Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. My name is David Galison. I'm the Head of Investor Relations for ATS. We have a great day lined up for you today and hope to give you a good understanding of our business and the opportunity ahead. Now, once we've completed the formal portion of our presentations, we've allotted 30 minutes for Q&A. We do ask that you hold your questions until that time due to the packed agenda. Now, before we begin, I'd like to draw your attention to the forward-looking statements and highlight, unless otherwise noted, all financials are in Canadian dollars. During the course of this Investor Day, we will make projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events, future results, or future financial performance of the corporation. Several assumptions were made in preparing these statements.
These assumptions are based on our current knowledge as it exists today. I wish to emphasize that there are risks that actual events or results may differ materially from these statements. I'm making this cautionary statement on behalf of each of the speakers whose remarks today contain forward-looking statements. Also, we may refer to certain non-IFRS measures. Management believes that ATS shareholders and potential investors in ATS use these non-IFRS financial measures to assist in making investment decisions and measuring operational performance. For a complete cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements, including the material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the statements and the material factors or assumptions applied in making such statements, as well as regarding non-IFRS measures, please refer to slides 4 and 5 of the presentation. So with that, it's my pleasure to introduce Andrew Hider, CEO of ATS.
Good morning. Well, that's a great start. Good morning!
Good morning.
A little bit better. I'm Andrew Hider, CEO of ATS Corporation, and I've now been here almost seven years. Today, we're gonna walk through our journey about where we've come from, where we are today, and a look into the future. But before we get started, I wanna thank you both for your time and for ending your summer with us this morning. You're gonna hear from several of our leaders across the corporation. You're gonna hear from myself, Ryan, Kash, Jeremy Patten, Udo Panenka, Simon Roberts, Christian Debus. We also have Fiona and Steve Emery here to support in the Q&A portion. 'Cause as we talk about our corporation and our journey, you will often hear me talk about people and culture, and it's the team that makes the corporation. It's the team that's delivered the results.
I wanna walk through a little bit about our strategic layout, our focus areas, and I start with build. This has been our mission: to build the best ATS. I will often talk about foundation, and our foundation is rooted with continuous improvement. Our foundation is aligned to the ATS business model or what we call our ABM. It's that constant focus to always build the foundation. That's our drive, so when we improve, we can build upon that improvement. Then it's about growth. It's about launching solutions that really support our customers, that offer higher levels of value, driving daily innovation, such that we can continue to support our customers as they launch new and exciting products. Then lastly, it's expand, whether it's through strategic M&A or through innovation that's really gonna drive us and propel us forward.
It's also through new solutions, whether it's services or digital, that really enable us to continue that value creation for our customer base. So our agenda, my agenda, I'm gonna start with really walking through who we are. The last twelve months, we did roughly CAD 2.6 billion in revenue. This is a five-year average of about 8.6%, and that's organic. Within organic, we're a little over 18% growth. We're a little over CAD 400 million in Adjusted EBITDA. That's roughly 15.6%, and as importantly, close to 24% five-year CAGR. So our teams really drove and continue to drive profitable growth. What you're also going to see on this slide is you're going to hear us continue to talk about or begin to talk about reoccurring revenue between 25% and 35%.
You're going to see us really focus on this from a standpoint of both organic and inorganic expansion. Additionally, we're also in over 60 facilities, 80 offices, we do business in over 20 countries, and we have now over 6,500 focused and engaged employees that are constantly looking to make tomorrow better than today. They're part of our journey. They make up who we are and how we operate. Additionally, when I first started, we did a deep dive into the areas that we view are more resilient, markets that we view have longer tails, areas where we say high consequence of failure. It's aligned with our customer's value. So I start with Life Sciences being our largest business. We do medical devices, we do pharma, we do radiopharma, we do niche capabilities in this space.
Additionally, we've continued to drive the green technology with our transportation, energy, and food and beverage. I start with transportation. This is now largely EV. We continue to support these customers as they tackle the challenges of really launching new and exciting products into this market. And you're going to hear from Udo walk through really what that dynamic looks like. Then energy. As energy shifts, it's needed more and more on green energy. We support nuclear, whether it's part of the CANDU reactors, decommissioning, or small modular reactors. Our business is engaged in niche capabilities, niche automation technologies within those spaces. Then food and beverage. We're also in primary processing for this space, so think about tomato from the vine to puree, as well as we do inspection and sorting.
So the next time you go and have a bag of fruit that's frozen or shrimp that's frozen, you know that it's been inspected and gone through one of our processes. And then consumer products. This is more niche technologies, niche capabilities that align around warehouse automation, that are around personal care and cosmetics. So the toothpaste you used this morning, there's a good chance it was filled by an IWK system. Additionally, our business is involved in, we call it, three major areas. First, it's custom automation or custom integration, building the full suite of products to make the product. We've also grown and continue to grow in products and standard equipment. And lastly, we have digital and services to really round out and support over the life of the equipment. Now, to give an example, I'm going to use the life sciences example.
Now we have to use our imagination here, but this pen, this is an injectable device. This treats something, this, this treats cancer, and you now just got FDA approval. So you built 1,000 prototypes. Your gross margin is 65%-70%. It's injected into your bloodstream, so quality is something you are very focused on, and your demand has gone through the roof. You come to ATS. We do the full production process, from identifying how you're going to approach it, to working with you on the machines, and then, oh, by the way, we now have the filling machines, we have inspection machines, we've got vision, we do the transportation, as well as certain products that are going to go into making this product.
Once we build it, ship it, and build it at your location, we serve and support it for the life of the equipment. We're constantly focused, whether it's break/fix, service contracts, digital capabilities, not just a dashboard, but actionable insights for you to drive improvements, predictive maintenance, digital twin. That's how we lay out our structure. All rooted in the way we operate is our ABM, our ATS business model. It's our DNA. It's that culture aspect of how we operate. It's people and culture, and this is how we have our culture. It's aligned around continuous improvement, and it starts with people. Having the best team and winning as a team.
Then it's process, being formal and disciplined, knowing when you have to have short-term countermeasures and drive long-term implement, really understanding what drove the root cause, so it's not just a band-aid fix, we're solving it for the future. And then lastly, performance. I like to say we're all ex-athletes. We like a scoreboard. We want to know, are we winning or losing? And we look at that from a standpoint of over our strategic layout for 3-5 years, this year, and then where possible, we break that down into daily understanding, are we winning or losing, and course correcting when we're off. And then the columns on the right are how we operate. It starts with strengthening our core, having a customer-first mindset. Performance management, aligning the annual targets to our people's objectives.
then breaking it down into value drivers, our critical eight, and KPIs that support those value drivers, and lastly, the daily visual management. And I often get asked about our supply chain and how we operated through COVID. It was one of our enablers. We drove it down to daily visual management, so we knew if our parts are off, what do we have to do to get back on track, short term and long term? And then it's deliver growth, customer success, 'cause if our customers succeed, we succeed. Talent development, constantly training, developing, and really empowering our employees to take on the challenges of today and tomorrow. Monthly business reviews, annual operating plans, standard process, then pursuit of excellence. I start with long-term shareholder value, and if you'll notice across the top, it always starts with customers, whether it's an external customer or shareholders.
For us at ATS, it's an and. It's not an or. We compete for shareholders as well as we compete to bring the highest value to our customers. It's about strategic planning process, looking out the next 3-5 years, ensuring that we've got the right areas of focus. Things change, things are dynamic, course-correcting where needed, but then also utilizing goal deployment to set those stretch targets to make sure we're on track to meet those long-term goals. And then lastly on here, just wanna highlight pioneering innovation, and you're gonna see more and more around this, but it's about that drive to constantly be relevant, outpace our competition, and bring solutions to our, to our customers. Now I'm gonna get into innovation and operational improvements, and I start our revenue, five-year CAGR, a little over 18%, Adjusted EBITDA, close to 24%.
But additionally, we've spent a little over CAD 1.4 billion, bought 19 companies, and you'll see a lot of those on the right. They are leaders in their niche space. They have strong brands, strong capabilities, and one, that when we unite with the broader ATS, we can bring higher value. So we look for businesses, we look for companies that can really be aligned with our long-term view of markets and innovation. And you'll see this shift has been purposeful. It's been focused around areas that we view have the more resilient aspect of a market, that we view are longer-term trends that we like. And if you went back even a little further, you would note that transportation, largely ICE, one of the bigger pieces of our business. Note that we've largely exited ICE.
We're primarily EV, but through that, we've also grown and grown our life sciences penetration and continue to grow that area. We've also grown in food and beverage and really built out our capability. So you'll see EV is transportation, life sciences, biggest piece of our segment today, and regulated food, high consequence of failure, high investment areas, and nuclear continues to support our future. So we went through markets, understand where those markets sit. We also looked at our business mix. We said, within that mix, we need to look at how we navigate and constantly focus on value in the markets we serve. So if you go back ten years, we were largely custom integration. Now, we're a leader in that space. We are one of the largest players in the markets we serve on custom integration. But what we've grown...
So we've also added standard machines, standard equipment, and products. We've added innovation and technology to really support that process, and, you know, it's fascinating to me that when we acquire businesses like Coma Chair, that does aseptic filling for radiopharmaceuticals, our customers will actually reach out to us and say, "Now you can do this application. Help us bring this to our company. Help us in this solution set." 'Cause we have the services, we have the capability. So it's been a focused shift around markets and the solutions within those, and that constant drive to be higher in the value creation for our customers. We've launched successfully. We've developed, we've built Coma Chair, filling for the radiopharmaceutical space, identification of cancer and treatment of cancer. BioDot, picoliters, really identifying real small applications.
To CFT, food processing, our big penetration into this space, to SP, which is lyophilization, taking a liquid to a powder, then allowing it to go back to a liquid. And then IPCOS and Yazzoom. And I highlight these two because it's that digital aspect, that capability we're building out around: How do we constantly focus on value? How do we bring that back to our customers? It's not just a dashboard anymore, but how do we bring enabling solutions back? Probably the biggest piece here is on the right, and it's that approach, that decentralized approach, and this went from a corporate-led area, which was largely my team, to now our leaders driving this, and our leaders identifying and embracing and empowering to really build out their cultivation. And that leads me to this, this area, which is our flywheel around this.
So we've taken this from a central approach to now how our leaders think, and you're gonna hear the leaders talk about their respective markets... 'cause the best cultivators are oftentimes the leaders in the market that they serve. So they walk through this, they identify where they want to target, they identify companies that fit within the space they want to go into. Then we acquire, and then we have a playbook that's aligned around how we're going to integrate. So we know on day 1 what we're going to do. We know on day 30, day 60, day 90. Now, no two businesses are the same, so it shifts. So while it's a playbook, it's a playbook, and then the play is called, and we modify. But we know the levers. We know the areas of focus. Supply chain, constant.
We know what we can do with the business before we ever acquire them. So then we go to results, and we launch the ABM, build out their capability, help them achieve their aspirations. We take those results, and we either invest in areas that we view have high return back into the business, or we then repeat the process of assessing markets and new opportunities, deploying that capital into new areas, and it's that flywheel effect that we've created. The big piece here is it's gone from, you know, a corporate-led initiative to really how we operate, how we build our businesses. And so these criteria, these four, are mission critical. It's how we look at every acquisition, the lens at which we view a business, and all of them are created equal. It starts with market, attractive markets. We don't just look at life sciences.
We dig very deep, 'cause we often invest in niche capabilities and niche technologies. So we'll understand in radiopharmaceuticals what that market is going to do, what their brand is valued at, what the customers think about their product, and what their competition looks like. We will understand all of that, and then it goes to strategic rationale. Is this a technology play? Is this a geographic penetration? Are we looking to build out services capability? Then, it's how we're going to operate the asset. Understanding the leadership team, getting to know, are they going to stay on? Are we going to have to make changes? If we're going to make changes, do we have an identified leader that's going to go in and run the business? Remember I talked about talent development? This is a big piece why.
We want to be able to deploy our leaders in to help them achieve greater success. And by the way, how fast they can adopt the ABM. Are they a continuous improvement culture, or is this new to them? And what we found, usually new targets, new, new, new businesses to ATS, they want to be part of the ABM. They want it as part of their DNA, so they're often eager to learn. And then last is financial return. ROIC greater than our cost of capital, as well as EPS accretion, margin potential, plus recurring revenue. All areas we look at. So I'm going to talk a little bit about now the layout for the future and what the fundamentals are for this. I start with innovation. I'll get into a little bit more around this. It's about digital growth, enabling the digital prospect.
It's about portfolio management and margin improvement. These are all areas that our total corporation is aligned to. Our employee base is constantly seeking to drive this, in everyday life, as well as how we think about the future. I start with innovation. Innovation has been an area of focus for us since I've been on, and it's been part and rooted into the ATS over the many, many years we've been in business, around solving our customer challenges. But it's also about really continuing to drive that market leadership, to constantly deliver solutions that both from a big perspective and on a daily basis impact our customers in a positive way. You know, when I was just walking through our facility in Cambridge, Ontario, and I was in the life sciences area, and they were walking through these bigger innovation projects.
I stopped at one of the areas, and the engineer, she turned to me and said: "You know, Andrew, I want to walk through what I'm working on right now." And it was a market that we serve that's growing very fast. About to say a word that legally, exploding, isn't really a reference word, but it's growing very fast, and we're supporting that market growth. And one of the challenges was the process would happen, and then they would identify a defect, and then they would kick it out. So you have a lot of cost at every stage of that process. And so the customer challenged us and said: "How do we bring that and bring it earlier in the process?" And so we utilized our Symphony, which is our pick and place, our ability to move the product.
We utilized AI, we utilized our vision application, we utilized our SuperTrak platform, because then we can bring things at a faster pace, to identify it very early on in the process around defects, so they don't have to add additional cost. She was as excited as ever that she was solving a singular problem for a customer, that we now have the, the know-how, the control, the IP around, that we can then offer in to customers around not adding to additional defects. Just one example of many of what we do on a daily basis around innovation, and this is a global focus. Every major site has an innovation agenda. Every major site is focused on how to drive innovation in their daily life. It's also about digitization and the digital value.
Christian is going to talk a lot more about this, but to walk through this, remember the example. We are one of the largest players in the, in the markets we support for integration, so we know what goes into building this product. We know what goes into this. So then we take that information and that data, and we've acquired businesses, we've also launched solutions that allow us to bring that data to the cloud or on-prem, to then utilize that data to have actionable insights back into the process, to really understand how to drive efficiency. And then PA, knowing where they sit and, and being a leader in this area for ATS, bought a business by the name of BLSG, which allows us to then implement those actionable insights.
So if a customer says, "I want the easy button, I need you to do it for me," we have the capability to do that, but it's a constant drive. So we're early in our journey here, but we're excited about the potential as where we sit around integration, around machines, and utilizing that data for not just a dashboard, for true actionable insights. It's about our portfolio management. And yes, we talked about the markets that, that we're driving into. We talked about the areas that we view have longer-term trends that we like. But guess what? There's also areas that we say maybe aren't a fit. One of them was, we sold the business a few years ago, that was traditional ICE.
