Now we're with eight customers on this. Their investment cycle is going to be different. One of the things you continue to see is companies will invest, they'll build out capability, then they'll produce their product, and then they'll reinvest, and so those cycles will happen, and so that's why a multi-customer approach is always a good thing for us, and our ability to build out services and spares and the whole discussion around recurring revenue, reoccurring revenue, which is typically 25%-35% of our business, allows us to be over the life of the equipment, so strong tailwinds there, one that we think is going to be part of ATS for a meaningful period of time, then I go to areas like, and I mentioned this earlier, contact lenses. This isn't a new product, but companies still continue to invest to launch, and they will replace as well as launch. Whenever there's a new change to a product or the packaging, they have to change the automation equipment. And they generally come back to ATS for that type of equipment, or that's our sweet spot. And so you'll see companies that will invest, and then they'll run the production for a period of time, same cycle, and then they'll either do a mod, a production mod, or they're going to replace the equipment out. And we've seen in our food business, and I know I'm going off from life sciences, but our food business, when energy in Europe became such a key area, they actually saw a lot of early replacements on the equipment because the payback was such an incredible payback because energy costs were so high. And we're a good energy efficiency product and solution set. And so we are generally a leader in that area. So if that's going to matter to you from a cost, we help quite a bit around that. And so.
Interested in the life sciences business for one second. So you have all these different verticals within that, but is there one that kind of dominates, whether it's auto-injectors or cancer detection, all these things? Can you talk about kind of the concentration of those verticals within the life sciences business? And then obviously with GLP-1s, one of the questions around portion control, things like that, packaging must change. I assume that may drive a refresh cycle for automation for the food business. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but you can talk about that.
In terms of sizing, auto-injector and radiopharma would be the two biggest. In terms of backlog, they're in the 10% range each. Auto-injector is a little bit behind that from a revenue basis. It's still very much in a ramp-up phase. But as Andrew said, within that, we call it 10% of our backlog each. There's multiple customers. In the auto-injector space, it would be in the high single digit. In the radiopharma space, a much broader customer base. And so there's good diversification across life sciences and across our customer base. The one thing that's maybe a little bit unique to our business is typically our top 10 customers are going to change every year. And it has to do with that investment cycle that Andrew was just talking through. So our biggest customer last year is going to be different than our biggest customer this year. And most of that top 10 will change over year over year.
So, with the backlog, obviously you reset a little bit of the backlog recently because I just want to understand kind of how the backlog works because obviously life sciences is a little bit of a different dynamic because there's a lot of growth there and there's good runway and it's a little bit more resilient. But tell me, the backlog today, obviously you guys are happy with it after this reset, a little bit lower, but just talk about kind of the fidelity of that backlog in terms of progress payments, deposits, things like that, where because some of these big projects can get delayed and get pushed out to the right. Just talk about the quality of that backlog today.
Yeah, so first of all, everything in our backlog is contracted. So, contract, purchase order, whatever it is, there's some kind of legal binding agreement. So, there's nothing that would be like a verbal or something like that. It's all contracted. Most of our backlog, so if you think about, we've got kind of the short cycle business, which is services, very little backlog in that business. There might be some multi-year service agreements, things like that that sit in there. But most of our backlog is tied to projects that are going to take anywhere from 6-12, some of them go out 18-24 months. And so it provides us with really good revenue visibility. And then between those, we do have a shorter cycle aspect to our business too, which are products or build-to-order type equipment that is done in two to three months or typically within one or two quarters. In terms of percentages, roughly 45% is that longer cycle. And then the rest is either services or short cycle equipment.
And are you seeing anything on the short cycle side that is good? I mean, one of the top questions of this conference has been: post-election, are we seeing any kind of restock or short cycle acceleration? The answer has been largely no, but I'm curious to see anything you're seeing on the short cycle side that's encouraging or not.
Yeah. So we generally don't see that. And I would say, it's interesting. During COVID, people asked about when people had a higher stocking level, you're going to see that. We don't generally see people double ordering or going through that process. But overall, I would say our shorter cycle business continued to perform and continue to have real kind of a drive for solutions that customers are targeting to launch. And so we've seen those businesses continue to deliver. And again, we're building out this capability such that in life sciences, we're not just a long cycle. It gives us the flexibility to have multiple areas that when we have an investment cycle, we can continue that trajectory, whether it's through recurring or reoccurring revenue or shorter cycle areas that can impact our customers at a faster pace.
And when you guys, so just coming back to that backlog for a second, just I remembered this question. So when you say it's contracted, I think the problem with that EV contract was that you felt like you did do the work and then it wasn't going in the direction where you guys felt you were going to get convert that into actual revenue. And so it came out of the backlog. But what was the, I mean, can you just pull back the curtain for us a little bit and help us understand that? Because at the end of the day, it's pretty black and white whether the work was done as per the contract. So we're curious to understand kind of the dynamics around why you guys weren't paid for that.
Well, so there's two aspects to this. And so I'll separate them a little bit. In terms of the backlog, that relates to a scope of work that was put on hold, geez, almost a year ago now, 10, 11 months ago now. And so we've taken that out of our backlog. And it was never in our revenue expectations for this fiscal year. We talked about it two or three quarters ago that the program was on pause and we didn't know when it would restart. At this point, we don't expect it to restart. So we've taken it out of backlog. With respect to the project or the scope of work that has been completed where there's outstanding payments, I mean, at the end of the day, the equipment has been in production for a period of time. So the customer's using it, getting product. It's where we fully commission the equipment. It meets or exceeds customer expectations. So we do expect to get paid for that scope of work. In terms of, we can't speak for the customer, but we know there's been a pretty significant change in their end market from what their expectations were. But at the end of the day, that's their issue. So we've got a contract. Like I said, we've done the work. We expect to get paid.