It was a business in Germany, that we looked at the investment to return, and we said, "This doesn't line up with the rest of our businesses. We have greater investment in other areas, and it maybe is not part of our future." And we ended up selling it to a business that viewed that that was their core, and that's okay. So as we look at areas, we're gonna look at that investment to return. We're gonna constantly look to seek and have the best portfolio of our products for the value creation we can have, whether it's services and launching new solutions that are high value to our customers, digital capabilities, or new technologies, and that continuation of the value chain, whether it's products or standard machines. Additionally, that focus on continuous improvement and margin improvement starts with supply chain.
One of our key areas and, you know, one of the items Steve and I talked about on this journey early on was: how do we make supply chain a competitive advantage? And we've been able to do that, and we're gonna continue to do that. Standardization, taking the modules and making them more standard, so we can not only outsource them, but look at those to reduce our time to market when we're designing new capability. Operating leverage, as we grow, continuing to focus on operating leverage. And then shift in business mix, whether it's services, digital, or new solution sets, constantly looking on how do we improve our value creation here. But what you'll see across the bottom is the ABM. We intentionally moved this to be across the bottom, and the reason is the ABM is now how we operate.
Yeah, sure, it used to be an operational area, then it went to commercial. We, we, we measure our lead generation, demand generation, we measure our success in the sales process, we measure all that. We now utilize this in HR, we utilize this in finance, we utilize this in IT to really understand the data, to then drive the business to have improvements. Kaizen event is as simple as: look to make tomorrow better than today, and, and to do so, to be successful, you have to make it better for the employee, the customer, and the shareholder. You can't shortchange any of the three. The ABM is constantly focused around that, and our business, our leaders, truly understand that power. So some takeaways before I hand the stage over to Kash Mahesh, who's our Group Executive for Life Sciences.
We are a strategic partner with customers in integration. We help them bring their products to market. We often work with the most senior level within the business, which allows us to bring in new technologies, new capabilities, to help them out even further. Additionally, we have purposeful expansion. We are constantly looking to leverage our technology, leverage our innovation, to really expand and bring higher value into the markets and the customers we serve. We're growth-focused, whether it's through M&A, organically, that constant drive to make tomorrow better than today. And lastly, it's about the team. It's about the leadership. We have the strongest leadership in our history. And while we've had nice success, we're just getting started on our journey, and this team, this team is the team, and the global team, that really enabled the success that we've had to date.
But they're hungry for the next part of our phase. They're hungry for that journey. So with that, thank you very much for your time. I'm gonna turn the stage over to Kash. Kash, over to you.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Good morning. I'm happy to be here to present to you our story, the ATS Life Sciences story, on who we are, what we do, and more importantly, the opportunities in front of us. Hopefully, I can get you excited, more excited about our story and especially, like, what lies ahead of us and the opportunities. Before I start, the purpose statement for ATS Life Sciences is: improving the quality of life for billions of people around the globe... Let me repeat that. Improving the quality of life for billions of people around the globe. We live by that, it's deep-rooted, and hopefully I can communicate, I'll be communicating that to you in every slide, everything I talk about, that we live by that.
So I'll be coming back to that, and hopefully I would have communicated that throughout the presentation. So agenda is very simple, is to get you excited about ATS Life Sciences. I'm gonna be talking about who we are, first of all. We are in a leadership position in the markets we choose to play within life sciences. As Andrew said, I'm gonna take you down into some details within these life science subsegments and submarkets, starting with medical devices. Medical devices is a market we have played for many years, over 40 years, and this is where we have high volume, high growth in assembling and manufacturing medical devices and wearables. An example would be an insulin pump that gets attached to our bodies for diabetic patients.
Diagnostics. It's again a high volume, high growth market, where when our customers wanna make millions, billions of these diagnostic patches and diagnostic kits, COVID was a great example. We made billions and billions of them through our equipment, through our customers. Those are examples of diagnostic products and kits that our customers manufacture. Pharmaceuticals. This is something I'll talk more about in terms of how we expanded our presence in the pharmaceutical market with our acquisitions, but this is where anything from fill finish. Andrew talked about the prefilled syringes. So our equipment help fill those cartridges and syringes and vials with pharmaceutical products. Take it to radiopharmaceuticals, again, mainly for cancer patients.
There's been a lot of growth and a lot of advancement in cancer treatment, and we play a big role in that in terms of getting these products, radiopharmaceutical products, all the way to the customers in a hospital. Pharmacies and labs, we play a key role in that in terms of automating labs and pharmacies, and we have multiple products. I'll be talking to you about that. We are in an opportunity-rich environment, subsegments within life sciences we have heavy involvement in. Before I talk about the customers, I wanna just talk about how we are organized. We are organized into four businesses. Our core business is our automation life science systems business. Acquisitions we have made over the last three to four years, SP Industries, Comecer, BioDot.
These acquisitions have taken us into adjacent markets within life sciences, and that's part of our strategy, and that builds our strategy you will be hearing more about. About our customers, and happy to say that many of our customers have been with us trusted as trusted partners for over 40 years. Large pharmaceutical companies, large medical device companies. You can see that this is basically the who's who of the markets we play in. Many big names, but a lot of emerging names, too. With some of the large pharmaceutical and medical device customers, as I said, we have relationship over 40 years. But as you know, in the biotechnology industry and some of the pharmaceutical industries, we have a lot of emerging players, customers with one blockbuster drug or a blockbuster medical device for medication delivery into patients.
We have relationship with both ends of the spectrum, large pharma and medical device companies to small and emerging medical device and biotechnology companies, and long-standing relationships. This is the foundation of kinda where we're taking our business forward. So what we do in those four businesses is top-notch technologies and products we deliver to the customers through large equipment, small equipment, services, and so forth. But the other part of the strategy that we have brought together and driving into the market is integrated solutions or end-to-end solutions for our customers. So here's a picture in front of you. This is an example of what our customers would be doing for assembling a diagnostic kit.
So any diagnostic at a patch or strip that you would use at home for COVID and other reasons, that takes all these equipment to manufacture millions and billions of those kits. So a typical customer would be going to three, four, five, six, seven different vendors and sourcing these equipment and integrating all of them through either themselves internally, or they would hire an integrator to do all of that. Then you have a lot of finger pointing between suppliers, you have time conflicts, and all this leads to a lot of risk for the project and time delays. And those are the two things. If you are a pharmaceutical supplier or a medical device supplier, those are the two things you don't want: risk and time.
Because you have a product that's most likely approved by FDA or one of the regulatory bodies, and you wanna get, make, as Andrew said, instead of making 1,000 of them, you wanna make a billion of them and distribute it across the globe, and you wanna do it fast. Clock is ticking because, like, you wanna make the money, and you wanna supply that to the customers and patients that are waiting for it.... That's where we come in. With our strategy, with our acquisitions, we have put together the entire solution for an application like this. So you can see, I'm not gonna walk you through each block. These are the equipment that are manufactured, made, tested by ATS. So one contract, one agreement, one purchase order gets you all of this if you're a customer.
We do all the testing internally, integrated testing internally, and we take it to the customer for their SAT and ongoing testing and deployment. We are known for great project management, and for over 40 years, and on-time delivery. So we give peace of mind to our customers if you are buying the full set of products from us. So that makes us unique, not only in terms of the products and services we offer, but also in terms of giving that peace of mind to the customer with a single one-stop-shop approach. That's what we bring to the customer. So this has been our strategy. It's in execution.
As we have done acquisitions, we're gonna do more acquisitions and more deployment, more organic development in this space as we push more to the customer, so they can have that peace of mind. Another example, I'm not gonna walk you through this, but this is for an inhaler application, and same concept, we can bring all of this to the customer with a one-stop-shop approach. Let me kinda dive a little bit deeper into kinda who we are. We are a global company. We are present in all parts of the world through our manufacturing and services. Our services business, you're gonna hear from Simon Roberts a little later. He leads the service organization. We are where our customer want us to be. That's unique about us.
If you are opening a plant in Thailand, our customers, we can be there servicing your equipment, installing and servicing our equipment. If you are doing an acquisition, and the acquisition brings them. A little later today, we're gonna hear from one of our key customer partners, Hologic, where they do an acquisition, and we're there. Like, they have a Finland acquisition. If they need to bring our system and service over there, we're there for them. So 40+ years of experience, we manufacture in nine countries, over 2,300 employees within ATS Life Sciences, over 1 million square feet of build capacity, 11 locations in North America, 11 locations in Europe, and 4 locations in Asia, and growing. All of these are growing. So we are where our customers want us to be.
Innovation is another key piece of who we are. And by that, I don't mean just we do R&D and bring that to the market. We work with our customers, in many of these cases, we're working with our customers to innovate. We have over 30,000 sq ft of dedicated space for innovation. We have over 100 of our engineers and employees working on acquisition across all businesses. This is not a central innovation center. We have, I'll talk about some examples of innovation happening across different businesses. Over 35 projects we're currently working on and 6+, in the range of 6-8 different platforms we're innovating on. Let me just give you a few examples.
Our Comecer business does a lot of innovation on the aseptic and radiopharma containment applications, and specifically, they're doing a lot of work on working with our customers on new radioisotopes that are brought to the market. And a lot of research and FDA approval is happening in this space, where this is for cancer treatment, various cancer treatments and, or various types of cancers being treated. And these are radioisotopes that are approved by the FDA and needs to be brought into the market. And we work with a lot of leading radiopharmaceutical and pharmaceutical companies to work on that innovation and bring those innovative products to the market. So this is real active product development, starting with innovation and deployed in the field very quickly.
Our BioDot business, working on low-volume dispensing innovation, and this is where the innovation is happening between two segments of ATS, where we wanted the ultra-low volume dispensing in the micro, nano, picoliter levels to be mass-produced. And this is where we use our SuperTrak conveyance system to speed it up and bring quality applications in the diagnostic field. Mainly, this is catering to the cancer diagnostics and treatment, and also diabetes diagnostics and treatment. Two markets that are high growth and we're making this innovation go into the market as we speak. SP Industries, they're one of the acquisitions, aseptic fill-finish innovation.
Again, this is a business that's been working since the acquisition with Comecer and with SuperTrak, our technologies and our businesses, to drive pharmaceutical fill finish into the market. And then finally, Illuminate. You've heard Illuminate, you're gonna hear a lot more. There's been tremendous amount of innovation happening in the Illuminate side of things in terms of turning on, if you will, IoT of all our equipment, and there's been tremendous amount of innovation going in there. Our acquisitions, I've been talking about the acquisitions, specifically four acquisitions we've made in the last couple of years: Comecer, BioDot, DF, and SP. Why did we acquire, and what value is it bringing to us and to the shareholders, and to the market? Enhanced value proposition. We were in the high-speed, high automation business for over 40 years.
These acquisitions have broadened the scope and market position for ATS. We are in pharmaceutical businesses, we are in fill-finish business, we are in early-stage drug research. I'll talk a little bit about that in a couple of minutes. So it's broadened the scope and our value proposition to the market. Expanded capabilities, technologies that we are leveraging on big time. Our market position, going with the strong core automation business we've had for 40 years, and we have added all these adjacent capabilities and technologies, strengthened our market position. More importantly, for this conversation, the opportunities for growth. We have these technologies and products and market position that's driving growth, and I'll talk about the excitement about the opportunity that's in front of us based on all these acquisitions we have made and more acquisitions we plan to make.
me pause there for a second and let me talk about SP. This was a big acquisition we made, as you probably know, a couple of years back. Andrew talked about the four criteria we use: attractive market, strategic value, operational fit, and the financial returns. We're clicking on all of them with SP. So attractive markets. It's taken us into the two markets I'll highlight: the early-stage drug discovery, which is a high-growth market, and the pharmaceutical production, the production side of pharmaceuticals. We are in both those markets. SP brought that to us from an attractive market perspective. Strategic value. It's expanded our portfolio. As we were hoping and, and, and strategizing, it's expanded the portfolio of technologies and products we have. Operational fit. It's been a two-way street for us.
SP brought a lot of capabilities from an operational point of view, and our ABM platform has helped, and I'm personally involved in many of the ABM projects that SP does, where they have been ready to take the ABM concept and use it on the operational side, on the commercial side, HR, finance, and many other functions. It's been a great success story on that. And of course, financial results. We're hitting on all of the cylinders in terms of the returns. So it's been a great acquisition, and it's made us the platform for kind of future growth in many aspects. Why am I excited about kind of overall our macroeconomics? I think you probably know a lot of this.
On the left side, what you see is how much countries, the leading countries, developed countries, are spending in terms of healthcare as a percentage of the GDP, 10%-20%. There's been heavy spend for years going on into healthcare, so there's money there. Demographics shift, aging population, I don't need to kind of belabor that. We are living in a country and developed world where the population is aging. There's more focus on care, especially the last 5-10 years of our lives. We're living longer. That also means, like, we're spending more towards kind of that latter part of life. And then technological advancements. A lot of advancement have happened, but specifically, COVID was a main trigger.
As you probably know, we all got our kits at home, and that technology and that logistics of distributing to the broader world is being leveraged. Cancer diagnostics is following that trend now. So we're working with a lot of major suppliers where such diagnostic kits and everything is going to follow all the way to home. So there's been a lot of technological advancements, and one other thing is labor shortage. Again, we all hear about it. All of that leads to the opportunity for us to serve that market, to the customers for the treatment and for our customers who are kinda driving those changes, again, whether in terms of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, radiopharmaceuticals, and so forth. One specific example I wanted to give you is with a product called auto-injector.
We have talked about it publicly for some time now, and there's been tremendous amount of focus on diabetes, more people that are diabetic, and there's a huge need for treating those patients. Government focus, FDA approvals, all of this is leading to a huge opportunity with the drug delivery system, which is the auto-injectors. These are complex, 13, 14, 15 parts, a lot of small ingredients or aspects, mechanical systems that go into that auto-injector. We have capability. We've been working on it with a lot of the large pharmaceutical companies and contract manufacturing organizations that have been working in this space, and we are positioned very well to support this significant growth. You can see over 25% growth happening in that market, and we are in the right market.
That's one of the opportunities in terms of what we're working on, and we're positioned extremely well to support our customers with auto-injectors. Another thing I've talked about this: this is the spectrum of drug discovery, development, and production. So traditionally, in the past, we were on the right side of this picture, and with our automation system, high-end automation system. With the acquisitions we've made, BioDot and SP specifically, we are in this full spectrum. And why is that important to us? It's important because the right side of this chart gives us the high volume and high growth.
The left side of this chart positions us very well to place ourselves into that space of drug development as customers know us, get to know us early in the phase, and the left side is high growth also, high growth and high margin, if I can say that. So that gives us the power, authority to be available early in the process, and we can work with our customers as the drug gets developed... clinical trial, non-clinical trial, all the way to production. So we're positioned very well in that spectrum of drug development, discovery, all the way through production. In summary, as I said, we are positioned really well. We're very happy with where we are. We're very happy with the outlook in terms of where we are headed, part of ATS Life Sciences.
We have great automation systems, unparalleled automation system, our core of our business, that helps us with further growth in that space. But all the acquisitions have given us the opportunity for that end-to-end integrated solutions, where we work with our customers on a holistic one-stop-shop approach. Our customer-centric approach, all the way from voice of the customer to partnering up with customers on innovation, all the way through the delivery, we are very excited about where we are. Global impact. We are a global company. We cater to our needs across the globe, and our growth is going to be on a global basis. Whether it's medical devices, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, radiopharmaceuticals, we are a global company, and our and the key aspect is the global platform we have on services. We can be anywhere.
We can be in any country our customer wants us to be, and that gives us the opportunity to grow further. Lastly, hopefully, I've communicated that our purpose statement, improving the quality of life for billions across the globe, that's what we do, and that's what gives us the energy and passion to grow this business and, and deliver results, that, that's important, for, for us here. That concludes my presentation. But Hologic, I wanted to kind of do a, a, a spotlight on Hologic. This is a customer partner. This customer exemplifies everything I've talked about in terms of innovation, in terms of partnership, in terms of being global, in terms of acquisitions. This customer exemplifies everything I said.
So what we want to do is bring— So we have Dave Tyler, who is the Vice President for the global diagnostics group here, operations. Wanted to have a chat with him on how we have worked together, and I'll be asking him some questions, and hopefully, that's very informative for you in terms of how we operate, who we are between ATS and Hologic. Before I bring Dave on board, let me just kinda share, for people that don't know Hologic, let me just share a couple of things about who they are. They are a global medical technology innovator. Their main focus is women's health and well-being through detection and treatment. They develop, manufacture, and supply diagnostic products, medical imaging products, and surgical products. Their last year, their...
For the last fiscal year, their revenue was $4.863 billion. They were founded in 1985 in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and, they have over 7,000 employees. Their market capitalization currently is $20 billion. They acquired Gen-Probe in 2012 and more recently, Mobidiag. I was talking to you about Finland. It's a Finnish-French company. Their main strategy there was to expand into molecular diagnostic testing and instrumentation. That's a little bit about Hologic, and we'll watch a little video before, we have the chat with, Dave.
She is your mother, your grandmother, your daughter, your sister, your wife, your lover, your best friend. She is strong, sensitive, funny, thoughtful, and independent, and when she has a health issue on her mind, it is also on ours. At Hologic, we are driven by a passion to be the leading innovator in women's health, to bring the promise of the science of sure to life. That's why we work harder, dig deeper, and reach higher to improve the health and quality of life for the 3.7 billion women of the world and those she loves.
As she brings new life into the world, as she grows proud and independent, as she discovers new love, as she faces health challenges that interrupt her life, as she takes care of herself and those around her, as she continues on the evolving journey of life, we are forever committed to delivering innovations that address the broad spectrum of breast, cervical, gynecologic, body composition, skeletal, perinatal, and sexual health issues women and men face as life unfolds. At Hologic, our purpose is to enable healthier lives everywhere, every day.
That's fine. I've got it. Oh, no! I am equally excited, as much as I'm excited about Hologic, I'm equally excited to introduce you to Dave Tyler, VP of Operations, Global Diagnostics at Hologic. He's been in this role since February 2023, with, especially with the acquisition of Mobidiag. Prior to that, at Hologic, he was the Vice President of Operations Diagnostics from March 2017, and before that, he was the Senior Director for Quality Control from 2013 to 2017. He's been a great business partner, and we're gonna talk about some of the aspects of how this evolved, but thanks for your time here, Dave.
Thank-
Appreciate it.
Thanks. Thanks for having me, Kash. So I'm in operations. I don't spend much time on stages, so please bear with me. But, I really did wanna be here out of a deep sense of gratitude for what ATS, with what we partnered on during the pandemic. That's my main, main reason for being here, which I know we'll get into, but I'm, I'm very happy to be here.
Yeah. Very much appreciate our relationship, but also you being here. I know you're a very busy person, so appreciate it. So let, Dave, let's start with our 15-year relationship between our organizations. This all started with you, Hologic, buying your first Multi-Tube Unit. I'd like for you to expand a little bit about the Multi-Tube Unit, and kind of what that means to everybody here. But, how do you describe the evolution of this relationship between our organizations?
Yeah, so, the notes are not advancing, just FYI. Sorry. We sell the Panther instrument, and the Panther instrument is used to run our tests, and each one of those tests is run in a what we call a multi-tube unit, so it's five tubes, very highly engineered, very precise, and those MTU units are made by ATS Automation. We still have the first line in use, 13 years. It's still making quality parts, and it now has 15 partners, so 16 lines from ATS, making multi-tube units, and again, every one of those tubes is a patient result. It's critical for us, and we'll talk later as we talk about the pandemic, how critical it was.
As our business has grown, the need for quality, reliability, and efficiency has only increased, as we face more and more competition, and ATS has always delivered for us. You're our top choice. Our relationship has strengthened over time, and it's really because ATS delivers top-notch, end-to-end design, production, and service.
Thanks. Thanks for those kind words, a whole lot, Dave, and definitely, like, it's, it's, it's been, a, a two, two-way street, and we've gotten quality input and, and guidance from, from your organization, too. Our relationship has deepened over these, 15 years, and, we're gonna talk about, the pandemic a little bit, later in the, in the conversation, but that's where, like, you know, we, we really had some tough times, but we came, came along, very well. But where do you... how do you see our relationship currently?
I really feel like we're growing in parallel. With the acquisition of Mobidiag, we've had some unique needs technologically, and right now, ATS is actually participating in a contract manufacturing RFQ, and then right after that, a new product automation assembly work cell RFQ, and that actually is now in production, and it's critical for our expansion into new markets and internationally as well. ATS again was right there, our top choice, because we're moving quickly, we don't have time for delays, and we need top quality on a very demanding, actually very demanding product, and so ATS was our first choice.
Great. And one thing, Dave and I privately talk about quite a bit is how we both organizations have evolved through acquisitions. Some of the acquisitions we've made complemented kind of Mobidiag acquisition, and so it's worked both ways for us, and great voice of customer. So this is... Sometimes jokingly, sometimes seriously, Dave and I talk about what should be our next acquisition.
Mm-hmm.
So that relationship has helped us quite a bit on that. So talking about acquisitions, we did the SP acquisition and BioDot acquisition over the last two years.
Mm-hmm.
Can you talk to, I know you mentioned about a couple of RFQs. Just overall, can you help us to understand how the increased capabilities has complemented you further?
Yeah, so for example, SP Lyophilizer, so we're... All of our active components are freeze-dried, and, so far, we've made around 255 million COVID tests, and every one of those has been lyophilized, so they are absolutely mission-critical to our business. So when we heard that you had acquired SP, we thought, "This is great," because we know we can rely on you to update, manage, and improve those Lyophilizers. Every Lyophilizer run can represent $400,000-$500,000 of product. If we have a failure during a run and scrap that, it's, it's huge. It's also a big impact to capacity, so knowing that you have that business, and we can rely on you to service all those Lyophilizers, was a real comfort to us and a really good sign.
And then the acquisition of BioDot, as you mentioned, at Mobidiag, they, they include the microarrays part of their cartridge, and, it's a very demanding technology. It's very difficult to get it to work, and it's still in development. So when we heard you had acquired BioDot, we thought, "Perfect, now we have a ideal partner for us to start to automate that production in the future as we get the product, the next generation product up and going." So again, a really nice, sort of parallel path of, acquisitions and complementary technologies.
Again, acquisitions are done very strategically, and, but it's always heartening to hear from a customer like Hologic that our acquisition made sense to them. That, that's a great feeling.
It's almost like we're planning it out together.
It's, it's like that. Yeah, exactly. We talked about COVID quite a bit here, last 10 minutes, Dave, and that brought our organizations together.
Mm-hmm.
Tough times, but clearly we delivered, and you delivered to your market, to your customers. Just expand on that a little bit in terms of, like, how it was when it happened, and what happened at the end of it, and with the relationship, and so forth.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, and like I said, you know, that's really one of the driving reasons that I'm here, is, I do feel a deep sense of gratitude for what ATS delivered for us when we desperately needed it. So just to give some context, we launched our first assay in March of 2020, and our second assay or, test for COVID in, in May of 2020. So back to back, we developed two new assays extremely quickly, and then we saw our volumes increase 300%-400% in, in six months. And again, this is during the pandemic, when everyone is locked down, no one's going into work. We're, we're in there, making tests at volumes we've never seen before.
With that volume increase, we were awarded a contract from the Department of Defense to fund a massive increase, up to 25 million tests a month, which we had been averaging about 6-7 million tests a month. The gating item on that expansion were the multi-tube units. We could scale up and lyophilize and fill components, but what we absolutely needed, as fast as we possibly could, were more MTUs to place in those Panther instruments to run the assays. We knew the first company to call was ATS, and so we asked for the seemingly impossible, 'cause that was required at the time. ATS was able to design, build, and deliver 9 new MTU assembly work cells in 20 weeks, which was more than a 50% reduction in previous design and build times.
So you can imagine how much we were, you know, rooting you on to achieve the impossible. And, you know, during that entire time, through 2020 and 2021, the real gating item from the Department of Defense and also our own internal leadership team, including me, was: How is ATS gonna deliver? And, and you guys did. You got those lines up and running, and that actually, every time a line came up, that allowed us to increase our total capacity. So, you know, again, it was a real, a real sign of what can be accomplished in partnership, and we made a, we made a huge difference in the world at that time.
Great. Yep, definitely, again, a heartening experience for both of us. Tough times, but, we both delivered, so-
Mm-hmm
... great to hear. Dave, you've been working with a lot of suppliers. You continue to work with a lot of suppliers. How would you rate, rank your experience with ATS compared to other suppliers you work with?
Yeah, I mean, in order, it's fantastic design and manufacturing, shorter lead times, as I just mentioned. Once the equipment's in, it's reliable, and it's efficient. We get good yield, good OEE. And then if we do have an issue, there's great customer support and spare parts service. And, like I said, I really do feel like we're true partners, not just on the equipment we have, but also as we move forward with new acquisitions, technologies, geographies. We know we can trust you, we can rely on you, and it's been... we've delivered great outcomes and will in the future.
Great. That's awesome. Last question from me, Dave. Key growth drivers for you, your organization, and the way you look at the market, looking forward, where does automation come in? What do you think is the future for automation?
Yeah, so as you can imagine, we're a highly regulated industry, and every one of those tubes delivers a patient result that guides diagnosis. So quality is top priority, absolute top priority. So ATS delivers us high-quality results. That's critical. And then having scalable automation solutions allows us to, again, deliver top quality while taking cost out and being compliant. And that's sort of become the way that we need to grow, is making sure that with the best automation, we maintain that high level of quality, and make sure that, you know, every diagnosis is accurate, and do that in a way that lets us grow both of our businesses together. And, like I said, you've never let us down, and we know we can count on you.
Great. Thanks, Dave. So to summarize the conversation, the three key takeaways from me are: We helped Hologic during the crisis, during the pandemic. We both had good results, good outcome. It was tough, but the team did it. And every time I talk to Blair, our leader for the systems business, and the team that was involved in that, a lot of hard work went into that, especially during the crisis, as you'd imagine. I don't need to belabor, like, you know, the masking and everything else that went with the pandemic. So the team did all of the work, and delivered great results to the customer satisfaction.
The other one is our acquisitions, both ways, we, as Dave and I keep saying, it all—it's almost like we were talking about our strategies, and it worked great for both of us. It gave them a one-stop shop with the SP acquisition, with the BioDot acquisition, a one-stop shop approach, where our integrated solutions, we were able to deliver for them to have peace of mind. End of the day, that's what you care about, is peace of mind, so you can meet your needs and your goals to the market, and that's what we've accomplished. And finally, the word is partnership. And we believe in that. We strive to have that level of partnership with every customer, and I think we have that with many of our customers. We enhance that.
We can continue to enhance on that. So the key word is partnership, and, honestly, Dave, I mean, every time I've talked to you, I meet with you, it feels like that's getting better every day-
Mm-hmm.
... and that sets the stage for our teams to work together, and you've been a great believer and supporter of ATS. So thanks a lot. I appreciate the time you spend with us.
Absolutely. My pleasure.
Appreciate it. Thank you. As we clear the stage, I'll transition this over to Jeremy Patten.
Thank you, Dave. Thank you, Kash. Thank you and good morning. Welcome. My name is Jeremy Patten. I'm the president for our Products and Food Technology group here at ATS. I've been with ATS a little more than 6 years now, joining in 2017 to help launch our ATS business model. I'm excited to tell you a little bit about our organization within Products and Food Technology, a little bit about the markets, and then get directly into our opportunities for growth, both organic and inorganic. Food Technology was established in 2021, following the acquisition of our CFT group of companies in Parma, Italy. We've grown to almost CAD 400 million in revenue, 20+ offices, 11 manufacturing sites, a number of key brands and businesses across the globe.
Outside of our SuperTrak business unit, which is headquartered out of Cambridge and based on ATS technology that's been around over 20 years, the rest of the group of companies has been based on acquisition, starting with Marco Limited out of the United Kingdom in December 2019. That's a checkweighing solution provider, particularly focused on fresh produce and convenience food assembly. We followed that up with the CFT group of companies in March 2021, headquartered out of Parma, Italy, collection of eight different businesses across a number of different vertical industries in the food and beverage space. Our latest acquisition inside of our group has been NCC Automated Systems in Souderton, Pennsylvania, focused on conveyor automation integration, particularly in the food and beverage space, along with an automation product called Glide-Line that pairs well with our SuperTrak.
Like a lot of other ATS groups, we deliver value to customers largely through our machines and integrated solutions, whether that's full-scale primary and secondary processing, beverage lines, automated inspection assembly around food and beverage. We also have a products and components section that can be leveraged across not only food and beverage, but a number of other industries, including inside of ATS, with life sciences and transportation, with our products and components group. That includes SuperTrak, high-speed, high-precision, smart conveyance, along with Glide-Line, and even our Marco scales. Lastly, our services in IoT, and this is a key focus for us, and you'll see it as a core part of our strategy to grow our services and IoT platform in partnership, particularly with Simon Roberts and the Global Services group.
Within the markets that we play in, our biggest market is food processing and packaging, focused on the produce space. We're a market leader in tomato processing, specifically, along with other continental fruits. You think of anything from apples, to peaches, to pears, to bananas. What we're creating at the end of the day are end products like sauces, baby foods, jams, with our equipment. We also have a pretty extensive list of solutions around fresh produce packaging, including inspection, weighing, and even convenience food. Within the beverage space, this ranges everything from juices to soft drinks, and particularly beer. So we do a lot of beer packaging operations, bottle, can, and keg, as a core part of our business.
We also have a PET or polyethylene blow molding company that can create the bottles and containers of a variety of different sizes with our equipment. The next market to highlight is optical sorting and X-ray inspection. This is really our Raytec Vision company out of Parma, Italy. And Raytec Vision uses belt sorting technology to detect any foreign material as well as quality defects in produce. But it can also be used in both food and non-food applications for high-speed optical sorting and inspection. We also leverage X-ray to look for foreign material inside of liquid food and beverages. And lastly, there's our automation-enabling technologies, like SuperTrak, deploying high speed, high precision conveyance automation assembly solutions. These are conveyors that are used in additional assemblies to add true value to customers. Like a lot of our other groups across ATS, some similar market trends.