Okay. Last couple of points for me. So one, I wanted to talk about the competitive landscape, particularly outside of America, market share trends. Who are you guys competing with? How do you compete in different verticals? And is there opportunity to kind of gain market share or what have those trends been? And then obviously I want to talk about, I have to ask this question about tariffs. I assume it's not really a big issue for you guys because you're producing in region, for region, things like that, but just hit on that as well.
So maybe we'll start with tariffs and.
Yeah. So I mean, short term, if we don't know what it's going to look like, but if it's just a kind of a straight 25% tariff, it's what's been kind of talked about in the media from Canada into the U.S., that does have an impact on us. It's, call it mid- to high-teens % of our revenues that are coming from Canada into the U.S. today. Or that's been sort of the metric over the last 12-18 months. But that said, we do have flexibility. So we have a very good engineering group in Canada. We have production capacity, but we typically are moving that production into different regions. There's typically a cost advantage to do in region for the region. We don't always do that. Again, within North America, it's been pretty easy to build in Canada and ship down to the U.S. up until now. So if that changes, like I said, we've got flexibility in our production footprint that we could move production. Short term, there would be a bit of a disruption, but longer term, we don't think it has a material impact on the business.
And do you guys feel you have pricing power to kind of pass that on, or is that still TBD?
That's going to be contract by contract, but largely we think we'd be able to pass it on.
We generally are a price leader in the space, and so we largely view that we'd be able to pass it on. As far as competition and competitive landscape, it's fascinating because we, again, we're in niche areas. So you're going to generally find the competitors are fragmented and they're by region. And so you're going to see a stronger competitor in life sciences in Europe, but they're not on the global scale that ATS provides. And so we'll take those head on. And I would say in large part, it really does depend on the business of where they have the strength, where they have opportunity. But in Europe, we do see this as an area that we can continue to drive expansion and have share gain. And especially in life sciences. And we just did, we did an analyst day, and we did a tour around Europe. One of the facilities we visited was our Munich facility. The reason we took investors there is it's an area we've invested in. It's an area that we're driving in for the same capability around auto-injector, around wearable devices, around those areas for the European market. Our view is we've got opportunity to continue to drive that expansion, bring a bigger suite of solutions. Customers don't look for just one application. We want to be the single owner of the capability. We've continued to add high value through that. We, again, have areas to improve on. We have areas to drive into. Because it's fragmented, we generally can take a lead position.
Do customers buy that way or they're moving toward that direction where they kind of want a one-stop shop, or is that still kind of an education and work in process?
It really all depends. What I can tell you is customers are looking for the easy button, as we all are. And so whether it's an easy button that we walk in and say, "Hey, we can do the full suite," or they say, and this is where because we're decentralized, we operate where we're going to allow for also to have an agnostic approach, which is we have a vision capability. We actually have a vision product, and we utilize it with our AI, and we do it for defect pattern recognition. And so we've launched that. And if our customers want to use it, it's a higher value. It's a higher capability. We know the solution set. But if they've continued with Cognex and that's their standard, we'll use Cognex as well. And so we operate very decentralized in that it gives the ability and flexibility to bring the first and foremost solution for the customer. But then second, we can expand that by bringing the education and really helping them understand why the value is there for them to make that shift.
Can we just end on margins? And, obviously, the organic growth profile, high single digits, is very, very strong. You add a little bit of inorganic growth on top of that, but what's kind of the margin opportunity, the operating leverage profile of the business, and where you think you can get to over the next few years?
Yeah. So we've set a target of 15% EBIT. So to translate that to EBITDA, that's another 250-ish basis points. We've been in the 13%, a little bit lower given the headwinds in EV and our transportation business this year, but call it roughly where we've been about 200 basis points away. Most of the opportunity that we've identified and are going after is more in our gross margin line. So it's not as much tied to operating leverage. Operating leverage is an opportunity, but given the decentralized model, it's less of an opportunity than what we see in our gross margin. So it's areas like material productivity or global supply chain. So that's an area that we've invested in that sits across all of our businesses. So we have local supply chain teams, but then strategically we have a corporate group that helps drive global supply agreements. It helps drive rebate agreements and putting spend into those strategic suppliers. We also have a standardization group, so one of the challenges with custom automation is how do you build efficiency into that so you're not starting from scratch with every new customer project. So Symphoni, which Andrew talked about earlier, that's a great example in the auto-injector space. It's a core technology platform that all of our auto-injector solutions are built on. Labor productivity is in other areas, so the ABM, the ATS business model, continuous improvement. We do a lot of Kaizen events, problem solving, and it's all typically going to drive improvement in productivity. Pricing is another area, the business mix, so continuing to build out our after-sale services at the higher margin business. All those are areas that we're pursuing for that margin expansion.
What's the timeline from the 1.3 or under sub 1.3 to 1.5?
We haven't put a definitive timeline on it, but it's, call it three, four years. I mean, that's sort of how we're thinking about it. In our core automation business, if you go back five, six, seven years ago, we were about 9.7%, I think, EBIT, and so we've expanded since then. The business that existed at that time, it's hit 15%. We've added some dilutive acquisitions, so our big entrance into food with our CFT acquisition was a lower margin business. It was about three, call it two, three% EBIT. That business has expanded 500 basis points since we've owned it, so we're well on the way. We've got good plans, targets across the businesses, but it's a multi-year program.
Yeah. Okay. I think we'll end it there. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for taking the time.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Amit.
See you in the front.