Global labor shortages, coupled with high inflation—labor inflation, is driving folks to automation. This is particularly true in an industry like food and beverage, that's historically been very labor-intensive. The energy crisis is presenting a unique opportunity for us as well. As you process produce, it's a very high energy-consuming industry to remove all the excess water out of the produce. And so this presents opportunities when you can add competitive advantages around, either electrification of heating and processing, or energy efficiency in terms of evaporation. General acceptance of automation and digitization is increasing across a number of industries. Food and beverage is one that tends to be a little bit behind more mature markets like automotive, and we're seeing an accelerated adoption and willingness to try within what has historically been a very labor-intensive industry.
And lastly, and one that may be a little more unique to food and beverage, particularly with a produce focus, is unpredictable weather patterns. They're creating a lot of uncertainty and inconsistency around crop quality and yield, and what that's driving is a higher need for efficiency and really maximizing the output for our customers. And so trying to take advantage of these market tailwinds, our focus is around driving customer productivity, quality, and efficiency. Some examples, from a productivity standpoint, our Marco checkweighing solution company provides productivity solutions. What does that mean? We can go into a fruit packaging or convenience food line and drive anywhere between 30%-50% labor savings for our customers. We can reduce the amount of giveaway on a given product.
So if you're packaging 500-gram punnets of grapes, they need to be at least 500 grams because you as a customer, that's what you're paying for. Anything over that number is giveaway, and they're losing out of potential profits and potential productivity within that business. From a Raytec Vision standpoint, I mentioned detecting foreign material and poor quality or quality defects in the produce. This is at exceptionally high speeds, fully automated, and now recently launching our first AI-enabled machine to increase the quality of that inspection over time. And some examples around efficiency. So CFT offers an Apollo evaporator using mechanical vapor recompression. At the end of the day, that's just 20%-30% energy savings over traditional evaporation methods.
We've seen incredible tailwinds in this space, particularly in Europe, where they're seeing probably more pressure on the energy crisis and the cost. Zenith Chrono technology, that's a patent that CFT has around produce processing, that enables them to avoid outside chemicals, maintain the highest quality of taste and color for their products. This has been a core differentiator for us as we expand outside of just tomato into other continental fruits, particularly apples. And then we're also really focused on continuing innovating. CFT's tagline was, "Leaders innovate," and that's something that we've tried to adopt across our entire segment of companies. An example of that is Raytec Vision. Raytec Vision recently, just this year, launched our Opportunity Machine. The Opportunity Machine solves a problem inside of tomato processing plants. Today, they're looking for partially peeled tomatoes on a manual inspection process.
So you see workers lined up on a tomato line, sifting through peeled tomatoes, looking for ones that are partially peeled. As you can imagine, the potential for misses, the potential for error is quite high. The Opportunity Machine leverages a 360-degree rotation of the tomato in real time, using AI for automated visual inspection. Running this easily saves anywhere between 10-15 folks per line, per shift, during a tomato season that's run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, across anywhere between 90-120 days. That offers a pretty significant value for our customers, and it's one of the first AI-enabled machines on the market. And so taking advantage of these market tailwinds and looking toward our strategy, we have four key areas of growth focus. Number one, ABM as our way of life.... Two, defend.
How do we grow services and expand our aftermarket? 3, differentiation, leveraging that innovation focus to stay ahead of the competition, particularly in our core markets. 4, diversify, expanding our geographic penetration and looking at adjacent market opportunities. Within our ABM or our ATS business model, I couldn't be more proud of the deployment of our ABM as a part of our M&A playbook. I think Andrew touched on it earlier. This is a core part of how we think about M&A and integration. If you remember, over 90% of our group of companies were acquired just in the last three years, and with that, in the last 12 months, we've driven over 30 Kaizen events across all functions of the business. We're managing key performance indicators in all eight value drivers, leveraging visual management, problem-solving, and Kaizen tool, and we're delivering real results.
So we've significantly expanded margins across the businesses inside of the group. We're enhancing lead time and quality for our customers. We're improving engagement and reducing voluntary turnover inside of the group, and at the end of the day, we're making the company better for employees, for customers, and for shareholders, and that's, at the end of the day, that's the focus of our ATS business model. The second area around defend is around that partnership and leveraging our global services resources. We're independently strong as businesses, but this is what makes us better together. This is around leveraging highly skilled resources inside of our global services group with Simon Roberts, where we have the opportunity inside of our group to double our technicians, to expand our local geographies where we're present to customers. We can take advantage of tools and systems to enhance the customer experience.
That might be Illuminate, which... or PA -FACTS, part of our IoT, Internet of Things, right, data, digital solutions. That might also be an internal tool, like Service Cloud, to enhance the service experience of our customers. And lastly, Global Services has been at this for a few years. Taking advantage of their best-in-class processes can accelerate our journey on growing aftermarket, which at the end of the day, means delivering a better customer experience. The next area is differentiate. I highlighted the opportunity. Why does it matter? Why do customers care? Some other areas where we're really driving innovation include our Illuminate manufacturing intelligence platform, installed on every CFT and Comac beverage packaging line going out the door. We're delivering 100% enabled IoT solutions to improve productivity and machine efficiency for our customers.
Or combining technologies, integrating SuperTrak into a PET blow molding machine, which significantly reduces the footprint, drives energy savings at a higher output for customers. We will launch our first Galileo machine in SIAPI here this fall. And lastly, around diversification. How do we continue to focus not only on the areas that we play really well in, specifically primary processing, but continue to grow and expand in terms of secondary processing? This is both from a geographic focus as well as adjacent technologies and markets. Adjacent markets, where we can take advantage of our existing technologies and opportunities for expanding that technology, both through innovation and through inorganic acquisition. And so if there are four key takeaways for food and beverage, number one, we'll continue to expand and grow in food and beverage. It aligns really well to our focus on highly regulated end markets. Number two, innovation.
It's going to continue to play a key role and a key differentiator as we take advantage of those market drivers. Number 3, ABM. It is our way of life. We are driving impact, not just to the bottom line, which is critically important, but for employees, for customers, and for shareholders. And lastly, growth and expansion. We have a significant opportunity here, both organically and inorganically, to continue our journey within food and beverage. So with that, I'd like to welcome Udo Panenka.
Good morning, everyone. ATS Industrial Automation, over the last few years, has been and is still growing, both fast and profitable. How did we do it? What's our recipe for success? My name is Udo, Udo Panenka. I'm the President, ATS Industrial Automation. I've been with the company for four and a half years now, and I'm excited to be here today and answer exactly that question. So just taking a quick look at the agenda... I'm sorry, that was too fast. I will first talk about the foundation that really enables us to drive these, what we call, mission-critical programs, and then I will apply that foundation to two of our really most important growth markets. On the one side, battery assembly within e-mobility, and on the other side, within the nuclear space.
Before going there, let me give you a quick overview of what we're exactly doing and which market segments we play in. We have really strategically positioned us to focus, and that's almost 90% of our business today, on green technology applications, green technology markets, that are all going through a significant level of transformation right now. We have three pillars: e-mobility, and I will talk much more about battery here. We do electric motor assembly, so automated lines for assembling electric motors. Specialty automation, which focuses on grid batteries. That's a very, very dynamic market environment at the moment, and we build automated lines for assembling and testing these grid batteries, leveraging actually our experience from the e-mobility battery business.
Fuel cells is something, especially stationary fuel cells, an area that is coming up nicely, and we focus on testing these fuel cells. E-commerce, packaging, paper-based is one area. And last, not least, nuclear. That's a business where we are one of these expert automation providers for automated tools and services that really cover the entire life cycle of a nuclear power plant, from new builds that are growing right now and becoming more attractive, to operating and maintenance nuclear reactors, to refurbishment of existing reactors, and to decommissioning when a reactor reaches the end of its natural life. So let's get back to the foundational aspects. While we are actually together today in this room, there might be a number of CEOs from our customers out there, and they are sharing their ambitions with the market. And their ambitions are high.
Somebody might be out there and say, "Hey, by 2026, we will launch another 30 electric cars." Somebody might be out there and say, "We will increase the production capacity of e-mobility by 1.5 million cars a year." Or somebody might be out there and say, "Yeah, by 2029, we're gonna start using 3 new SMRs, small modular reactors, that we're building right now." So these customers, they all have really, really high ambitions. And when we think about what we're doing, we're their partner. We're their strategic partner that is there to bring these ambitions to life, to realize them. And when we look into this, these programs, they have all a lot of things in common. They're typically super complex programs, never anything that's easy. These programs are typically mission-critical, so a little bit of make or break for our customers.
These programs are typically very, very dynamic. While we are building a lot of our lines, the technology is still evolving. Somebody is moving the goalpost. That's a little bit of a moving target. These programs are normally very big. These are true enterprise programs. They can be $500 million big, so that's real, real relevant stuff. I think we, we learned over the last few years, we cannot support these programs and execute them successfully as just a automation supplier. We can only really do this as a true automation partner. Our slogan that we have in a lot of cases is: What would we do if we were one company? That's how we actually wake up in the morning. That's how we act with our customers together. We use basically five building blocks to get there, to execute these programs successfully.
Number one, it's really our team. I think we have some of the very, very best automation experts that are working for ATS. And these automation experts, they use ABM, our ATS Business Model. They use breakthrough technologies components. You have seen quite a few of these things already here in action today from the other presenters. They use what we call disruptive operating strategies, and in the end, we're that partner that covers the entire life cycle of a program. Let's dive a little bit deeper into these aspects. ATS Business Model, ABM, Andrew started talking about it. I think almost all the other presenters did. It's what we do. It's how we do it. It covers the entire company, and I just wanna focus on two examples.
So what we do typically has to follow a very strict and a pretty short and aggressive timeline, again, back to the ambitions of our customers. Some of these programs, what I said, is... are a little bit of a moving target. In a battery program, it's not unusual to have something like 600 change orders while executing that program. If you have 600 change orders and short lead times, and it takes, in this case, 167 days to execute such a change order, you're not fast, you're not agile. So we went together with the customer. We did process improvements together with the customer to really reduce the cycle time of a change order by 138 days. Joint Kaizen events together with customers to achieve better outcomes. The other element, partnership, that's something that's so high up on the agenda, that's so mission-critical to us.
We had to build a lot of commercial tools and processes and educate our team to really drive there. So if you have these large programs, customer portfolio management, funnel management becomes a key driver. Pricing is a key driver to drive margin expansion, what Andrew alluded to. How do we use tools like account plans to really understand with which levels at the customer do we need to interact? How do we support these different hierarchy levels, target account reviews? But also, at the same time, how do we train our people, large account management processes, negotiation trainings, et cetera? That's basically how we use the ATS business model to drive such a transformation in our business. The next piece, breakthrough technologies. So I just wanna highlight two examples. SuperTrak, our linear conveyor system, what you heard a few times.
One of these big battery lines, this can be 100,000 sq ft big, much, much bigger than such a room. With SuperTrak, we're able to drive footprint reductions up to 30%, so you're saving 30% in space. That's a huge, huge driver, and also energy costs, so very, very high up on the agenda of our customers. Or say, intelligent welding. If you have one car with one battery, in that car, you might have 6,500 battery cells. Every cell needs two welds to bring it all together to a battery, so it's 13,000 welds. And our customers, they produce one battery pack a minute, 13,000 welds in one minute. If one of these welds is defect, the range of the car drops by 2%. That's mission critical.
So having the right technologies, proven processes, components, modules in place that enable us to build all these lines, have that capacity, but also have the quality, that's mission critical. And therefore, we're not just an integrator, we're really having that value-add technology, components, and modules to enable us to execute these programs. And we need to do this fast, so disruptive operating strategies, that's a, that's a key driver for us. Typically, in custom automation, building one line takes 18 months. Doesn't work in today's world. We need to deliver one line in 6 months, and possibly even faster, and a whole program with 5-6 lines in 12 months. So how can we get there? For us, one key driver is digitization, digital twins, for example. Don't need to know all the ins and outs.
If you're interested, Roland and Frank from our team are here today, and after that event, you will have a chance to see a live digital twin and see what this technology can do. But that's basically something we can start programming of the line before it's built. We can do crash controls with robots in reality. Pressing the reset button is much easier than repairing a mechanical damage if there was a robot crash. So some of these technologies are repeat equipment manufacturing. How do we make the first line as a custom line, but then go into serial production and get much faster to replicate, to build, and to expand? And that across the entire life cycle, so even if a line is on operation, the technology is still changing, the product is still changing.
How do we keep that updated, upgraded, while the customer is still producing on that line? They don't have time to switch it off. So a lot of aspects around operating strategies. To execute this, you definitely need scale, resources, so just in this year, we have been adding more than 600 people to that platform, so significant growth that we're driving. And for us, it's around scaling the business on the one side. The other thing, what we did, is adding digitization resources, so we added a full team here in Germany, in Ingolstadt, that is specialized in digital twin technologies and such aspects. Plus, also to drive margin expansion, lower cost countries, so quite an expansion that we're driving in places like Slovakia, with Bratislava, a nice site that we're expanding significantly.
We just work together here with other group companies to really set us up in India, where we are looking at remote engineering other support activities, so really to build scale, but also do this in a smart way. With this, let's apply what we said to e-mobility. Number one, what are we doing in e-mobility? Well, we are the ones that really don't have automation equipment to produce battery cells, but once there is a battery cell, we're the ones putting these cells into what we call module and then pack, and a pack is basically the battery that ends up in your car. So what's interesting about this market is the growth opportunity. In 2022, the entire global car industry produced something like 10 million electric cars.
By 2030, it has to be north of 40 million, which is important to realize it's still only half of the cars that get produced every single year. So there is enormous growth potential going there, and it's super interesting to compare this. The last time this industry scaled like this was somewhere in the 1920s, and it took 50 years to increase production volume by 30 million cars. This time, we have 7 years. So it's all about speed, it's change agility, because the technology is still evolving, it's still growing and maturing, and it's scalability is what drives success here. And the building blocks for us, it's the strong team we talked about, is just leading products and services, but also really, really solid project execution.
You wanna manage a program with 600 change orders, you need to be very, very good to manage this program successfully on time and on budget. This is also where we have phenomenal people, but also where the ATS business model, getting better processes, solid processes, in such a highly dynamic environment helps a lot. Really being that first-rate company, financial stability, if you trust somebody to execute your mission-critical programs, better trust somebody who is a stable company. And we have been doing this 15 years here, so executed more than 100 such large projects, and that gives us a lot of experience. And that really helps us to be the player in that market, growing very fast compared to our competitors, but also driving that execution excellence. And execution excellence is important in two directions.
On the one side, happy customers, because you wanna have repeat business from these happy customers, so better be successful. But on the other side, execution excellence also means that we're driving these programs in a profitable way. And these things together give us a really, really nice position. Now, as we're spending all that energy to charge our cars, somebody has to produce that energy, and that's our other business, it's our nuclear business. So in nuclear, there is what we call a nuclear renaissance happening, going on. So what does this mean? Well, there are two key drivers. On the one side, we need more capacity, more energy, and CO₂ emission-free energy. Nuclear is now, even by the European Union, classified as a green technology.
So on the one side, capacity additions, new builds, and also refurbishment of existing nuclear power plants to keep them up and in operations. And on the other side, some of these reactors went to the end of their useful life, and they need to be decommissioned in a safe and in a fast way. And we're actually that provider that has automated tools and related services to do exactly that. So we were the first one ever, for example, to really automate CANDU detube and retube. Don't need to know all these bits and pieces. That's a special type of reactor, and you see a picture of this. This is basically all this, these little holes; this is the reactor surface.
And then one of our tools, and what we do is, for example, pull 6-meter-long tubes out and cut them into small little pieces, put them in a box in a highly radioactive environment, and therefore refurbish such a power plant in a safe way and make sure waste management, volume reduction, et cetera, is driven in the right way. So very, very specific application and very specific knowledge and competence we have built, again, here over the last 15 years. And the opportunity is pretty intriguing. You read more and more about additional refurbishment of existing reactors, so we just identified 6 new opportunities where we can apply our tools here. The other thing is new builds. You hear a lot about companies, countries, et cetera, announcing new builds of what they call small modular reactors.
But also you now hear, and this is pretty recent in Canada, addition of large-scale nuclear reactors, something we haven't seen for a long time. And in these new builds, we have quite a play, especially when it comes to fuel handling and fuel fabrication, so automated tools for this part. And decommissioning, where we really do reactor segmentation and all type of stuff, that when a reactor comes to the end of its life, we're doing this in a safe and in a positive way. With this, let me summarize things. So on the one side, unique positioning, explained all the foundational elements here. We're really playing in a, in an area where we have high barriers of entry and, I think as Andrew said, high cost of failure.
Then in the end, it's all about being a partner to our company, acting like a, call it in-house automation player, because that's, in our mind, the only way how you can really execute these challenging programs in a successful way. And really make sure we help our customers in the end to meet their aspirations and, and help them to be successful. That's how we are successful. With this, I wanna thank you a lot for your interest so far, and I think you all deserve a good cup of coffee now. So we're gonna have a coffee break for 15 minutes, and then my colleagues will continue to take you through the program. Thank you very much.
... CFT has gone great. I mean, CFT deal, that's part of my discussion, is the margin expansion within that.
Both the skills are the same, right? Right, so-
It also feels like there's a front end problem, like the applications, guys.
The session will resume in two minutes. The session will resume. I guess that's it, you know? Just make sure I don't fall with that mills. That's it?
Well, is that 9 that you got in your hand that you know it's only...?
Nah, it's just a full fan out, man.
Oh, okay.
It's a full fan out. Sure, it's his own channel. It's not confused with another mob.
Good morning. Good morning, and welcome back. I'm pleased to share some insights for a significant opportunity to go, recurring revenue at ATS. My name is Simon Roberts, and I lead the services organization. You've already heard this morning from my colleagues how ATS provides effective solutions to some of the most complex manufacturing challenges. I'd like to share with you how ATS Services provides comprehensive solutions across the entire asset life cycle. I'll cover three areas during the next 15 minutes, starting with our capabilities, and then we'll move into the opportunity and dig a little deeper into the higher value opportunities that we see for services. Our strategic focus is really captured in our mission statement, and that's to deliver value through our customer partnerships on the delivery of the highest level of possible asset performance across the entire life cycle.
When we think of that and that partnership, that's really about driving our value proposition to lower the total cost of ownership, faster time to production with our customers, improve asset utilization and overall operational performance, while working with our customers to actually reduce their enterprise risk and help them in their digital asset management journey. That life cycle relationship can start as early as the individual opportunity for a CapEx. The services organization is increasingly involved in CapEx pursuits to demonstrate our ability to support the customer through the various stages of their investment. That lifetime, that life cycle can last anything up to 25 years. So during that design phase, we're often consulting and supporting the customer as they consider about their reliability, their maintenance, and asset management programs, while highlighting our regional and global infrastructure to support the customers.
And then the critical next stage is that after the customer's made that investment decision, and they've taken delivery of their CapEx, we're the true partner in that transition from our organization to the customer's organization. We're focused about that start of production, but we're also focused on that critical knowledge transfer from our organization to the customer's organization. And often, you'll see us involved in terms of establishing spares programs, establishing the maintenance programs, and really starting to plot our way through the digital capability of our customers. And then we move into the sustain stage of the relationship. That's really where we can add value and really bring our ABM mentality into how we continually improve asset performance throughout its life cycles.
We'll focus about reducing variability, we'll focus about reducing the risk in terms of unplanned downtime, but it's really about how continually we take data, we marry it with our subject matter expertise and our privileged IP, and how we drive continued asset improvement. Throughout the life cycle, we will have opportunities to modify, adapt the equipment. That might be driven by product changes, market demand, or purely extending the actual planned life cycle of the asset. Leveraging our growing digital capability and our regional infrastructure, we're well positioned to build, grow, and expand customer engagement across the entire life cycle of the customer's investment. Our global services infrastructure is all about making it easy.
Making it easy internally for our ATS companies, but also making it easy for our customer to gain the type of support that they need to drive the improvements and manage the challenges within their day-to-day operations. Our strength lies with the 500+ service personnel, a growing team, that's organized either in our manufacturing divisions or in our growing regional presence, as well as obviously growing our capability in our centers of competence. This is an area we see for continued investment and focus as we expand our regional footprint and really expand our asset management capabilities on a global scale. So ATS, I think, is uniquely positioned to differentiate.
You know, we have developed and continue to invest in developing our capability around maintenance, reliability, serviceability, and we're really building a culture that's adopted at the earliest stages of our, even when we design the original machine. How do we actually look to the maintenance programs? How do we look at reliability right from the outset, working with our customers? We've got a very proud heritage, a heritage that's got 40 years of machine builder capability and experience with deep subject matter expertise, and we've gained privileged IP around a customer's key processes during that period of time. And when you add to that our growing investment and capability that we're now developing around digital, it allows us to bring data-driven decision making to everyday optimization of our customers' assets. So our talented team are organized in our key regions.
Some of those resources are embedded within our customers' facilities or within our actual regional service teams or dedicated service centers. And they're organized either in their execution roles or in key functional roles. And again, making reference to the ABM, they continually draw upon the customer feedback to evolve and develop our offering and our solutions and really drive our product solutions roadmap to drive better outcomes for our customers. So let's take a quick look at the growth opportunity. Well, firstly, we have a fantastic foundation. Over decades of projects being executed across all ATS companies, we have a significant installed base. And when you add to that, every year, we add CAD 1 billion worth of new projects. We then have a great opportunity to grow the business by in the greater install base penetration and continually expanding and evolving our services portfolio.
So we focus on four key areas. You know, our focus as new projects get delivered, how do we make sure we start the service relationship in the right way? Our continued expansion and penetration of the install base, and in every case, with each customer, how do we actually increase the share of wallet as we develop and evolve our product portfolio? What we're also increasingly excited about now is the growing opportunity in many of our customers' facilities to actually work on non-ATS equipment and actually provide valuable services and solutions, particularly as we build out our asset management and digital capability. So when we look at new CapEx, you know, our goal is to work towards every single machine that leaves an ATS facility, goes with a startup service plan, a digitally enabled service plan.
We also want every machine leaving our facility to actually be digitally enabled and ready to collect data, our ability to analyze data, or remotely connect to that asset and gain valuable insights to drive different conversations with the customer, particularly during that critical phase of startup. And when we think about the build team in our ATS divisions working on those projects, we're also focused on knowledge transfer. How do we transition that critical knowledge to the local teams that are gonna be supporting that customer throughout the lifecycle? And they can be embedded resources or members of our regional execution teams.
We've also, in our manufacturing divisions, also got dedicated service teams working alongside the CapEx project managers, making sure that we understand as we transition from one stage of the actual CapEx project into entry into service, that there's continuity of the relationship and identification of opportunities for improvement. When we look at the install base, that's really, you know, one of our primary focus is to expand our regional footprint. Again, deploying resources in customer facilities, but year over year now, we're adding dedicated regional service centers in key locations. These are critical kind of resources, supported by the original equipment manufacturing divisions, to really provide that timely support and develop the relationship with the customer along that long-term partnership.
Whether through routine maintenance, whether through ongoing relationship with the customer, upgrades of their machines, we're continually taking the opportunity to now to digitally connect legacy equipment. How we can bring technology on board to the asset that allows us then to start gaining those valuable insights and combining that with our ability to focus with the customer on asset performance. Across that, we also recognize that the challenges at different stages of the lifecycle mean that we need to tailor our offering and our capabilities to make sure we address the high-impact scenarios for our customers.
So when we think of the intimacy that we achieve now with our customers through the digital insights, but also by having resources on the ground embedded within our customer's facility, we gain a level of insight about performance that truly allows us now to anticipate and prepare for some of the customer needs. We see that as one of the key drivers of how we actually increase that share of wallet and drive that recurring revenue opportunity with our customers. Our service plans are definitely configured to some of the high-value use cases, whether that's purely around asset monitoring, asset improvement programs, where we'll actually work on specific KPIs with our customers.
But we're also seeing now as we expand our asset management capability, recently, supported by our acquisition of Triad Engineering, it gives us the ability, through their expertise now, to look beyond the ATS asset when we're in that customer's facility. We're actively engaged now with customers who are actually, when they see the benefit that we bring with our service plans, with our digital capability, they're asking us now to bring that same capability onto some of our competitor assets, and really drive a one-stop-shop approach for our customers. And consistent with what you've heard today about ABM, we continually use the feedback from our customers to drive and improve... and using their metrics, really, to drive our internal metrics around improving that customer experience and driving value for the customer.
So I made a reference to it, but certainly, what we see now as we're embedded within our customers' facilities, as we're using some of our platforms, like Illuminate, we're able to actually develop that relationship on-site on a daily basis using data insights, our knowledge about the machine, but also around the factors around the machine performance that can actually allow us to drive improvement, not just on ATS equipment, but to look upstream and downstream of the process and really drive continued kind of OEE improvement across all ATS assets and non-ATS assets. So let's take a look now at some of the shift towards higher value services. So we're very aware, first and foremost, around the kind of pain points of our customers.
That's something that we clearly and consistently understand as we gain data off the machines and the intimacy that we develop with our on-site resources and our customer relationship management. We clearly understand that we need to drive solutions around their high cost of manufacturing, about not meeting production targets, and some of their frustration or lack of visibility around the actual asset performance. That's why our services portfolio, our infrastructure, is really focused on that overall equipment effectiveness and specific opportunities around how we help the customer drive reduction in their production costs. That really underpins our value proposition in terms of aftermarket solutions. When we think of our portfolio, when we think of our infrastructure, when we think of our organization, it's really focused continually about driving a change, a shift, in that customer experience and asset performance.
So the gray line and the gray area on this chart really represents a typical or traditional revenue profile. As you can imagine, as we transition an asset into service, there's a high level of support of on-site training, spare parts, and then really peters off. And typically, you know, we'll see or the odd opportunity for upgrades and retrofits throughout certain points of that life cycle. But what we've established now with the relationship and the investments that we've made, is really to focus on that start-up phase with our start-up service plans. The earlier we start the relationship by driving asset performance from data insights, embedded resources, we create a steady flow of recurring revenue in terms of our service plan.
As we transition from that first 12 months of start-up production, that gives us the opportunity then to transition to production service plans designed and configured to be renewable. What we see over time as they get renewed, we see that compounding effect in terms of service plan revenue. The foundation of our transition to service plan and that recurring revenue is really around our digital foundations and how we address some of the concerns of data security. But as you'll hear from Christian in his presentation, this is a core area of focus of how we connect with assets, take those insights, and drive actionable insights, actions and improvements within the field.
So we've built strong foundations, we've been driving momentum, and there's certainly readiness now when we look at the infrastructure that we've created regionally and digitally, to really take to the next level of growth. And what you'll see coming in the coming weeks and months, is a continued build-out of our regional capability, deployment of resources into the field, into our customer locations. We will be opening dedicated service centers every year and over the next three years. And you'll also see in our Cambridge facility, the construction of our asset management center. And this is a facility where we operationalize digital. This is where we will monitor, this is where we will advise, and this is where we will direct our resources to actually improve the performance of assets within the field.
We will continue, as ATS grows inorganically, to leverage the services infrastructure to really drive the opportunity with new acquisitions around synergies and shareholder value. So we're making great progress shifting right, shifting right to really climb and build greater customer value. Moving away from that ad hoc service relationship to higher value services, data-enriched services, and ultimately positioning ATS for positioning for changing certain business models to more of a performance-based relationship around services. Now, while that kind of opportunity is built around our partnership, our growing partnership with our customers, we also recognize that our services portfolio represents the opportunity for customers at different stages of their manufacturing journey.
What's core to driving this growth and this value for shareholders and for, for our customers is to continue to expand the services portfolio, while at the same time developing our digital capability across the organization. In conclusion, I liken the services opportunity to an iceberg. Above the waterline, we have the opportunity now to actually drive a greater proportion of recurring revenue through customer lock-in. That's driven by the data insights, but it's also driven by the contract design and service plan design and configuration. As we continue to expand and build upon that recurring revenue, that drives greater pull-through, high-value opportunities. As we execute our strategy, we're confident, and we're demonstrating that we're increasing the level of recurring revenue, we're increasing that high-value services pull-through, and overall, we're increasing the higher, the percentage of services in ATS overall revenue.
Let me now hand over to Christian, who will give us some insights around the digital journey. Thank you very much.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Christian Debus, and I'm happy to lead PA Solutions since, now actually five years and five days. I would like to talk about, a paradigm shift, which is taking place in automation, enabled by digitalization, and how we, ATS, shape and drive that paradigm shift. First of all, talking about what is happening in the environment. The automation pyramid has been the architecture for automation and control systems since more than 50 years. The automation pyramid is basically described by, proprietary standards from system suppliers, and not fully full integration between the different layers of the automation pyramid, especially when it comes to higher levels, like enterprise-wide levels. This paradigm is now shifted to cloud edge architectures. Cloud edge architectures, they allow full integration of operational data and IT data coming, from IT systems.
Combined with advanced technologies, it is possible in this new environment, to not only control enterprise-wide production processes, but also to continuously optimize production processes based on the integrated data in the cloud. What is the hold up for that new paradigm, for that new situation? The hold up is basically all the legacy systems in operations, in the plants we see worldwide, which all have different data and control standards. Connecting these data together, integrating these data together, and enabling the interoperability between the data coming from the different systems, contextualized with the data coming from the IT systems, this is the big hold up to drive value out of the integrated data and out of digitalization. Once this problem is solved, there is huge potential in digital and digitally enabled architectures.
We can drive productivity, we can drive capacity utilization, we can drive quality improvements, and we can drive energy consumption much better with the integrated data on a holistic enterprise level than in the isolated islands we used to have in the world of the automation pyramid. This has been widely recognized by production companies. There has been a study by McKinsey done just recently, that the demand for integrated OT/IT architectures and platforms is very much increasing. Customers are looking for IIoT platforms, where they can basically integrate enterprise-wide their data, their OT, and their IT data, and drive performance improvements based on that integrated data. But what is important for the customers to select an IIoT platform? The most important topic is that they have a standardized integration into existing systems.
That is exactly the point where they need to overcome the legacy systems and the different standards of the legacy systems. Customers are not looking for complicated solutions. They are looking for an easy way, ideally a plug-and-play, where they can put their legacy equipment into, and can enjoy the benefits of integrated data and integrated solutions. But that's not sufficient for customers currently. Customers figured out that just having a data platform and just having analytics available is not realizing the value from digitalization. Customers also require much more a service provider, which is helping them to drive value out of their IIoT platform. So the important thing for customers is having a standardized connectivity and data integration, and having the ability of the IIoT service platform provider to provide services to drive value out of the data.... utilization of the cloud is widely increasing and accepted.
So a year ago or two years ago, I think there was still a hesitation to move production data into the cloud. This is now step-by-step overcoming, since customers see the benefits of having the data in the cloud, having the data all integrated, and the hesitation to have the data in the cloud is decreasing, even in highly regulated industries like pharma. What is the business and the market potential in that new environment with that new paradigm? It's here for me important to say that digitalization is not a purpose by itself. We talk a lot about digitalization, but digitalization is a tool. It is a tool to enable continuous productivity improvement in daily operations and manufacturing. This is what this digitalization is up for, and therefore, with digitalization not unfolding the value of productivity improvement, it's nothing worth.
But if digitalization unfolds the value of productivity improvement, there is a huge business potential. If we assume or we see... we look at the global manufacturing output, which is currently $7.8 trillion, and we focus just on our focus markets as ATS, as the addressable market, and we can drive with digital-enabled tools, productivity improvements for our customers in our addressable markets, and we get rewarded with a certain portion of that achievement, it is a massive opportunity. And the good thing with this opportunity is, it's widely unserved so far. It is really a true blue ocean we are developing here, because these tools and these possibilities are not exploited fully yet.
The demand is there, but there are only a few players which are able to really drive value here, and I will explain in the next section why this is the case. So the typical environment we are seeing in a customer environment is, you see on the plant level, customers are having different kinds of production and control systems. They are all working with their proprietary standards. They all build their own IIoT solutions, but the standards are not interconnected. So on the other hand, you have the cloud providers, where you can basically utilize all the data in the cloud, and you can have nice analytics and nice functionalities for all the data you have in the cloud.
But who is actually connecting that diverse manufacturing environment with the possibilities of the cloud to make use of the customer data to increase the customer performance and the customer productivity? That is exactly the sweet spot where we, PA, are positioned. And we are doing automation integration, we are doing integration of OT and IT systems since 40 years. So building that bridge between the diverse production environment and a central database where you can drive value out of the data, this is basically our business since 40 years, working with all the different standards and integrating all the different standards. And what we have done over the last years is that we utilize basically all the individual solutions we were finding for customers, for individual integrations of individual systems to higher level databases.
We productize them and made them scalable, and with that, we were building a repository of standard connectors of many different kinds of equipment. So in our daily work, where we integrate OT and IT systems, we do not only integrate on a customer basis, we integrate a way that we can use that connectivity in a scalable way, and we can reuse it. And with that, we are building step by step by step, an integration platform for OT and IT systems. As I already said, we are already 40 years old, almost 40 years old. We have 1,600 engineering and IT experts in more than 50 offices around the world in more than 19 countries.
So we are a truly global player, which gives us the possibility to be really close to our customers, because the integration of operating technology into any kind of higher level databases, be it the cloud databases or other databases, needs to be done on site. You need to be on the customer side. You need to make your hands dirty. You need to have boots on the ground in order to do the data integration and drive value out of the data. We execute 3,340 projects per year, and this gives you a little bit of a view on how much possibilities we have to build that scalable integration. We are working absolutely OEM agnostic.
We can deal with all different kinds of standards, and we can integrate all different kinds of standards, and we have a deep expertise in our core verticals, which is chemicals, which is pharma biotech, which is food and beverage, and which is, to a certain extent, also automotive. We are trusted by the world's largest companies in our focus industries for the integration of production, control and IT systems, and this is a direct reflection of our capabilities as well as our ability to service our customers across geographies. So how to drive value out of the data, out of the integrated data? First of all, it's very important to connect all the different systems from the operating technology to get the data out of the different systems, to standardize the data, and to contextualize the data with the different IT systems.
Based on this single source of truth, we need to make performance visible. We use advanced analytics to drive, to identify optimization potentials in the operating technology. The final step is we need to close the loop in order to drive really value on the shop floor, because until we have the fourth step done, there is no value created out of the data. We have insights, we know how to improve, but we need to do the fourth step, and we need to get tangible, and we need to get into the shop floor, and we need to make our hands dirty, and we need to help our customers to really drive the value out of the insights we are generating and realizing the potential in the production process. If the step number four is not done, there is no value of any digital solution.
I would like to go now through two case studies where we were establishing a digital platform, one for a global machine builder, and number two, for a global manufacturing company. First of all, let me talk about TOMRA Sorting. TOMRA Sorting is a company which is building recycling machines, and we have built the global IIoT platform for all their machines they are delivering to customers, where they offer their customers a perform looking on the data of the machines, of all the machines, which are connected to the platform to drive performance of the individual machines. All TOMRA Sorting machines are connected to the IIoT platform we have set up for them by default.
They have only an opt-out option for the customers who do not want to have their data transmitted into the cloud, but this opt-out option is basically selected by almost none of the customers. So almost 100% of the machines are connected to the platform, and all customers provide the data in the cloud, which enables them to increase the productivity of their machines. The second example is AkzoNobel. For AkzoNobel, we have built a global IIoT platform, where 58 plants across the world are connected to. The purpose of this platform is to drive the OEE of the operating equipment.
And the first thing we have, we were realizing, is that the plant managers were coming in the first meeting, where they were looking on the data of the platform, and every plant manager said: "Well, the OEE which is displayed there is wrong." And what we figured out is that every plant manager was working with his own definition of OEE, Overall Equipment Effectiveness. In the plant meetings, everybody was showing his extraordinary performance. Everybody had a great performance, but everybody was working with a different definition. So with having all the plants connected and with having one single source of truth, we made, just by making the performance visible, performance improvements possible, because they could see who is performing in which area extremely good, who is performing in which area extremely bad, what can we learn from each other? How can we drive performance improvements across the plants?
This enabled a productivity improvement of 10% worldwide across all AkzoNobel plants. By the way, thanks to our standard connectors, we are able to connect a new plant within one week to that platform. How do we differentiate in that environment? If you look at that circle, there are lots of integrated platforms available. There are lots of cloud platforms available. There are lots of analytics available. Nevertheless, we see a digital sobering. You see, you read a lot of articles that companies are not happy with the performance of their digital projects, that companies basically stop their digital activities because they don't see the value of what they are doing in digitalization.
The big hold-up of driving value of digitalization is usually the step number 1, the connectivity of the different systems, of the different standards, the integration of the data of the different standards, and to really make the performance visible by the integration of the data and bring all the different standards together. This, what is usually the big hold-up for the digitalization, for driving value of the digitalization, this is basically our home to home turf. This is, for us, paradise. This is what we are doing since 40 years. So this is exactly where we make the difference, and with making our individual customer solutions scalable on our platform, we can really drive extraordinary value here, which companies which operate in the cloud space cannot play.
If you go together today to a cloud company, and you would like to have the cloud implemented for performance improvement, for integrated data of manufacturing systems, you always need to hire a system integrator who is rolling out the platform with a high effort globally, worldwide, to make the data available in the cloud. We come from the other side. We say we can do the integration, we make the integration scalable, and we enable the integrated data platform for you based on our experience. The other hold-up is the fourth step, driving really value out of the data, and this is an area where we were investing heavily in. Andrew mentioned it at the beginning of his presentation. We have acquired IPCOS.
IPCOS is the expert for data-driven performance improvement of production processes in chemical companies, which is absolutely applicable to pharmaceutical production environments and food and beverage production environments. So we have really the main knowledge to drive value out of data for holistic production processes. Combined with what Simon has explained in his presentation, the domain knowledge we have in services about the ATS machines, we can really make the value out of the data and the analytics tangible for our customers.... We built this value proposition with acquisitions systematically. I would like to highlight three acquisitions we have just done recently, which expand our value proposition in that overall circle. One is I already mentioned it, IPCOS, which is strengthening heavily our domain knowledge to really drive value out of the data.
They are specialized in advanced process controls, so really using data proactively to improve the performance of the processes. I would like to highlight Yasum, which is a company which is specialized in advanced analytics, AI-based advanced analytics. And I would like to highlight also Odyssey, which is enabling us to basically make our platform available as the pharma-validated cloud. So Odyssey is able to make sure that our platform can be applied in all pharma companies, and the data in that cloud and the analytics in the cloud are pharma-validated. This enables completely new business models for ATS. So in this pyramid, you see the digitally enabled business models. On the lowest level, we built a digital interface that's basically just integrate the data and make the performance visible for our customers.
Based on that, we can put AI-based tools, we can sell as a software-based on a software-as-a-service contract, and we can enable our customers to identify performance improvement potentials based on the integrated data coming out of their manufacturing. So this is just selling software as a first service, selling digital tools. If we then combine this with our domain experts from Simon Services Group, we can then enable exactly the service level agreement Simon was speaking about. We can collect the data, we can contextualize the data, and we can make the service people, we can make this available to the service people, that they can drive with the customer OEE improvements for our machines. And I would like to say something here, which is really differentiating for us as ATS.
Since we are able to integrate the data from not only the ATS equipment, but also from the non-ATS equipment, since we are able to contextualize the data with the other IT systems, we can really avoid driving isolated island improvements. Here in the customer manufacturing, we can really enable holistic improvements. What we have figured out, for example, in the life sciences industry, we have seen that the OEE of our machine relatively often is down, not because of the process in our machine. It's very often down because of the material availability for our machine in the right quality and in the right quantity. That means what is driving the OEE of our machine down is basically caused in a process which is happening before.
You can only identify the root cause for that if you can really fully integrate the data of the former processes together, contextualized with the other IT systems of the company, that you see what is really causing the bottleneck. We can identify what the bottleneck is, but what is causing the bottleneck needs the contextualization of the data and needs the integration of data from the other equipment and from the other systems as well.
Having this done, we can even go a step further, and we can say, if the bottleneck is not the ATS machine, if the bottleneck is the other machine, or if the bottleneck is another process, then we can enable our customer also with our PA domain knowledge, how to improve another process or how to improve the overall process in order to solve the bottleneck, which is in the entire manufacturing process. So we move with our fully integrated platform away from isolated island optimization to holistic optimization of production processes across single lines, across single plants, even potentially across single companies into the entire supply chain. What are the key takeaways? Number one, we are facing a significant market opportunity, which is mostly unserved up to now. We are really tapping into a blue ocean here. Number two, we are uniquely positioned to drive customer value.
You see lots of companies which are strong in data integration platform, which are strong in analytics. We are coming from the other side. We are coming from connectivity and from domain know-how, and this connectivity and domain know-how enables us basically to really drive value out of digitalization. So we have the domain knowledge, we have the scalable connectivity, we have the data integration connectivity capabilities, and we have the advanced analytics to really close the circle to drive value out of integrated data. It's hardly another company available in this world who is really able to fully close this circle to drive value out of digitalization, which is the main cause for the digital sobering.
Point number three, with that capability, we can massively increase of all the ATS businesses where you have heard about, we can not only automate our customers' processes, with this value proposition, we can offer our customers smart automation. That means a continuous improvement of the performance of the machines and of the processes during the entire lifetime, together with the services group from ATS and together with the machine builders from ATS. Thank you very much. Next is Ryan.
So good morning, everyone. First of all, I do want to acknowledge we're running a little bit behind, which, as a metrics-driven organization, is a little disappointing, but does give us something to improve on for next time, so we'll work on that. I wanna thank you for joining us today. I hope you've enjoyed what you've heard so far, and have found it valuable in helping to understand how, as ATS, we operate and provide value for our customers. Now that you've heard about our business in some detail, I'll briefly cover our financial performance and then get into some key financial focus areas for our business as we move forward. A key component of our ATS business model is our eight value drivers, and this is how every business at ATS is measured. I'm gonna focus on our financial value drivers.
What's important is there's a strong tie between those financial value drivers and shareholder value creation. The first two measure growth, order bookings and revenues measure our ability to win work and deliver for our customers. EBIT is a measure of profitability and how effectively we execute across our businesses. Working capital, that represents the cash we invest into our business. As an asset-light company with low CapEx requirements, working capital represents an important ongoing investment for our business, and it's an area that we challenge ourselves to drive efficiency in, in how we deploy capital internally. We also apply the same ROIC framework on internal investments as we do with external investments, and I'll speak more to that in a few slides. So looking at our results against our four financial value drivers. I'll start with the order bookings.
Growth over the past 5 years has averaged 22.5% on a compound annual basis. On revenues, on a 5-year compound annual basis, revenues have grown 18.2%, with an average growth rate of 8.6%, excluding the impact of acquisitions. Over this period, the application of our ABM has matured across the organization, including, as you've heard today, at acquired businesses. On profitability, Adjusted EBIT has grown 23.2% on a compound annual basis on execution of our growth and margin expansion plans. Adjusted EBIT margins in fiscal 2023 did reflect the economic environment, including supply chain cost inflation, lead time increases, and competitive labor markets. Our teams, nevertheless, were resilient and responded to address these challenges and offset their impact, particularly through the use of ABM tools.
Non-cash working capital is our fourth value driver, with a goal of keeping investment at less than 15% of revenues. We ended fiscal 2023 at 10.1%, working capital as a percentage of revenue. As we have seen in our most recent quarter, this percentage can vary based on the timing of milestone payments, particularly on some of our larger EV programs. Another metric which is important to us is return on invested capital, or ROIC, which is an important measure in how we measure the efficiency of our capital deployment. We've consistently generated ROIC above our weighted average cost of capital, and you'll notice the strong tie between our value drivers, which provide a simplified method to keeping our businesses focused on the key inputs into ROIC.
Today, our cost of capital is a little over 10%, which has risen from the high single-digit range as the cost of debt has increased. Nevertheless, debt does remain an efficient and preferred source of capital for us within the relatively conservative leverage range that we target to operate within. A key driver of the improvement in our ROIC has been the margin expansion that we've realized. We've continued to both grow and expand our margins, as you can see by the higher growth rate in our EBITDA as compared to our revenue growth. This profitable growth is a key driver of value creation for our investors and remains a key objective for all of our businesses, as you've heard today. As we look forward, each of our business is focused on driving that profitable growth within their markets, and that is both through organic and inorganic means.
These are the key focus areas for us. Well, starting on the left with operational excellence, we're focused on driving efficiency in our business through the ABM, a key theme that you've heard about today. In addition to global supply chain management, standardization, and operating leverage all remain key levers for ongoing margin expansion. In addition, we continuously evaluate our portfolio, so we're optimized from a capital deployment perspective. This includes evaluating our mix of business and balancing with higher-value products and services, while continuing to pursue innovation and M&A to drive growth in our strategic markets. Occasionally, this can also mean restructuring our operations to take cost out or rationalize less profitable areas of the business. Where we have a business that may no longer fit with ATS, it can also lead to divestitures, where a business may be better suited as part of another group.
Overall, these are the key focus areas for value creation at ATS, and I'll spend a bit more time on each over the next few slides. Starting with the ABM, in addition to the tools that we use to drive continuous improvement and lean into our operations, we also use ABM to drive a consistent business cycle across the group. ATS is a strategy-led organization. On an annual basis, our teams engage in a disciplined strategic planning process focused on internal, market, and competitive analysis. Longer-term goals are updated and form the basis of our plans going forward. We then move to a review of our org and talent, ensuring we have the right team and the right structure to deliver on those strategic objectives.
From our strategic goals, we then develop annual targets, which form the basis of our annual operating plan and then for the coming fiscal year, including detailed budgets, KPI-based planning, and execution plans. Teams then engage in a goal deployment process, which is where we identify priorities and set stretch targets in order to drive performance, in order to achieve our plans. Then finally, through our performance management process, we focus on cascading goals throughout the organization and delivering on performance to plan. The disciplined application of the ABM business cycle means our teams are using a consistent framework to align our business strategies, and then at a more immediate level, focus on clear targets to execute those plans. This process forms the roadmap, which is then supported by the ABM tools we implement to course-correct and drive performance through the year, tools like Kaizen events and formal problem-solving.
Next is our global supply chain, a core competence we utilize to drive performance across the business. We partner with our suppliers to drive best outcomes for project performance. Internal teams are focused on key processes, including project material planning, PPV savings, and supplier consolidation. We utilize several sourcing tools to drive value in our supply chain, measured through challenging KPIs and disciplined execution of these processes through our ABM. While our supply chain remains challenged in today's environment, particularly from a lead time perspective, this is a focus area that has served us well, both through generating margin expansion in the past and through the challenges coming out of COVID. We expect this capability will continue to serve us well as the environment normalizes. Standardization has been a targeted area that historically was more challenging for us to unlock.
As we moved through COVID and project timelines became critically compressed, we had to rely on standardization in order to achieve very aggressive customer schedules, as you heard from David today in our work with Hologic. Today, we are pursuing standardization in several areas: at the part level, in design and product development, and project standards. All of these drive efficiency and savings in engineering design effort, assembly time, and in supply chain management. Importantly, as the supply chain norm, environment does normalize, the ability to go fast and accelerate project schedules for customers will serve as a competitive advantage for us again. Non-operating leverage. Our efforts in realizing operating leverage will continue across all parts of our business.
While we have and will continue to invest in our business in support of growth, disciplined cost control and driving cost synergies in acquired businesses remain important opportunities and priorities for our leaders. Shifting now to portfolio management, how we view our business in the context of value creation. As you've seen over the past several years, we've executed a purposeful shift in our business mix. We've been disciplined in our focus on strategic markets and in our focus on higher-margin products and services and recurring revenues. Over time, this has decreased the balance of revenues that come from custom integration and increased the percentage of revenues coming from more standardized equipment and technologies, along with products and services. With respect to services, you've already heard from Simon Roberts on how aftermarket services are of critical importance to our customers.
Importantly, services also continues to represent an opportunity to expand our margins going forward. In terms of growth and investing to drive growth, another key area of focus is leveraging our culture of innovation, and you've seen some excellent examples of that today through our team's focus on innovation. This focus is supported by our ongoing spend on key projects, which was just over 1% of revenues in fiscal 2023. We've increased our investment in innovation, both in terms of dollars and as a percentage of revenues, in each of the past three years. This spend does not capture the full investment we're making in innovation on customer projects in our custom integration business, which represents another important area of innovation for us.
Our ABM provides structure to our innovation activities through regular innovation reviews, along with events such as our innovate days, that drive fast turn idea creation and concept advancement. On M&A, you've heard several other presenters today speak about our approach. We have a proven and consistent playbook across all acquisitions, regardless of size or market, with clear return targets and other financial measures assessed on every deal. This has been and will continue to be an important part of our growth. We also apply a similar lens to our existing portfolio of businesses to ensure we have the right fit and are driving acceptable returns for our ongoing investments. In terms of our playbook, our approach to M&A integration enables us to drive operational excellence quickly and efficiently.
Looking at the progress on our acquisition of CFT, Jeremy spoke to some of the highlights of CFT as a core platform within our food business. We've owned CFT for just over two years now, having acquired the business in March of 2021. Overall, the integration is on plan and reflects the clear focus and application of our integration playbook. This includes creating the best team to drive the plan, discipline on costs, ABM deployment, alignment of our global supply chain teams, focus on key products and markets, and a services and aftermarket approach to improve value. We've also reallocated resources and spend by restructuring and selling underutilized assets. These actions have supported an increase of over 500 basis points in EBIT margins since the acquisition. Importantly, we're aligned on continuing to pursue improvements in the business to drive growth and continued margin expansion.
So looking ahead, we are well-positioned as we move forward. We have a strong base of business, a balance sheet, and a playbook to execute. We have good momentum in our business, with a strong trend in our book-to-bill ratio and year-over-year growth in our backlog, which gives us good visibility over the next 12 to 18 months. As you've also heard today, we continue to see good funnel activity across our vertical markets. We also have a strong balance sheet. Looking at our capital structure, we ended fiscal 2023 with good liquidity, which was further enhanced through our recent U.S. IPO in June. This gives us the balance sheet capacity to continue executing on our strategy. Over time, we've demonstrated our ability to support our growth through disciplined capital deployment. We have a target leverage range, with the ability to be opportunistic and increase where appropriate opportunity presents itself.
While proceeds of our recent IPO were reused to repay amounts outstanding on our revolver, our objective is to deploy those proceeds primarily for strategic opportunities, including acquisitions, as well as working capital and other organic growth initiatives. Our CapEx requirements are low. We typically invest in CapEx for the business at a rate of 2%-3% of annual revenues, and we apply the same disciplined ROIC criteria to our internal investment decisions as we do with external capital deployment. That's important, as our capital allocation priorities do favor internal investment. This flywheel represents our approach to capital generation and deployment. Our financial profile, which has included strong growth, margin expansion, and disciplined working capital investment, has allowed us to generate free cash flows that we have reinvested back into the business.
We also have access to credit markets to fund this growth, and while equity remains an option, our preference is to fund growth through lower-cost sources of capital, being cash generated from the business and the debt markets. We then take this capital and reinvest it back into the business via the internal and external areas that I've talked about. Our first priority is internal investment, as this typically drives the fastest achievement of our ROIC targets. Acquisitions are second in terms of priority and represent a strong value creation opportunity over time. Share repurchases are not allocated a set amount of capital. Rather, we execute repurchases on an opportunistic basis, and deleveraging is only targeted where we are outside of our target leverage range. Overall, our strong cash generation capabilities creates a flywheel effect and drives growth and value creation over time.
So in summary, our value creation priorities are clear. Our team is aligned to drive above-market organic growth. We have a target to achieve 15%+ EBIT margins and a continued focus on strong free cash flow generation. We've got a strong balance sheet, a playbook to execute, and the team is well-aligned to continue to drive long-term value for shareholders. At this point, that concludes our prepared remarks, and thank you for your attention this morning, and we're now gonna get ready for the Q&A portion of our event. Thank you.
Perfect. Yes, I have at least. Thank you. Sure. Switch it off.
It's very exciting music. I get the delight of being able to actually be the moderator of this. So unless you ask a specific question of me, which I will probably also deflect, I'm gonna allow you to actually ask the team questions. So who's got a question for the group? Oh, wait a minute. Before, sorry, we also have Fiona Cleland on the stage, as well as Steve Emery, who did not speak, but they're joining us. Fiona is over at Strategic M&A and also our corporate strategy for the ATS Corporation, and Steve is over Supply Chain. Sorry, you had the first question.
Hey, Michael Glen from Raymond James. So first question is for Kash. So Kash, you talked about the opportunity, and you had the slide on diabetes. I'm just hoping that you can better frame as you're looking at that opportunity and how it's progressing what this might translate to, to ATS from a bookings perspective and when we might start to see some of those bookings come into the company?
So let me use the opportunity to expand a little bit. I talked briefly about the auto -injector. And so from a market perspective, let me explain where things are. So this started out as an opportunity for the insulin market, specifically treating diabetic patients. So the evolution of that has been people were using a normal syringe at home to inject insulin for diabetes treatment. And since there were a lot of issues, the evolution of that from a medication delivery system point of view has been auto injectors, which takes care of a lot of errors and everything at the home front from a patient perspective. So these are pretty complex. I had a picture of that in my demonstration in my presentation.
A complex pen, a sophisticated pen for injecting insulin for the diabetic patient. So evolution of that has been, this has been approved for additional indicators, more recently, for obesity management. What that meant to us was market that was for the diabetic market expanded to a pretty significant bigger size in terms of obesity management, and this is still evolving. Our customers are getting more and more drugs approved by FDA and other regulatory bodies on the for the obesity management. That's fast-acting happening very fast. And the same drug, like insulin-based drugs, have been approved... are getting approved for additional indicators. More recently, about three or four weeks back, they've been approved for stroke and heart attack indicators.
So point is, this market is getting expanded as we speak. That's why we were flashing high CAGR from a market perspective. So translating it to what that means to us, we've been working with the leading pharmaceutical companies in that space and contract manufacturers in that space that are working on auto-injectors. And that is translating to funnel activity, very strong funnel activity. So we have some bookings and a lot of funnel activity, so it's we're in the phase of that getting translated into bookings as we speak. So we're pretty excited about this market to be able to kind of treat the patients out there, but also in terms of the opportunity to kind of convert that to bookings.
We're in that phase of fast translating our bookings as our funnel activity is very high, and it's translating to bookings as we speak. I hope that answers your question.
Yep, thanks. Second question for Andrew, perhaps. From thinking about that battery business, one thing that you see in the automotive landscape is a high degree of commoditization, and that can come at businesses quite rapidly. Can you give some perspective as to your plan for the battery business? Is it something that you could potentially look to divest over time?
So why don't I let Udo talk about the focus on technology and our approach to ensuring that we're a strategic partner, and then I can talk through the second part of the question.
Right. Happy to do so. We don't see any time soon a commoditization in this market happening, and there are a few key drivers. Number one, the technology is still evolving as we build the automation for it. A lot of pressure here on battery costs, on other characteristics, charging characteristics, range of a car, et cetera. That technology is evolving. We also see potential technology breakthroughs coming. Possibly in the next few years, we will talk more about solid-state batteries. We see early programs going on in that field. If you combine this very, very dynamic technology environment with the need to significantly improve production volume here, out there, I've shown statistics that show in the next 7 years, the production equipment has to be quadrupled in terms of output.
But with this, you will only by 2030 get to half of the cars, then produced with a electric motor. By 2035, when some of the regulation, European Union and, and some states in the North America kick in, you will need to get to almost 90%-100% of all cars being battery electric vehicles. That means we need to double the volume from 2030, then in the next 5 years, so that from our perspective, will continue to be a super dynamic environment. And we, we don't see at this point in time that there will be a commoditization happening anytime soon.
Just to kind of touch on the second part of the question, which is really portfolio evolution, and we look at every business for investment to return. And when that doesn't make sense, then we start to really dig deep into what that means and what does it look like from a future perspective. Right now, you know, Udo walked through where EV is in its journey and our ability to continue to drive support. So this is really around an investment and really working with our customers on ensuring they have the high value from ATS. Thank you. Please.
Hi, Sabahat Khan, RBC. So just a question on the after-sales service side. There were some comments about, you know, building out the regional service network and kind of expanding the footprint there. I guess just on a bigger picture question, sort of, is that, you know, a catalyst for driving higher penetration? Is that something you heard from your customers was needed? And then just broader picture, if you can maybe just talk about, are there other inflection points on that, or is it more just scaling up business that happens over time?
Thanks for the question. What we've demonstrated, I think, with the recent investment, as we kind of deploy resources in the field, it kind of end up in two locations: directly within our customers' facilities, and more recently, we've repurposed some of our existing divisions into dedicated service centers. And what we've been able to do is have the right type of focus more closely aligned to the customer regionally, but also bring the capability of that legacy business into driving what that kind of customer expectation is. So we do see that as something that we will definitely drive and continue to expand, to drive that install base penetration.
Working across ATS and the companies that you've seen present today, we can really leverage that infrastructure around some of the common service portfolios that we deliver, and I think we're certainly seeing the traction of that already, and it's something we're looking to continue to expand upon over the next number of years in terms of dedicated regional centers. And really trying to acquire and retain the best talent in key regions and embed them and drive that customer experience that we referred to in the presentations.
Hey, hey, Simon, can you touch on the, also the process that we've now implemented for when a new acquisition happens? How you start to embrace that from what we can bring from a services perspective.
Yeah. So we've seen today, obviously, the inorganic growth of the company, and part of that process, when we kinda look at candidate companies, is look what's the aftermarket opportunity. And, you know, we're able, through that structured playbook that's been referred to today, to really look at, you know, what is the opportunity in terms of leveraging our products, our portfolio, our infrastructure. And we'll also look at the complexity of the assets, right? I mean, we've seen today a shift to systemized, highly integrated solutions, complex, but we've also got opportunities around more productized machinery that goes into the field. So through the due diligence process, we get the opportunity to look at install base penetration, look at the CapEx attach rate of services, and then really, you know, formulate a plan to drive at those synergies.
Yeah, and, you know, just to add a couple comments. First, COVID really changed the game when it came to services, and it went from a nice-to-have to mission-critical. And, you know, I still draw on, you know, a conversation I had with a massive customer of ours that they were in the medical space, but they didn't provide COVID test kits, but they were helping people's lives and making them better. And they said, "We have to have your support." And Simon, working with our, our IT team, and Christian, launched new solutions, and they identified areas we could continue to support. And because they'd built the infrastructure out, it put us in a very unique position, and we've now maximized that. So customers look to us, and they drive into us because of our services capability.
If you think about from an M&A perspective, you know, day 90, they have that infrastructure, and it's really been a nice welcome change for our ability to add value.
Great. Thanks for the color. Maybe just a quick follow-up, I guess, just a two-parter. You know, you talked about how the after-sales service rolls into M&A, but I guess, can you use M&A or buy companies that are maybe doing a lot more after service? Maybe the role of that. And then secondly, you talked about rolling out some of the ATS after-sales software onto third-party, non-ATS platforms. Maybe if you can just give some examples of what that entails. You know, is that an easy capability?
So why don't I take the M&A piece, or actually, Fiona, why don't you touch upon how we assess M&A, and certainly Simon can add in.
Great. So I think actually we look at M&A from all of our different segments. That means that service is an area we focus on, looking to augment the portfolio with new service capabilities, new service companies. I think Simon, actually, during his presentation today, mentioned Triad, which was a company we acquired for their asset optimization capabilities, and that is now being brought into the services group, and their capabilities are going to be spread across the different organizations that we have in the group. So Simon has tasks to to bring in good targets that we will then action.
Yeah, and just to build on that, you know, when we think of post-integration of acquisition targets for after-sales, the idea is to establish them as centers of competence and establish that kind of infrastructure to make it available to all ATS companies today and in the future. So yes, you know, we can acquire capability as we acquire into new technologies and platforms, but specifically in terms of aftermarket, there's very key and focused areas where we want to build our capability and make that available in terms of driving that kind of recurring revenue, but obviously the opportunity to build out capability around that lifecycle management of any asset that ATS produces or trying to access other assets which are non-ATS.
Christian, could you touch on the second aspect, which is, digital capability on non-ATS assets?
Yeah, it's like I said in my presentation, so, we are able to connect all different kinds of assets and all integrate all different kinds of standards, which is then giving Simon and his domain experts the possibility to even improve and service the performance of non-ATS assets. So that's a great interplay between our digital capabilities and Simon's boots on the ground to really improve the performance across and beyond the ATS assets.
... possibly to add to this, what's really happening in reality, I would class this as a land and expand opportunity. Our right to play, how we enter, is typically having these digital capabilities for our own machines. But if then a customer realizes that he gets to actionable inputs-
Sure
that they can really improve the performance of our machines. This is that perfect starting point then to roll that platform out to other people's machines and really achieve these benefits across a whole site, for example. So it's really a nice land and expand strategy we're driving here.
Question?
Thanks. David Ocampo, Cormark Securities. This question is, I guess, for anyone up there, but when we look at your portfolio today, it's certainly changed a lot, and it came up a couple times in your presentation today, but is there anything in your portfolio today, outside of EV, that Michael brought up, that isn't hitting your return thresholds? And I guess most importantly, can those businesses be fixed, or are you guys thinking about potential divestitures down the road?
Do you wanna take the first part of that, and then I'll take the second? Yeah, so the first part being, are there businesses that aren't achieving targets? Yes. There always is, and we set, frankly, we set aggressive targets. When I walked through the ABM cycle, maybe I didn't spend enough time on it. Andrew mentioned it in his remarks too, but goal deployment is where we look to stretch and really to perform and drive incremental value in our business. And so that's a key function for us, but or a key process for us, rather.
But yeah, the short answer is, there's businesses that are behind plan, there's businesses that are ahead of plan, and there's businesses that we look at quite hard on whether they fit and or whether they'd be better as part of another group.
And my second one: I know we always put Andrew and Ryan on the hot seat as it relates to EV, and I'm pretty sure everyone's well aware here that most of your EV awards have been with one large enterprise customer for a platform order there. Curious where we are today with other OEMs, how large those orders can potentially be, and timelines that we should be keeping an eye on?
We are continuously working on diversifying our order book quite a bit, and we have been doing this for quite some time. We're landing a number of pilot opportunities, where we're developing technologies together with customers and doing this quite successfully. I'm excited that our funnel has been growing nicely here over, especially the last six months. I think you will see going forward that we will diversify that customer portfolio a bit, as this space, especially in which we're positioned, is getting a very, very relevant space as OEMs are really now going into mass production and looking for larger programs and automation partners that can handle such larger programs.
You know, and thank you, Udo. At any given moment, we're working with multiple OEMs on the space. And then if you recall, we actually talked about this, that initially we were more successful in Europe, and we saw some wins there, and then we said North America is a bit behind. We're starting to see that catch up. So at any given time, Udo, the team are really working to constantly be in front of the customer base around their movement, their launch, and ensuring that we're in a key position.
Hi, Justin Keywood from Stifel. Thanks for the presentations. My question is related to M&A and cross-selling across the organization. We heard from David at Hologic of using solutions from BioDot and SP Industries. So if we're able to characterize at least the opportunity of cross-selling across the firm, and what would be the KPI to measure this going forward?
So maybe I'll start. Kash, feel free to jump in. I mean, so when we identify specific opportunities, we measure them, and we have something within the Life Sciences group we call the integrated funnel. And we've seen really strong growth in that funnel, particularly since the acquisition of SP. And I think, Kash, maybe you should talk through sort of bringing the various pieces of equipment together like you had in your slide presentation. But if it's a key driver and a key synergy opportunity that we identify ahead of an acquisition, then it's something we're gonna measure and track. And sometimes there'll be things that come up after that, that then become opportunities that weren't part of the initial business case, and we'll track those as well.
If it's something that we're relying on to drive value, then it's gonna be a KPI.
Thanks, Ryan. Just to add to that, so I look at it three ways. So one is, as part of the acquisition, we'll have pure cross-selling opportunities. So you're going to a customer, let's call it a lab customer. Can you sell, upsell with another product that's part of our core business? So that's a metric we track in terms of what's the pure upsell within that customer base. Second is, as Ryan said, integrated solutions or end-to-end solutions.... So that's something we have been evolving. So there's great funnel activity, there's bookings. We have also delivered some solutions on that. That's an active, very large opportunity in terms of integrated solutions we talked about during my presentation. The third one is also something I talked about in terms of innovation. An example would be take BioDot and put it on SuperTrak.
That's an innovation space driving growth opportunities in the next 2-4-year range. So those are the three buckets with clear opportunities and targets, and we talked about goal deployment. That's an active process internally for us, where we have specific targets for those key metrics within the businesses, within life sciences.
Thank you. My other question is related to the tight labor markets and labor constraints. Obviously, beneficial for automation and ATS, but internally, are there any challenges in recruiting and retaining some of your knowledge workers or engineers? And how has the employee turnover rate trended recently?
Yeah. So as you're well aware, 'cause you've seen our, our deck several times, but on our value drivers, two of them are focused on people. And we have internal fill rate, which really is a very lagging measure on, are you developing your talent to take on bigger jobs, bigger opportunities? And then number two is turnover. And I'll tell you, we're, we're trending in the right direction. We are mid-single digits. Our target's 5%, we're over that. I think we exited the year a little over 6%. Globally, that is in a very specific category. It's a very good category, but yet it's still above our target. So our teams have gone into countermeasure. They're constantly driving it to ensure... We're looking for opportunities. We wanna be the place for the best talent.
We also measure time to fill, and so we look at many different metrics around the health of a business. Just to give you some perspective, when we first acquired SP, they were mid-20s% of turnover, and they're now low double digits, call it high single digits. Same discussion for CFT, was a very big number. The leadership was focused on how we operate and how we think about our businesses, the ABM implementation, and they're releasing it. Where's CFT today?
Just below 5%.
Just below 5%, and they were double digits. So it is a key focus for us. We talk people first for a reason, we mean it, and we're constantly seeking to have the best talent and the best team in the business.
Hi, good morning. Max Sytchev from National Bank Financial. I had the first question on healthcare. As the regulatory landscape is shifting a little bit, that seems to be benefiting biologics on an ongoing forward basis in terms of patent protection and things like that. I'm just wondering, Andrew, if there is an opportunity to potentially accelerate the growth in that space, or do you think that SP kind of gets you there in terms of capability? So that's my, that's my first question.
Why don't you start and then... Yeah.
It is a great question because that's really what's happening in the market. The traditional pharmaceutical companies, the large pharma companies, are actually waiting for some of these smaller biologics-based companies to get approvals, and then they've been acquiring these companies. That's been a trend for the last few years, and that's accelerating, as you said. So, one of the charts I had was about how we positioned SP and BioDot acquisition into that early stage. Majority of that, 99% of that space is really in the biologic space. So we are positioned very well in terms of working with customers. Some of them are large customers, some of them are small, venture capital-funded customers.
In fact, we have in our portfolio where we work with them and help them with on the lab side, on the drug discovery side, and the lyophilization side, and so on and so forth, to really kind of build up them in terms of, like, getting the approvals, the clinical trials and the approval processes. So we are positioned well, and to your point about SP, that's really where they do a very good job. And it's a high-growth market, and we work with those customers as they get those approvals and get into mass production, where we are positioned pretty well.
National, just to follow up on that asset specifically, because I think at the time of the acquisition, one of the sort of eventual synergies was kind of the cross-sell into other geographies, specifically Europe. I'm wondering if you can maybe give sort of any update on that front, please. Thanks.
Absolutely. I think there's tremendous cross-selling opportunities between kind of SP customers and not only our core business, the automation business, but we are definitely leveraging on Comecer, getting into the space that SP is in, BioDot getting into this space. So one of the things we're working on is, again, integrated solutions is actual integration of these products, but also these leaders, the business leaders within life sciences, are actively working on those cross-selling opportunities. A lot of them in the pharma space, in the fill-finish, in the lab space, where SP does a great job.
Okay, so well, thank you. And my last question, just in terms of your 15% kind of operating margin target, I know that it was kind of long-term when it was initially introduced. Right now, obviously, COVID, supply chain, and so forth. I'm just wondering, what time frames are we working with potentially? So I'm just wondering if you can frame it a little bit better. Thank you.
Well, I mean, we haven't put a timeframe on it, frankly. With the base or the core business pre-acquisition of some of the more dilutive acquisitions, like CFT, for example, we achieved 500 basis points over about four years. I don't think, given where we sit today and in relation to that 15% target, you know, that would be an outside date. If it took us four years to get to 15%, frankly, I think we'd all be disappointed. But I'm not gonna provide any more specificity than that.
... Yeah, Gabrielle from Van Berkom Global Asset Management. My question is for Fiona. You spoke a bit earlier, but you know, given your background at Danaher and Honeywell, can you maybe talk about, since you joined ATS, the team, how it's structured, inbound, outbound sourcing, the current environment, you know, is PE in much these days in either divesting or competing with you for assets? Just give us a sense as to, you know, you've noted a US listing. Obviously, we're all looking at capital deployment, so how should we think of how your team, you know, kind of goals and objectives for the coming years, etc.?
Okay. So let me just start by saying both Danaher and Honeywell, great companies when it comes to their M&A track records. But, you know, I look at ATS, and I actually believe that we have a world-class M&A environment here within the company. You mentioned a little bit about the team and how it's structured. We have an incredibly tightly structured corporate team, excellent people, very focused on M&A. But our secret sauce is really the fact that we amplify all of our efforts with the different presidents and the different segments who are actively building their pipelines, actively out cultivating targets. And so that amplifies the size of our pipeline, the buoyancy of our pipeline, and really encourages the companies who we are targeting to look at ATS as a potential acquirer.
I think it was Andrew who said earlier, there's nothing more compelling than actually somebody else who's in the same business having a conversation with you and identifying the opportunity that we can bring you and understanding the opportunity that a target can bring to us. So from my perspective, we look every year to be adding to various parts of the portfolio. You know, also, you'll have seen in the presentation 19 acquisitions since 2017. We're looking to minimally continue with that cadence, and we've done big acquisitions, small acquisitions, and you're going to see that still steady rate moving forward.
Hi, Michael Dumet, Scotiabank. Thanks for the great presentations, by the way. The question I had is, I think in one of the charts you showed how the revenues have evolved over time, custom integration, product, and then, services and spares. Just curious, on your thoughts on how that evolves further. And also wondering, you know, just how to balance or how your thoughts are on balancing product development, and then how to, you know, be product agnostic at the same time to help your customers develop the best custom integration project.
Yeah, I'll take it. You guys have heard from me a lot, but I will definitely... So there's no perfect answer to your question. And I say that because we're going to see growth profiles in different areas, and we're going to maximize our impact in those areas. We have been more focused on innovation, which generally lends itself to the products and standard machines, and it's been an enabler. And so if you step back, we're one of the larger players in the integration space, and usually that's done through organic expansion. We expanded in Ohio, two new facilities. They've already filled those, and we continue to look at organic expansion. But then if you look at technology and innovation, that's where we can really continue to maximize value for our customers. And so you're going to see us, you know, down that trend.
But additionally, digital, laying out different applications, the strategic rationale is always going to be a consideration for how we think about really new adds to the family. Back to your, your other question on, on innovation. Look, if you lay out the, the capital deployment return, one of the greatest return on investments is internal investment, and it's innovation. And so we look at how we can maximize that and how we can really utilize it to continue our trajectory of really that value creation for customers. We have time for one more question.
Hi, Jonathan Goldberg from Halstead Advisors. I've got a question for Christian. It seems like there's a lot of pulls on customer wallets for IT and OT spending between the automation components companies, yourselves, the MES companies, the industrial software companies, the large software companies. Can you maybe discuss where do you compete versus where do you cooperate in the ecosystem? And then how to think about ATS's growth versus the market.
So first of all, we differentiate, like I was trying to explain in my presentation, in the area of connectivity, data integration, and in the area of driving impact out of the data, so really realizing tangible benefits in production. In the area of cloud and in the area of analytics, we are absolutely open to cooperate. So all our integrated data we are having, they are absolutely agnostic to any kinds of analytics and to any kinds of data integration platforms and to any kinds of cloud technologies. So we are really leveraging here what is available in the market because this is a war. You are never able to win if you want to compete against the analytics functionalities and against cloud functionalities.
We focus really driving differentiation in the areas where we come from and where we have the core expertise.
Great. Well, that concludes the Q&A portion, and I just want to take a minute to say thank you very much for the engagement. Clearly, a lot of involvement with the group, and hopefully, we could answer your questions appropriately. Look, I'm gonna end with really how I laid out the differentiation of ATS. First, we have very strong, deep relationships, and I, and I hope you heard that across the board with our leadership team around the engagement with customers and what that means from an impact perspective, and how we can continue to work with partnerships and expand that. That leads me to the growth opportunity. Aligned with innovation, aligned with synergies, aligned with new acquisitions, but that constant drive to really build out our capability in areas we view are more resilient, areas we view are longer term. Lastly, the team.
It's about the team of those 6,500+ employees that are driven, but always trying to make tomorrow better than, better than today. About the team that's standing up here, that really was the driving force behind their segments. The team is as strong as it's been, and we're constantly focused on really building the best ATS. While we've had great success, we're early in our journey. The ABM is taking shape, and it's how we operate, and it's gonna be one that we continue on and continue our development. Lastly, when we look at the tailwinds of the market and we look at the spaces we serve, not only do we like the markets, we also like a lot of the dynamics around labor. We like the dynamics around cost of labor.
We like the fact that when you talk about supply chain de-risking or onshoring, these generally favor automation. Kash's example of $1 billion, or when you go from 1,000 product prototypes to 1,000 a minute, automation is a real enabler, and we are rooted and aligned with that enabler. So when we look at the markets, the impact, and where we take from a tailwind perspective, the position we're in, we view as a successful position. Lastly, we're at time, but I do wanna invite everyone for lunch. It will be right outside. But additionally, we have a demonstration, and you're all allowed to be able to go out and see the demonstration. It's really walking you through the digital twin as Udo talked through.
Please take the opportunity and really appreciate the time this morning and hearing about our story and our journey. Thank you, and goodbye for now.